Alley Cat (1984)

Cinematic villains love to cackle, and few bad guys cackle more or better than those from Hong Kong genre cinema and English-speaking exploitation cinema.  Show me a martial arts film made anywhere from the Sixties up to about the year 2000 that doesn’t have one (usually either followed by or while simultaneously stroking a ludicrously long, stringy beard), and I’ll show you a cigar box full of four-leaf clovers.  American action films typically have a gang of lowbrow guttersnipes who all think things like rape and murder are the funniest things in the world.  I can’t tell you where this tradition started, but I know that it swiftly became a staple/cliché that carries through to today.  The idea is that the villains have a sense of superiority, and their haughty laughter shows this to their enemies and victims.  Likewise, it’s meant to show the audience that these characters are vile.  The things they find uproariously hilarious are things a normal human being finds odious and tragic.  It also removes the films further away from reality, because these guys are so heightened in their reactions to everything, they become cartoonish.  Take Edward Victor’s Alley Cat, for example.  The iniquitous Bill/Scarface (Michael Wayne, an actor who only appeared in this one film but could very easily have been the Anthony James of films that only had $1.22 to spend on casting) brays when he thinks of what he’s going to do to our heroine Billie (Karin Mani), and his underlings follow along, because being a scumbag is fun (conversely, this is also meant to be menacing for the same exact reasons).

Billie chases a couple of thugs away from her car with her Karate skills (and it should be said that either Mani actually knows martial arts or the stunt-doubling is impressive, maybe both), but their boss Scarface decides to teach her a lesson by stabbing Billie’s grandmother.  Billie decides to take this rather personally.

Alley Cat is a standard revenge film in every way, and that includes its philosophy of disproportionate responses.  Billie kicks the stuffing out of Tom (Tim Cutt) and Mickey, who run off crying to Scarface.  To show her who’s boss, these jerks follow Billie’s grandparents and assault them, leading to Grandma Clark being comatose and, eventually, dead.  The average man might have just forgotten about having their ass whipped by a woman, been thankful they didn’t wind up in the pokey, and gone about their felonious business elsewhere.  Not these guys.  Every affront must be met with five times the violence and viciousness.  Billie, however, is just like them.  Yes, she starts off defending her property and family or helping a stranger, but she quickly discovers that the adage about if you can’t beat them, join them, holds true when it comes to thugs.  Inevitably, she does to the bad guys what they tried to do to her, tracking them down and killing them (I assume; there’s only one definitive onscreen death).  Yet, we side with her because we repeatedly see her attacked (honestly, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t give up jogging at night if they were assaulted even half as much as Billie is) for no real reason.  She goes from defensive to offensive, but morally, she’s correct.  The justice system we rely on also lives up to the rule of disproportionate responses.  After Billie rescues a woman from a rape using a handgun, she is arrested for a variety of crimes which she did violate, but that any decent cop would let slide, all things considered.  The judge who presides over every single case that Billie is involved in chucks her in jail for contempt of court (where she makes a few friends for life).

This leads to the idea of misogyny that pervades the film.  Every man in the film either hates women or is ineffective (read: a pantywaist).  All the men on the street want to have sex with every woman they see (willingly or not).  Billie is chased and set upon multiple times in the park, and the men who do this have nothing but sex and violence on their minds.  Scarface’s girlfriend is treated like the piece of meat she is.  He calls her “Miss Blowjob,” and the two are not above throwing things at each other.  He puts her down and reminds her constantly that she’s nothing but a warm hole.  She puts up with it likely because she’s been beaten down and is now simply inured to the fact that this is the way of things.  Boyle (Jon Greene), a beat cop, is the one who gives Billie a hard time about her need to carry a gun when she goes out at night.  He delights in handcuffing her and charging her with every single thing he can.  Boyle also has a hooker (Britt Helfer, whom you likely remember from Raw Force or the soap opera Loving, but, either way, is physically impressive, just to play my own pig card for a moment) he bangs while on duty (and, we can infer, without paying for her services).  The single male who isn’t a complete swine is Johnny, the cop Billie meets cute with at the hospital and who quickly becomes her boyfriend.  At first, Johnny is the paragon of virtue, standing up for the little guy and attempting to keep Billie out of danger while trying to bring the bad guys to justice by the book.  even he has a level of sexism about him, trying to show Billie how to do Karate without knowing she’s working on her black belt.  What Johnny finds out, however, much like Billie did just slower, is that to get justice one must get one’s hands very dirty.  You can’t clean up a Jell-O wrestler without getting some on you, so to speak.  As in all movies of this stripe, the system is moribund, if not five weeks gone, allowing the misogyny perpetrated on the streets to corrupt the decency it’s supposed to stand for.  The choice left for victims is surrender or vigilantism.

