Cheesy martial arts movies! AKA Chop Socky!
Malaya and I enjoy watching bad martial arts films, and since I review every other film and book I consume, I might as well start reviewing these as well. The review will be a bit different than my usual reviews, since the films aren't really movies, in the same way. No one is going to sit through one unless they're a fan of the genre, so while I'm going to rate all the usual categories, most of my discussion will cover the story and the action. The story since I can make jokes about it, and the martial arts since that's why you're watching the movie, if you are in fact watching it. (Go with God.)
I use my normal review scale for these, but since those scores would always be very low, in comparison to modern movies with 50000x the budget, I'm also scoring them in compared to other cheesy martial arts movies. All of the reviews will be grouped on the Reviews page, and I'll put in links to my other, non-chop socky movie reviews.
I'm currently working on four reviews, for the four films I got in a box set called the "Martial Arts Marathon." Four films on two DVDs for $5; discount multimedia rack at Ross. The films?
Dragon Strikes Back,
Fists of Bruce Lee,
Blood of the Dragon, and
Bruce's Fist of Vengeance. Needless to say, none of these films star Bruce Lee, or anyone else you've ever heard of. They're low budget punch-fests set in Hong Kong, with entirely native casts (speckled with the occasional white or black guy) and plots that don't make much sense. Not that anyone cares about the plot; these are just fist-porn, when you get right down to it. I usually fast forward over the dialogue to get to the next fight scene, personally.
All scores have two numbers; the first in comparison to other movies, the second in comparison to other chop socky. The one exception is the "combat realism" score, since I'm holding these films to the same standards of, "Would that actually be effective/possible in real life?" that I do modern action films. In fact, I should probably grade these martial arts movies more critically on that score, since this is their genre, and if they can't do that right, what can they do?
Again: Scores are all 1-10. "All movies/chop socky only"
Dragon Strikes Back, 1972
Script/Story: 3/6
Acting/Casting: 2/5
Action: 6/6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Combat Realism: 6
Eye Candy: 1/4
Fun Factor: 3/4
Replayability: 2/4
Overall: 2/5.5
This film stars Chen Lee as a wandering monk type dude, in Texas. Yes, he's a Chinese cowboy, in the Old West. Curious about this one, we
looked it up on IMDB and found that it's actually an Italian film. It's a spaghetti western, as they call them, but one with a Chinese martial arts guy as the hero. No, it's not worth watching just for this novelty aspect.
StoryThe plot involves the hero, Shanghai Joe, arriving in San Francisco, popping in to Chinatown for a brief moment, and then buying a stagecoach ticket to travel east to Texas, where he pursues his dream of becoming a cowboy. Predictably enough, he meets with constant racism and physical attacks from one drunken white idiot cowboy after another. The movie gets monotonous about 2/3 of the way through, when Shanghai Joe has had at least half a dozen different groups of cowboys, ranchers, gamblers, etc, try to rob him, cheat him, trip him, insult him, and so on, always culminating with them attacking him and him kicking their asses.
The English dialogue was obviously dubbed in, so perhaps the original Italian version was better, but the dialogue during these scenes is frequently so bad that it makes them completely unbelievable and almost impossible to watch. Perhaps they didn't know enough words in English to translate the taunts and insults, but it's unpleasant to sit through several straight minutes of bearded, dirty white guys shouting "Slant" and "Chink" at a small Chinese man. I believe the joke, "Chinese use chopsticks because they're too stupid to use forks." was used twice in the movie. No, it wasn't funny either time, unless you perhaps take it as a clever attack on the white guy making the comment; I.E. he's so stupid that that idiotic comment was the best insult he could come up with? (
Just like Harlan Ellison?)
Eventually the plot progresses a bit, bounties are placed on the Shanghai Joe's head (understandably; he's killed or beaten unconscious like 30 people by then), and he discovers someone worse than the casually murderous racists; a wealthy landowner who is not only enslaving Mexicans to work his land, but is routinely slaughtering them, sometimes by standing them up on barrels, putting nooses around their necks, and then shooting them in their extremities until they lose their balance and get strangled. Why he's blowing away his own slaves is never quite explained, nor do they say what he needs slaves when he's a cattle rancher and the slaves only distract his men from doing their actual cowboy work. Basically, he needs slaves so he can be an evil slavemaster, and have extras to murder to prove his evil nature. They're sort of self fulfilling, in that way.
