Snake Fist of A Buddhist Dragon (1979)

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Dir. Henry Cheung

If Henry Cheung is able to read this, I apologise for the comments I'm about to make. But with only this film on his IMDB page, any film connected to producer Joseph Lai and director Godfrey Ho causes me to wonder if the director's name is actually a pseudonym. I rented this film under the belief that Ho, infamous creator of numerous cut-and-paste ninja films made from pre-existing material, directed it. He is said to have written this, and it's still a film "produced" by Lai. I have many guilty pleasures that aren't really that guilty. But there's only two in cinema for me so far that have become obsessions - nineties anime, sometimes great, more interesting when it's a fragment of a story that never got an ending, always fascinating even when bad, and c-level martial arts films with poor English dubs and terrible DVD transfers. Joseph Lai could in fact become the first producer to get his own tag on this blog because of my obsession with his films. I love the martial arts films because they are, except the occasional dull one, completely unpredictable. They exist with clear traits different from other martial arts films. English dubs that sound silly and for some reason always seem to have an accent I presume to be Australian when I could be deluding myself. Ridiculous martial art skills used in even basic situations like chopping wood. Jump cuts and tricks straight from Georges Méliès magic films. The only real sour note with Joseph Kai, depending on your tolerance to exploitative content, is the sexism more pronounced in a genre where, in Chinese and Taiwan cinema, there are very strong female characters in the stories too. You have to bare it in mind with his films, sleazier than what martial art films usually are, clinging over some scenes in this one despite one of them having a great trick from a character of spitting needles from his mouth. These films feel more and away more interesting than other trashy sub-genre work though because of how creative and bizarre they are, let alone the fact that the performers and actors are solid martial artists even in technically mediocre work.

The story begins with a group of Chinese rebels having to protect itself when an evil Manchu organisation kidnap a female member for information on dissidents. From there its somewhat pointless to try to explain it because of how vague and all over the place it becomes. It does involve revenge. An orphan raised at a Shaolin temple who is taught martial arts. Behaviour that frankly doesn't seem logical to what real human beings would do. And befitting how Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho used to make new films with pre existing footage, a big chunk of this one is made from fight sequences that are clearly from other work, existing ones or, as Lai and Ho did as well, unfinished projects, padding out a plot from it. It becomes shambolic very early on, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing with Snake Fist of A Buddhist Dragon. There is something curious and utterly entertaining about the recycling of previous material to create new things, beyond sampling to references, the seems glued together to make this film's eventually collapsing plot work fascinating to look at rather than to mock. Barely held together with characters like White Tiger and absurd moments, usually in the many fight scenes, this feels like viewing the footage of all the pulpiest martial arts films in its purest form, churned together into a single movie. Cutting out lifeless moments when the pace sags or when it was no longer entertaining to watch on of these films because it descended into dull, expository dialogue with no gain to it.

Even with the "bad" martial art films, I've found that many still have so much to enjoy and get from as entertainment. Brief moments, even when the plot is threadbare and the swearing filled English dub for this film is hysterically poor, shining out. A fight scene that is still exceptional in terms of the agility of the performers, a rudimentary visual effect or wire work trick, like a flying tray of food at one point, all of which evokes a childlike wonder, that even a bad film can still be memorable in a special way, mixed with the adult glee of exploitation cinema and z-grade pop culture where anything can happen around the corner even if the plot's obvious. Things happen not quite as you would expect them to in this film, and it's fun because this happens. Unlike other genres, where the things that entice viewers (gore, sex) can too easily mingle with tedious, time eroding paces and forced-out plotting, the immediate advantage of even a film like this one, that the actors are still more athletically superior than even many in Western action films, and have no qualm with acting out the most brutal, ridiculous and showboating stunts on a shoestring budget, is always engaging even if the film itself is in shambles from the get-go. Even in a film like this you get all the theatrics crossed with a culture steeped in well taught martial arts whose history and beliefs still seep into a work written by Godfrey Ho. Physical people doing psychical fighting, back flips, kicks, elaborate counters and strikes. Physical stunt falls. Physical visual effects from wires to the clear camera edit, by human hand, where a person disappears and reappears a distance further in a peculiar, near stop motion effect. Even the regurgitation of pre-existing material, for a buck, and the dub are physically made, the battered print of these kinds of films, on DVDs by third-grade companies long gone, adding  to their material rawness.

As two sides collide, the good Chinese rebels and the Manchu group, the cacophony of material is compelling as if sticking random pieces of these films together into a Surrealist's cut-up martial arts film project. Where you can have razor blade sewn into your cape to slash at people, but don't fear it stabbing into you as you were wearing it. Where you can get a hostage released by sneaking into the villain's lair and cutting all his hair off in his sleep, more significant as he is legitimately dangerous when he's sober and not drinking. The vulgar, messiest and trashy of material can be the most inspiring even if it's to amuse oneself, and a film like this, and the many I can get second hand in a martial arts section of a nearby store, remind me that looking at the bottom of a barrel can be just as creative and fanciful.