Alley Cat has some good things going for it.  Being an exploitation film, it is loaded with beautiful women who don’t mind doffing their clothes onscreen.  There are action scenes every few minutes.  There is a layer of grime all over it; you can almost feel the grit on the characters and smell their b.o.  What it gets wrong is that it is unfocused.  Did we need the lengthy sequence of Billie in prison?  Did we need the lengthy sequence of Johnny tormenting the Helfer character for information?  Did we need the random jogging assault attempts that have nothing to do with the main story?  No, to all.  Yes, they each satisfy for this type of film, but they are all extraneous.  You could argue that they are necessary as illustrations of systematic misogyny, but they distract from the main narrative.  Maybe that’s the point?  Maybe the filmmakers wanted to do a more holistic approach to a Woman’s Revenge film?  It’s possible.  But, at eighty-two minutes, the tangents drag down the pacing, and they made me think that the filmmakers simply didn’t have enough story to fill out that time frame.  Fair enough, because the distractions do what distractions are supposed to do.  But they also remind the viewer that time is dragging by.

MVT:  Mani can keep a movie together and handle physical action, and, with a better script and some better direction, I believe she could have been a genre luminary.

Make or Break:  The finale drops what scant subtleties the film had and digs into its genre trappings full bore while displaying exactly what Billie has become.

Score:  6/10       

Three-Head Monster (1988)

There’s something about things with two heads that fascinates us.  When we see genuine Siamese twins, our heads fill with thoughts about how they live their lives.  How do they get around if one side wants to go a different way than the other?  What is that total lack of privacy like, to be forever physically linked with another person?  What do their arguments go like?  Sure, we’re also entranced by the biology of it, the uniqueness (call it freakishness, if you like).  But more than that is the fantasy of a life so alien to our own.  In cinema, things with two heads are almost universally maleficent.  There’s The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, The Thing with Two Heads, Dioskilos/Orthrus from Clash of the Titans (the good version), The Manster, that purple, beardy Muppet from Sesame Street, and so on (yes, that last one is actually fairly good-natured).  They are typically portrayed as two sides of the same coin, at conflict with one another, each struggling to be the dominant personality and maintain control.  They are, in effect, the dual nature of man.  Now, bring one additional head into the equation, and the dynamic changes.  King Ghidorah is likely the first creature most people think of when they think of three-headed monsters.  All of his noggins work in concert toward a common goal, because Ghidorah, the body, is the one who needs to be sated.  By contrast, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the three-headed knight is indecisive and bitchy, immobile and ineffectual.  It’s no longer about grappling with the twin sides of a man’s soul but about the ability or inability to act at all.  It’s an answer to the old saw about “too many cooks spoiling the broth.”  So, the Three-Head Demon King in Wang Chu-Chin’s Three-Head Monster (aka San Tou Mo Wang aka Ginseng King) knows exactly what he wants, and his heads act in concert toward that goal.  With this in mind, when somebody says that two heads are better than one, feel free to disagree.  But three heads?  Hoo, boy!

Hsiaoming is off collecting herbs for his ailing mother when he is bitten by a cobra but is saved by the affable (if creepy-looking) 1000 Year Ginseng King.  Turns out, the Ginseng King is also in need of some saving when Princess Hsiaoli (Cynthia Khan) captures him for the titular beastie to devour and become immortal.  Hsiaoming quests it out, both for his new, Man-Thing-ian pal as well as for the sake of his mother.

Three-Head Monster is a fantasy for children, but, like many filmic fantasies for the pre-adolescent/adolescent set produced in the Seventies and Eighties (and especially when hailing from places like Taiwan), there is enough gruesomeness to make the Brothers Grimm quite happy indeed.  For example, a Nazi zombie (possibly a Jiangshi) terrorizes the young boy and his mother, destroying their hut in the process.  He pauses at multiple times to Sieg Heil, and he is stopped in his tracks by the swastika on a young monk’s satchel (never mind that it’s facing the wrong way).  Every supernatural character, with the exception of Hsiaoli and Grampa Earthgod, is hideous, their skin mottled and peeling off.  There are more bloody squibs and explosive body impacts than one might expect in such a movie.  But this is also part of the appeal to kids (and, let’s be clear, to many adults).  It has the simultaneous sense of wonder and imagination that captivates a young person’s mind and the violence which not only ups the ante but also satisfies as something which is partially taboo to stare at and partially exactly how the scenario might play out in a kid’s head (death, not imprisonment or banishment, is the ultimate fate of bad guys).  

