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Quick Takes: Second-Hand Kung Fu

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There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity.  Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time.  Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful.  What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs.  Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs.  The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews. 

I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any.  Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt).  They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle.  Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics. 

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template.  While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime.  Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat.  He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant.  Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance.  His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.

I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC.  The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head.  It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers.  In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes.  The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool.  Either way, he’s right.

The Iron Monkey (1977)

The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation.  Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government.  He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax.  Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.

The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain.  There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines.  My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape.  I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before.  I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.

Return of the Tiger (1977)

Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless.  I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father.  Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies.  Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire.  As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits.  Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam.  As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.

While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting.  The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard.  My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song.  It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality. 

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in.  First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang.  Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm.  Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection.  Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns.  The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.

What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill.  The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist.  I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.

-Brandon Ledet

Problemista (2024)

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I’ve been a fan of Julio Torres’s for years, ever since a friend introduced me to the joys of Patti Harrison and I got into that whole crew. Los Espookys was a lot of fun, and I was excited to hear about his directorial debut when it originally premiered at SXSW last year, in 2023. It took some time for it to make it to my local theater, but I was excited to see that not only did it hit the mainstream multiplex nearest me, but that there was a surprisingly dense group of people in attendance at my Tuesday night screening, and it got a response from everyone there. 

Alejandro (Torres) is the son of a Salvadoran artist, and many of her designs for public art features came from his imagination, made manifest by her. As an adult, he’s living in a nightmare NY apartment situation and attempting to break into his dream job, as a toy designer for Hasbro. Unfortunately, despite his application to their “talent incubator program,” which included such designs as Cabbage Patch Dolls that have smartphones and the attendant anxiety that comes with such devices, slinkies that simply refuse to go down stairs, and a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back (instant drama in the dream house), he has not been selected. Instead, he makes a meager living at a cryogenic facility, where he is assigned to a particular corpse, Bobby (RZA), a painter who was focused on one particular subject: eggs. Bobby’s been frozen for over twenty years, and his art critic wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is fed up with the ever-increasing cost of his “care.” When Alejandro is fired for a workplace accident—one with zero consequences—at roughly the same time that Bobby is to be moved to a smaller, less expensive part of the facility that does not accommodate his paintings, he latches onto the idea of helping her put together a show of Bobby’s work, as she needs the help and he needs an employee sponsorship in order to remain in the U.S. She agrees, but Ale quickly realizes that he’s bitten off more than he bargained for. Elizabeth is, it turns out, an erratic, defensive, bitter, verbally abusive narcissist, perhaps the exact evil monster his mother foresaw him encountering in a dream. 

Swinton’s performance here is utterly phenomenal, and Torres’s directorial and narrative choices that make her alternatively demonic, sympathetic, and delusional are pitch perfect. There are countless tiny details about Elizabeth that build a portrait of a very particular kind of person, one whom all of us have encountered at some point. When she’s sold on something, she’s devoted to it to the point of nearly psychotic loyalty, as evidenced by her obsession with using FileMaker Pro, a three decade old computer program, in order to maintain continuity across all of her databases. She’s hit a point of technological arrested development, and her frustration is made the problem of everyone else around her: Apple phone service agents for whom explaining how to find her photos on her phone is a daily occurrence, Ale for having to learn software that might be older than he is, and everyone who crosses her path and is blinded by her smartphone’s flashlight, which is always at full blast. She’s a classic evader, as she deflects any and all attempts to rationalize with her by changing the subject to one of her other countless complaints, and she has no appreciation for how her apathy toward signing his sponsorship documentation keeps him in a perpetual state not just of anxiety but of danger as well. 

Alejandro is her perfect foil in addition to being her assistant and, in some ways, both her student and her teacher. The details are best left discovered through a viewing rather than recited here, but the plan to be saved from deportation via Elizabeth’s sponsorship fails … but not before she empowers him to achieve not just his short-term goal of staying in the country, but his larger goals of sharing his ideas with the world through his toy creation. When he was a boy, Alejandro’s mother never limited his dreams in the slightest, and instead of that making him a selfish, demanding adult, it’s made him a soft-spoken sweetheart, and through learning to stand up to Elizabeth and break through the barrier she’s built between her reality and the world at large, he grows. And, having witnessed (and received) countless rants and diatribes from Elizabeth, he learns that this is rarely the best way to resolve a situation; there are instances in which it’s the only way to resolve it, though, and he uses this new wisdom to not only make sure that he receives credit for his ideas, but to secure a future for himself. The film has already provided an alternative happy ending by creating a path for him to stay in the U.S., and in a more realistic movie, we would likely have seen Ale accepting the job as a translator from his immigration lawyer and we would end the film with his next year’s submission to the Hasbro incubator program. Instead, Alejandro goes for broke and so does Problemista, to my delight. 

If you haven’t seen the movie or any of its advertising, then this probably sounds like a fairly straightforward plot description, since I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about the film’s touches of magical realism, other than a brief mention of Ale’s mother’s dreams about his future. In the dream, she sees her son approaching a darkened cave, the depths of which are completely occluded other than two glowing red eyes. Elizabeth becomes that monster, dragon-like, but when Alejandro breaks through her self-deception forcefield and gets her to take an opportunity to show Bobby’s paintings despite it being “beneath” her, he appears in that imagined cave wearing a child’s toylike idea of a chivalric knight’s armor, besting her. Alejandro imagines the thirty day grace period he has to find sponsorship for his employment visa as an upturned hourglass, set amongst hundreds of other such devices, and he sees a woman fade from existence in front of him at the lawyer’s office when her time runs out. And, when he is forced into a series of degrading, quick, for-cash Craigslist jobs, the website is personified as a living being (Larry Owens) that presents him with opportunities for food delivery, handing out hair care product advertisements, and, ever present as a last resort, “Cleaning Boy (kink).” 

There are a myriad of effusively captured smaller roles here as well. Torres’s partner James Scully, of You and Fire Island fame, is ironically cast as Ale’s nemesis. The perfectly named Bingham is a white, New England landed gentry layabout whom Elizabeth is asked by a friend to take on as a secondary assistant, and whose effortless WASPy sycophantism charms her. There are hints throughout that Elizabeth may owe what meager success she had in her critical career to her aggressiveness and self-delusion more than to her eye for art, and although I don’t know that this makes her “shallow” necessarily, she’s positively wooed by Bingham’s surface level blaséness and taken in by him, to the degradation of her working relationship with Ale. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect narrator for all of this than Isabella Rosselini, whose soft enunciation of Torres’s script creates just as much magic as the visuals, and as a fan of Killjoys, it’s always exciting to see Kelly McCormack out and about in the world, even if her appearance is brief (but memorable!). My favorite appearance, however, was from Greta Lee, who appears briefly as Dalia, a former protegee (and more) of Bobby, who is in possession of Blue Egg on Yellow Satin, the final painting needed to complete his posthumous(?) show. She’s an utter delight to see here, and she makes a big impression despite her relatively short screen time. 

This is my favorite movie that I’ve seen so far this year, and I couldn’t have been happier that I ended up in a less-than-ideal seat at the theater because there were so many other people already there. There was a constant undercurrent of pure joy that rippled throughout, and it proved that it had something for everyone as groups of various ages released giggles, laughs, and even the occasional chuckle, all over different bits and jokes. (One thing that we could all agree on: Torres’s eccentric running style never got old.) I loved this one, and if you have enough joy in your heart, I think you’ll love it too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond