Jiao tou fa wei

Let me say, I am having a hard time recalling a worse movie that I have watched. This movie made me feel dirty after watching it. And also stupider, if you can possibly imagine that.

It is a disgusting hodgepodge of unilluminating plot points, incomplete story arcs, and one-dimensional characters bouncing off of each other like pinballs.

As a cheap and vulgar substitute for a genuine, emotional experience (like what real films provide to viewers), this movie willingly, almost gleefully, draws the viewer through feelings of shamefulness and pointless wretchedness. You end up feeling not so much as manipulated, but assaulted, by the ugly, cheap crudeness of the movie.

I won't even bother with an attempt at a plot synopsis of this, not even a "train- wreck-of-a movie", more like a "scrapings-of-the-slaughterhouse-floor-of-a-movie". What I will say is that the available synopses of this movie as made available by the DVD releaser is about as accurate as the worst, most deceptive trailers that have ever led you into watching a movie you thought you were going to love, but absolutely hated.

There are some movies which we all lovingly call "bad". This is not one of those movies. This movie is simply bad.

I am not winking at you when I say, "avoid this movie". If you choose to watch it, you will be in equal turns bored to tears, contemptuously angry, and pitifully disgusted by what you see. There is no joy in this film. There is neither the difficult but necessary anguish that comes when witnessing good tragedy. There is only that horrible, hollow feeling that somehow, only the worst of Hong Kong movies can foist on their viewers.

If someone offers you the choice of sitting through this movie with no hands on the pause or fast-forward button, or biting off the tip of your own tongue, I say, "Get ready to bite, hard."

Do you enjoy watching films for a few hours of entertainment and escapism? If you do, then don't watch this film. You'll get nothing out of it but pain, disgust, cringe and pure misery.

The script in this movie is one of the worst I have ever come across. And this is from someone who has watched hundreds of Hong Kong movies. It is simply atrocious. There are so many 'What were they thinking?!' moments that you'll be shouting at your TV by its disjointed, nonsensical conclusion.

I'm not sure how they managed to botch such a simple 'revenge film' formula so badly here, but perhaps not condensing the revenge arc into the final 5 minutes of the film would have been prudent. Normally the 'act of transgression' will occur near the beginning of the movie (or at least the middle) and then the protagonist will spend the rest of the film kicking ass, taking names and putting people in an early grave. But not this film. In this film we get the unspeakable sin 10 minutes from the end, when our hero should already be well into the last boss fight. There are honestly so many celluloid crimes on display here it's sickening.

And it's a bit of a shame because some of the actors involved are actually putting in really good performances! They obviously had no idea what they were signing up for.

If you're looking for your kung fu fix then you'll also be disappointed, because there's one fight that lasts about 30 seconds, and the final fight which just about scrapes past the 2-3 minute mark. The choreography on display in these rushed sequences is exciting to watch, but you have to wade through 87 minutes of turd to enjoy it.

Just watch Sun Chung's other fu film, A Fistful of Talons (1983) instead. It's so much better. If you absolutely have to waste your time here then skip to the last 5 minutes of the film. You'll be glad you did.

Even though the studio had officially closed the preceding year, the Shaw Bros. continued to release films sporadically over the years. This is possibly the last film that closely resembles the classic Shaw kung fu drama. The Shaws' rehired director Sun Chung, who had been working independently, to helm this Ti Lung film.

Ti Lung reprises his role from Sun Chung's earlier "Kung Fu Instructor" as the kung fu master, Tong. This time he has a young teenage son who follows him since the mother is dead. Hired by a general to retrain his troops who've become lazy and useless, Tong's first act is to stop the soldiers' nightly forays to the town's classy brothel. This goes over poorly with the town's chief constable who secretly owns the brothel. The constable targets Tong's son and persecutes the child by framing him for thievery. Complicating the plot is Tong's attraction to the star prostitute in the brothel and the politics that prevents Tong from just smacking the crap out of the constable. Things don't get better, especially when the emperor's eunuch shows up looking for new young boys to castrate.

Heavy on drama, low on martial art action, this would be a minor Shaw effort if it was from the 1970's. What makes this film an exception is it's production date of 1985. While chock full of Shaw supporting actors and apparently shot on Shaw sets in Taiwan, this is not filmed on the standard "ShawScope" widescreen film ratio. With a more standard screen ratio of 1:1.85 it looks different and while colorfully lighted the film stock looks much more modern then Shaw films of a year before. Also the ever present "The End" title with the motto, "Another Shaw Production" is missing replaced with a more standard credit roll.

Is it a good film? For me the story is disjointed and in a way arbitrary. The brothel setting brings on two useless sequences with nudity. There's a pointless subplot about a soldier and a pregnant prostitute. The soldiers are a stock set of goofy rascals that you've probably seen in other Shaw films. Wong Yu, a wonderful presence and martial artist in Liu Chia Liang films, is almost completely wasted here. He gets to act as the leader of the soldiers but he never lifts a finger in a fight. Sun Chueng's direction is solid as usual and the two fights in the film are filmed with his intense action style. The script veers from heavy melodrama to goofy hijinks to rather intense violence. Believe me, when the eunuch shows up things do not get pretty. Ti Lung is the saving grace in the film, he pulls off his role of a conflicted fighter who is trying raise his son and continue his living as a wandering kung fu instructor. Unfortunately he suffers during the stagy melodrama scenes. The fights are very well done, too bad there are only two during the entire 90 minutes.

Interesting but not great at all. The violence is distasteful at times.