Like fairy tales and parables, the film also contains a valuable lesson, and it is that greed is bad, and self-sacrifice is good.  The Demon King is concerned only for himself and the prospect of his own immortality.  He imprisoned his own wife (who looks like a grade school play’s version of the Wicked Witch of the West) because she stood in his way.  The Ginseng King is kindly and helpful to people in need.  He heals Hsiaoming’s snake bite.  He gives the lad a “whisker” to heal his mother (this backfires in a big way when the Nazi zombie drinks the broth with the root in it; the Nazi zombie also being a symbol of greediness in both his worldly and otherworldly natures).  He helps Hsiaoli escape from the Demon King’s minions, unaware that he’s actually falling into a trap.  He will even sacrifice himself to save them all, if that’s what it takes.  Grampa Earthgod starts off greedy, thinking only of his own safety, reluctant to admit what he is or to help Hsiaoming on his journey until he’s shown that this is his purpose.  Hsiaoli also skirts this line, at first seeking the Ginseng King with all her resources.  Later, she sides with Hsiaoming and the forces of good, because her genuine motivation lies in helping her mother, not in the betterment of her father.  Therefore, the more we can do for others while ignoring our own needs, the better we are as people.

Like an after school special, Three-Head Monster is simplistic and obvious, almost to the point of pandering.  It is also repetitive, not in the sense of the overcoming of similar obstacles and circumstances but in the facility with which the protagonists’ problems are dispatched.  “We need to convince Magic Eyes and Magic Ears to help us.”  “Okay, let’s ask them, but they probably won’t do it.”  “Hey, guys, would you help us out?”  “Sure.”  When the characters need to find something or escape from somewhere, the solution is always right at hand and/or achieved with a minimum of fuss.  It takes any tension out of the story.  Yes, we know from the outset that the heroes will prevail, but without any real resistance or effort, it deprives their victories of resonance.  The action scenes are edited with jump cuts and shot with enough shakycam to make modern action filmmakers drool.  I can at least rationalize in my own mind the jump cuts as playing to the supernatural nature of the characters and as some vain attempt to display the speed at which these characters move.  The rest of it is simply messy filmmaking.  The film also ends abruptly, engendering shrugs of disinterest rather than reinforcing the sense of wonder the filmmakers likely set out to capture.  Ultimately, the audience is left with the question, “Why?” and the offhanded reply, “Eh, why not?”

MVT:  The ambition of the filmmakers.  

Make or Break:  The Nazi zombie scene comes out of the blue and threatens to derail the whole affair with its conspicuousness.

Score:  6.25/10          

Karate Wars (1978)

Tatsuya (Hisao Maki) used to be the top Karate-ist in Japan, but a stint in prison for murder sent him into exile.  When former sensei Tetsugen is offered the opportunity to prove the worth of Japanese Karate in Hong Kong and Thailand, his former student takes up the mission.

Hideo Nanbu’s Karate Wars (aka Karate Daisenso aka Karate Great War) features Maki as the most stoic martial artist in the history of cinema.  Nothing surprises the man, and he is forthright in his undertaking.  One has to believe that this approach comes, at least in part, from Maki the person.  Before his death in 2012, Maki was known for three things, his manga work (he was the creator of WARU and co-writer of the Futari no Joe anime, amongst other titles), his devotion to Karate (he opened his own dojo), and the rumors that he was a yakuza.  Two of these things can be definitively proven, but the third seems to influence this film most of all.  Tatsuya betrays no emotion.  He is there not just to beat the champions in the other countries but to kill them.  He swaggers with every step he takes, and the vast majority of his reactions to danger is an icy sneer.  This plays into the film’s concept of honor (something which, some would say, yakuza are only tangentially concerned with, but which is intrinsic to Japanese culture).  Tatsuya went into hiding because he had lost face in the eyes of the Karate world.  He was no longer worthy of being public about his artform.  It doesn’t matter that the murder he committed was not only accidental (and against a luchador, no less) but also was done out of love for his sensei’s daughter Reiko (Yoko Natsuki) and his urge to protect her (that Tatsuya wants to kill his adversaries in foreign lands is antithetical to the whole reason he left the martial arts world in the first place, but never mind).  Tetsugen falls for the line of the Karate Association, as headed by bent politician Soma (Nobuo Kaneko), that they want to claim honor for Karate outside of Japan, but he’s not so gormless as to not be suspicious.  

