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| From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is146/strike1h.2843.jpg |
Dir. Park Woo-Sang
South Korea
Film #5 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema
Martial arts cinema is its own
genre, not just a mere sub-genre it once was, with its own infrastructure to be
divided into types of sub-genres, and marketable to a wider audience than many
cult genres of film. Even the ordinary person on the street will find them in a
supermarket’s new release section and buy it, something that The Raid (2011) will continue to a new
stage for the genre. It has its own
section in the nationwide British store HMV, and its own shelf (or two) in the
second hand store I frequent. The latter is a vast source of both obscure gems
and truly the obscurest of this cinema, of scratched, English dub only DVDs
from long vanished distribution labels of varying quality. I picked this up out
of interest, but ended up (consciously or subconsciously) considering it for
this season, not because it sounded awful, but because this sounded like one of
those films that are usually viewed as bottom of the barrel in the genre but
can turn out to entertaining viewing. Interestingly, it fitted the season as it
is a South Korea film that has ended up with an entirely different person
taking credit for its direction on the opening credits of the version I saw,
and has the name Joseph Lai as one of
the producers, the man who helped produce the films of Godfrey Ho such as Ninja
Terminator (1985). This feels like the sort of films this man distributed,
or at least cut from the same cloth of these low budget releases from the
period, in terms of its recognisable and ridiculous English dub synonymous with
films from Lai. In my experience with
these films – where Godfrey Ho took
credit for other people’s work, and Lai took
credit for Ho’s, and where I have
seen a cut-and-paste ninja film exactly like Ho’s infamous sub-genre of his own creation that didn’t have his name on it at all –
this confusion with even the basic origins of this film and the disguise that
it has had forced upon it is to be expected. It exists with a cheaper, more
erratic or dimestore craziness than other more well regarded types of martial arts
cinema, truly distinct even if it’s only written about in select films like Ninja Terminator.
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| From http://img.youtube.com/vi/A12Cv7bxN_Y/0.jpg |
Three men steal a large amount of
loot, only for one to betray the other two. When he is murdered, the other two
swoop over his daughter, like hawks, to get information on where it has been
hidden, only for an outsider with a dangerous skill in combat to intervene and
stake his claim for the loot as well. Like the Lai/Ho films, and
anything pre-existing they had their hands on, it starts as a simplistic
one-dimensional film with absolutely no regard for boundaries in entertaining
the viewer. As the hunt for the loot takes place – using a Rubik Cube as an
important key of all things – you are bombarded by amusing digressions, dubbed
voices and numerous fight sequences one after another. From a period, decades long, where these films
were being churned out, and the aesthetics of the 1990s onwards was a long way
off, these low budget meat-and-potatoes martial arts films, especially those
from South Korea (like this) or places like Taiwan, are fascinating. The fashion
in this film – scarves, white gloves, denim jacket and jeans – alongside the
hairstyles is a back catalogue of style far too concentrated in its nostalgia
for most people that it would cause aesthetic diabetes of the texture cognition
of the mind. The characters are one note but stand out for their looks and
dubbing, including that reoccurring trend of Asian martial arts cinema of an
effeminate (ie. gay) character as a joke who is as over the top in his
behaviour as possible, one of the villains who wears a full body, blue stocking
for part of the film and has a best boy pasted in lipstick and white blush
besides him. Its eye rolling as always with this cliché, but like many of these
films, at least he is a skilled martial artist who can handle himself. He’s
also one of the few villains I have seen who, using an anatomy chart, goes out
of his way to advise his minions about the combat prowess of their enemy to
warn them of who they’re facing; it is such a poorly developed virtue in main
villains that it shows so much in the incompetence of their henchmen, something
this one can be grateful isn’t one of his faults. This film in the first half
keeps throwing moment after moment that are charmingly goofy or insane; it
stands out as eliciting one of the oddest thoughts I’ve had watching a film – “Wait, did the man bring a harpoon
with him??” – only for it to become obvious, in a film that is 99% set
inland, that the other main villain has indeed brought a harpoon with him to
stab people to death with. When it disappears, thinking about it, the
harpoon-shaped absence it leaves makes the choice of weapon even more
peculiar. This film even continues the
trademark of Ninja Terminator in “borrowing” music from other sources,
this time going one further and using Wendy
Carlos' reinterpretation of Henry
Purcell's Music for the Funeral of
Queen Mary, the theme for A
Clockwork Orange (1971), for one sequence.
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| From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is4/strike5f.3897.jpg |
Watching films like this however,
unlike the more infamous Godfrey Ho works,
is as much an act of patience, even masochism, too that not everyone has. The
martial arts in this film is solid and well done, but outside of this or the wardrobe
department, no one is bringing their best to the material; it starts to become
the ponderous, disinteresting work it probably should have been since its
beginning and the entertainment on from this fluctuates immensely. Its charm is
still there – as when it suddenly becomes a Christmas film in a montage
sequence, an instrumental rendition of Jingle
Bells set over images of the daughter dressing up as the anti-hero in only
his shirt, jacket and a drawn on moustache – but its sporadic. Also like a lot of
films from this type of martial arts cinema, including Godfrey Ho’s own sadly, there is a bitter taste of sexism,
especially with having its main female character beaten up continually,
including by the anti-hero himself at one point. It’s a major issue with
exploitation cinema – that is designed to exploit
taboos regardless of moral judgement and good taste – but it’s very incongruous
considering this genre is full of strong female protagonists, and actresses
like Michelle Yeoh, who stand on
their own two feet as incredibly skilled and talented martial artists.
It is a film for only the
die-hard viewer or the person like me who dives into piles of films and DVDs for
movies like this, as it is a film that gets it merits mostly from its
ridiculousness, not necessarily for a cheap laugh, but to absorb the juxtapositions
put onscreen and moments of goofy surprise. A large quota of the films on that
second hand shelf I cross past continually is full of martial arts films like
this, costing a mere pittance and probably only viewed by those film fans
willing to give their time for lesser films that could either be mere hastily
made bad cinema or great c-grade pulp. Strike
of Thunderkick Tiger, like many of them, elicits mixed emotions that change
from bad to entertaining continually throughout it, and because of this it’s an
acquired taste if there ever was one.
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| From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GrHkbqssc10/0.jpg |
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