Still busy with work on other things, but I can at least take a few minutes to post a movie review I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it's more chop socky fun...
Chase Step by Step is another cheesy Hong Kong-produced chop socky film from
the 50-pack I received for Xmas. It's cheesy and fake, but still better than most of its kind. The two heroes are usually worth rooting for, the bad guys are hissable, and the plot holds together, providing you can overlook numerous physical impossibilities. The martial arts aren't very good, but there are a ton of fight scenes, so at least you get your money's worth.
To the scores, which as always, are meant to be compared only to other chop socky films.
Chase Step by Step, 1982)
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 4
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 5
Overall: 7.5
I'm giving this one the highest overall score of any chop socky yet, but of course that's on the chop socky scale. Compared to real movies, this one wouldn't get more than a 3 or 4. Then again, considering the budget and production values, that's not too bad. Plenty of hundred million dollar action films have fared worse, by my metric.
Production ValuesNot bad. The dubbing isn't a disaster, it's in focus, it's lit well enough to see all of the scenes, and the camera angles aren't horrible. The worst visuals are right at the start, with some unwatchable scenes filmed in a Chinese circus. In those the camera is focused in very tightly from a distance, aimed almost straight up, and in poor lighting. After that 90% of the scenes are outdoors in sunlight, so they all look pretty okay.
The pan and scan treatment is awful, as always, and in most scenes of conversation one or the other of the two actors is cut off to the left or the right of the screen. Why they don't just leave these wide screen with letter boxing I will never understand. Why they didn't make TV screens rectangles with aspect ratios similar to those in movie theaters all along I will never understand, since movies came first. But that's an issue for another day.
The other production value problem are the incredibly cheesy special effects. There aren't many of them, but at least half a dozen times in the film the female lead does a magical tumbling technique that lets her travel oh... twenty to thirty meters in about two flips and three seconds. It's never less than laugh out loud fake, as you see her looking way up a hill or across a gorge at some bad guys, then the film suddenly cuts to a very tight close up of her doing some sort of flip on a trampoline, and then cuts back to her suddenly landing on a wagon, or in front of the bad guys, who are always shocked to see her there, as if her tumbling was actually some sort of teleportation technique.
StoryThis is the part I usually have the most fun with in these reviews, as I get a kick out of retelling and laughing at the ridiculous plots of these chop socky films. In this case though, I can't. It's a simple plot, and almost interesting. Some poor province of China is locked in a drought, people are starving and dying, and when word somehow gets to the capital city, a benevolent ruler wants to send gold to help relieve the suffering. The gold must be delivered and protected along the way, and for some reason two kung fu experts who are also circus performers are sent along to guard it.
Of course the greedy bad guys in the province (none of whom seem to be starving or suffering from a drought) somehow get word that the gold is coming, and set out to ambush the circus guards and take the gold. The guards, a man and a woman, are the heroes and main characters, and they fight off dozens and dozens of bad guys.
I'm unclear on how exactly a huge chest of gold is going to help people dying in a drought/famine. Where are they going to buy food/water, when everything has to be transported by wagon? Overlooking that, the funniest story problem was the bad guys. They keep sending out two or three henchmen to kill the good guys and take the gold, and each day the henchmen come back all beaten up and the boss curses at them. Why doesn't he just send out all of his goons at once and get the job done quickly? Furthermore, the heroes are traveling on foot, and so are the bad guys. Yet the new batch of bad guys get ahead of them on the road every day, for like a week, when the bad guys always go back to their same base each time. Are the heroes walking in a big circle, or what? How are the bad guys all coming out from a central location, and continuing to get ahead of the heroes who do nothing all day but walk in a straight line?
Eventually the gold gets to the province, and after a last betrayal where the leaders of the province try to take it for themselves, the heroes kick their asses and walk off with the treasure, still happily in asexual comradery with each other.
Speaking of asexual comradery; the female lead is far and away the worst thing about this film. She spends the entire movie scolding her male companion for being male, for looking at girls, for wanting to stop and rest, etc. The two of them are constantly splitting up after she pitches a fit about something irrelevant, they're always attacked the minute they separate, before rejoining just in time to save the gold. Again. Her character acts like she's about seven, and bratty. It's embarrassing to women, it's shrill and annoying, and it serves no purpose.
Martial ArtsNot bad, but nothing special. There's a good variety of techniques and styles here, but almost all of them are very non-lethal. Everyone takes fifty hits to get knocked out, and the good guys never use any weapons, even though the bad guys constantly try to kill them with swords, knives, staves, and anything else that comes to hand. It's frustrating to watch, as like four murderous thieves swing at the hero man while he ducks and dodges and kicks at them, but never finishes anyone off when he grabs them, and never disarms them, and never uses their weapons against them. I guess it's a morality play, where the good guys are so heroic they don't need to use weapons to defend themselves, but it just makes them seem so dumb and naïve and inefficient.
During numerous fight scenes the good guy starts beating up the bad guy, who resorts to pulling a knife/sword, and then it's always the same. Two or three wild slashes before the good guy steps in close enough to block or grab the attacker's hand. But they never do more than kick or punch them once, before they let go and return to dodging sword swings. If you're in a fight with a person holding a deadly bladed weapon, and you get a hold of their wrist, you'd better break their f'ing arm, at a minimum.
Un-opportunistic weapon counters aside, the martial arts fights aren't horrible, and the choreography isn't always painfully apparent, but you're never in doubt that it's just a big dance. Most attacks do a high-low-high series of moves, or a left-right-left series of punches, and quite often the person being targeted moves well before each punch/kick is on the way. Why it's almost as if they know exactly where the punch is going before it's even thrown! This is most obvious in the weapon scenes, where the person with the sword or staff is swinging a good half meter over the head of the target -- who ducked before they even swung anyway.
Happily, the actors all know how to move and punch and kick, though no one in the film is good enough to look impressive, and they're all so slow and deliberate. And cooperative. Every punch is this straight-armed thing where the puncher misses, and then leaves their arm straight out so that the punchee can parry, back off a step, and then counter. Try that in a real fight, where any competent opponent will snatch back their hand the instant it hits or misses the target.
My main gripe, as it usually is with chop socky combat, is how non-lethal everything is. The hits never seem very hard, the punches are not fast enough to be scary, and there are no throws or joint locks or arm breaks or much of anything other than weak kicks and snappy but powerless punches. Comparing the typical chop socky fight to a more modern and brutal movie fight style (such as the endless arm breaks
in this scene from a Tony Jaa film) makes the chop socky look like a damn puppet show.
OverallIt's not exactly an involving story, and I had no problem watching it in 10 or 15 minute blocks, but the fight scenes aren't bad and there is a nice variety of weapons on display, even though no one particularly knows how to use them. The very linear plot works too, since the heroes are on a road, we know where they're going, we know bad guys are trying to stop them, and there aren't too many stupid detours. It's certainly not a good movie, but it's pretty good for chop socky.
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