In Hong Kong and Thailand, the opponents that Tetsuya faces do so out of honor, though they are not necessarily honorable people.  Chinese Kung Fu master White Dragon (Yao Lin Chen) knows that Tatsuya must be defeated in order to save face and his own Kung Fu school.  Yet, he doesn’t want to confront the Karate man himself.  He sends lackies like his wife Chin (who does a great disco/Kung Fu floor show in a Japanese club) and an assortment of Kung Fu goons to surprise attack Tatsuya at every turn.  He meets Tatsuya in bars and chats with him as if he were sympathetic.  It’s only when White Dragon’s legacy is directly threatened that he finally challenges Tatsuya to mortal combat.  In Thailand, Tatsuya is jumped again at several points, but their current Thai Boxing champion doesn’t command people to do so.  They attack because Tatsuya is a direct threat to the honor of Thai Boxing.  The former Thai champ, King Cobra (Darm Dasakorn), has fallen on hard times.  Like Tatsuya, he has recently been released from prison for an accidental murder.  Unlike Tatsuya, King Cobra has become a layabout and a drunk.  He sponges off his girlfriend and refuses to get a job.  Only when he sees that a Karate master defeated the Thai Boxing champ does King Cobra decide to contest Tatsuya and regain honor for his country.  It’s this same sense of honor and the ineffable drive that it sparks inside the martial arts masters that proves their undoing.  They cannot and will not back down.  Ever.  The pleas of their loved ones mean nothing in the face of possible dishonor.  Honor requires not only victory but also the death of an opponent.  On the one hand, the sense of honor in Karate Wars is virtuous, but, on the other hand, it’s also ultimately destructive.

Likewise, the film is nationalistic.  The plot is sparked by the Japanese characters’ sense of superiority as represented by Karate.  They want to show the world that Karate is the best and expand its influence outside of Japan.  Soma even states that Karate’s triumphs will appeal to the Japanese people’s sense of nationalism.  When Tatsuya leaves Japan, he becomes a stranger in a strange land, so to speak, though he behaves exactly the same as he did in his home country (i.e. like he owns the place).  All of the non-Japanese characters are prejudiced against the Japanese in general (the use of the pejorative “Jap” is ubiquitous in their dialogue) and Tatsuya in particular.  Though he is befriended by a Thai man who becomes his guide and translator, this man also becomes an outcast due to their relationship.  When he lived in Japan, he was similarly ostracized for his ethnicity, something about which Tatsuya does not give one shit, and he would likely eschew this guy if he didn’t need him.  Tatsuya is even kicked out of his hotel for no reason other than his presence in Thailand and what that means as a menace to the Thai identity.  What’s interesting in the film is that Tatsuya is similarly nationalistic, and this, in combination with his slavish devotion to honor, is his fatal flaw.  The two characters who care the least about any nationalistic ideals are Tetsugen and his daughter Reiko.  Instead, they are motivated by love; Tetsugen’s love of Karate and Reiko’s (inexplicable) love of Tatsuya.  Because their love is unselfish it surpasses the self-absorbed nationalism that motivates all of the other characters.

Nanbu’s film is simple in its story and repetitive in its structure.  The characters outside of the three main fighters are nigh-inconsequential except for illustrating the self-destructiveness of these men.  The plan of Soma’s cabal never develops beyond being a motive to get Tatsuya back into Karate-ing.  Where Karate Wars excels is in the subtext of its story and in the style Nanbu brings to the table.  At various moments, the picture fades to black and white or becomes solarized.  The sound drops out except for the natural noise of the environment.  Nanbu isolates the minds of the fighters in these ways, giving the audience an idea of the focus and viewpoint of these martial devotees.  The director also makes extensive use of slow motion, long takes, and wide shots in the fight scenes.  The fight choreography appears to be, by and large, genuine, not stylized to a superhuman degree but idealized for what a human is capable of through the martial arts.  So, while the story is mechanical, the film satisfies as a showcase for Karate and a study of the pros and cons of honor.

MVT:  Maki, Dasakorn, and Chen all impress with their skills.

Make or Break:  The finale is a great summation of the film’s thematic elements and an enjoyable rumble.

Score:  6.75/10