The plot really gets ridiculous at the very end, when we get a flashback to Shanghai Joe's training (this is while he's healing himself from half a dozen bullet wounds in like two days, without ever eating or drinking) and there's a standard training montage. It touches all the requisite bases, with him thrusting his fists into scalding sand, punching through boards and bricks, enduring beatings, and so on. The twist here is that another man was being trained at the same time as him, but they never saw each other, and were both blindfolded when they received their sacred lotus tattoos and graduated and headed out into the world.
Five points if you instantly realize that the final ultimate battle in the movie will be Shanghai Joe facing off against the other guy, who has turned mercenary and is serving the evil cattle rancher. It was funny, since I'd been wondering what the final battle would be, since so far Shanghai Joe had won every fight in like three hits, since none of the fat, lazy, racist white men knew how to do more than throw roundhouse punches. Fortunately the plot conjured up another martial arts master for him to battle, just in the nick of time!
Joe wins of course, after a final battle that's overlong, extremely brutal, and full of the nearly criminal misuse of various martial arts weapons. It's not the worst thing in the film, but it's far from the highpoint, largely since the main evil rancher has already been killed, leaving us to wonder why his merc is still fighting, since there's no one paying the bill. Plus there's no emotional weight to the fight, since this new bad guy just walked in; we have no reason to like or dislike him. Not that there's emotional weight to any of the other fights either, since we quickly get sick of every single person other than Shanghai Joe being an asshole racist who deserves the beating he's going to get, but hypothetically speaking...
I've spent far more words on the plot than I intended to, but there's not much else to talk about. The story was actually pretty inventive, and while it was ridiculous, at least it wasn't just another, "You have killed my master and I will avenge him." story set in ancient China. I didn't give it a very high score overall since it was repetitive, predictable, and one-note. And yes, that's pretty much par for the genre.
Martial ArtsAs for the martial arts, they weren't very impressive. Having drunken white guys as the targets was fun a few times, as the asshole racist cowboys got their deserved beatings, but it soon got old since they presented no challenge to Shanghai Joe. I don't know enough about Kung Fu to say what style he was using, but it was not high flying, and not very brutal. Lots of chops, kicks, and punches, none of which looked very powerful. Lots of jabs, basically, and every fight required him to hit the bad guys numerous times to knock them out. He never did any joint locks or breaks or submission or choke holds, and while watching him land a flurry of light hits, after which he stepped back and waited for the bad guy to come at him again, I kept shouting "Finish him!" at the screen.
He seldom did, and it wasn't like Shanghai Joe was beating them up to punish them before going for the knockout; his style was just not hard-hitting enough to win with less than a dozen strikes. Very inefficient, especially when dealing with multiple attackers, as he usually was.
Most of the fighting was relatively realistic though, without too many "Oh he so didn't hit him with that." shots. The early fights were heavily-edited though, much the way most modern action films do it, in order to hide the fact that the actors involved can't actually fight at all. I'm not sure why they did it that way, since the cowboys were just throwing huge right hooks, or swinging chairs, and all Joe had to do was dodge or parry and then land his hits. Surely most of those could have been done in one take, with a camera far enough away to let us see how he moved.
Only the last fight, when Joe faced off against the evil Chinese guy, was shot from a distance, and there were some decent scenes there, though the choreography wasn't that great. The weapon stuff was especially mediocre, with knives thrown from the shoulders, like darts, and swords handled very poorly, with big, slow swings and no real control.
OverallSince the only real draw for this sort of film is the martial arts, I can't recommend this one. There's not that much action, far too much of it is one-sided and takes place in dark rooms, and there's very little variety in moves and styles. The weapon work sucked too, even though there was very little of it.