The Hole (1998)

Also Known As -  Dong

Director – Tsai Ming-liang

Taiwan/France

Set in an alternative reality just before the year 2000, the film exists entirely in a Taiwanese apartment complex that has been almost abandoned. An epidemic known as ‘Taiwan Fever’ has struck the outside world, starting off as flu-like symptoms before the infected individuals start acting like cockroaches, afraid of light, crawling across floors and searching for dark and wet places to hide. In the middle of this, in a cast that could be counted on a single hand and a few extra fingers, is a woman (Lin Kun-huei) and the man living above her (Lee Kang-sheng) forced into close proximity when a hole between their apartments if left allowing them to see each other (or as in one unfortunate case, for someone to vomit down the hole onto the other’s property). Their relationship is very hostile at first, but as the film goes on, a connection is slowly made.

To merely say The Hole is merely an art house drama is a disservice to its creativity and uniqueness. Commissioned as part of a series of films interpreting what the then-oncoming Millennium would be like, this could be seen as the least conventional post apocalyptic virus film in existence and the best I’ve seen so far. Refusing to leave their homes to go to government medical tents, the characters live in a strange blurring of ordinary life and dilapidation with no rage-infected monkeys in sight. There was the constant feeling in the back of the my mind that food shortages in the apartments would eventually happen, but instead of starvation, the symbol of this apocalypse is people eating instant noodles all the time. The issue of there being enough clean water to survive on is explicit, yet water is one of the film’s most prominent motifs – it is continually raining, water is prominent in nearly all the scenes, including other types of fluids, and plumbing is responsible for the hole of the title in the first place. The walls are rotting and people’s wallpaper is flaying at the sides, but with the furniture and possessions of before still in their original places, this is less a wasteland than an ordinary environment transformed into an alien landscape.

Landscape is important for this film because its cinematography by the director’s regular cinematographer Liao Pen-jung is a masterclass. Baring in mind that flat environments can be just as striking if used right, this film triumphantly pushes cinema’s ability of showing even the most enclosed place as three dimensional. The human eye sees an environment, be it the person’s living room or a vast plain, in great depth depending on what angle it is seen in. The cinematography here was clearly done to enforce the contradiction of the claustrophobia and the expanse of the apartment complex. It is a place that can be related to by anyone who has been in a city, even down to there being too many fire extinguishers then needed everywhere, but at times it becomes science fiction. To avoid a pointless tangent, it reminds me of one of the reasons why the current 3D trend in films is somewhat pointless for me, because a standard two dimensional film, if the production crew take it into consideration, can show just as much depth in a flat image. I am reminded of one of the art classes which everyone including myself had to take during secondary school where we spent a couple of lessons drawing three dimensional shapes on paper over and over again; one is able to create depth depending on where one places the image in front of the eye, something this film can attest to and results in images which are both incredible, and exceptionally dank and rundown.

The film isn’t just about environments though, as there is a clear emotional core to this film. There is very little dialogue through The Hole, but you can still feel that the two main characters, played perfectly by both actors, are interacting with each other and their surroundings, seen through the emotions on their faces and in their actions, like actual human beings. The silence also allows the world and the idiosyncratic behaviour of everyone within it to be fleshed out, from the constant noise of rain outside to the horded collection of toilet paper the main female character has, and feel real. Themes of isolation, the lack of communication and of connection can be found in The Hole, and is built upon as the film gets to its (bitter) sweet conclusion...and that’s not including the musical numbers. I have only seen two of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, this and The Wayward Cloud (2006) (the later I need to re-evaluate now), and both of them have musical numbers, a clear trademark the director may use in some of his work. In The Hole, the director will cut to another part of the apartment complex where Lin Kun-huei is suddenly wearing elaborate dresses and lip syncing to songs by the Chinese singer Grace Chang. These scenes have nothing to do with the film’s reality, nor are they dream sequences, but they have importance to everything in it. In a very clever move by the director, the songs and their lyrics reflect the emotions the character feels at that particular moment, which not only works in drawing the viewer more into the film, but takes advantage of how the cultural items we have make up as much of what makes us human beings as our thoughts and feelings do in a meaningful way (and Ming-liang clearly adores Grace Chang’s music, judging from the statement of his at the end of the film which brought a smile on my face). The musical numbers by themselves encapsulate why I think this film is a masterpiece; they are imaginative twists of film conventions, but they also have a deep and meaningful core to them, a description which can be applied to The Hole in general.

I have only seen the film once, but I already hold this up as a truly great film. It is, if I’m going to be very cheeky, one of the best science fiction/fantasy films in existence, far better than the likes of Blade Runner (1982) in that it has enough power in its contents as well as the images, as well as being a romance, a drama, a comedy and many other things that is sublimely put together, a film which clearly comes from the time when Y2K fears of the Millennium were growing, but is still relevant in its themes now. Sadly it might be difficult to get hold of now, which is an absolute shame. If you do find it, I absolutely recommend it as a rewarding experience.