Burning Paradise (1994)

As God is my witness, it had nothing to do with Ed Kowalczyk.  The erstwhile singer for Live used to have a largely shaved head with a long, braided ponytail.  This was something I wanted to do with my hair.  This was also back when I was initially going bald and fought tooth and nail against this by growing what hair I had long (I’m slightly ashamed to say that, yes, Virginia, there was a skullet).  I wanted to just have a small patch of hair growing from the back of my head and a wicked long tail forming from it.  The difference between Mr. Kowalczyk and myself (I assume) is that I was inspired by a lifelong love of martial arts films.  It was to the point that I actually wanted to dye this thing white like the great, old, cinematic Kung Fu masters of old (the better to toss over my shoulder and cackle malevolently).  Thing is, not only was I going bald (something I swiftly learned to accept and let go of fairly gracefully), but what hair I had was insanely curly, so, no matter what length I grew my tresses out to, they wound up being about down to my shoulder once the follicles dried after a shower.  This was in no way like my idiotic attempt to mimic Kurt Harland of Information Society’s locks (a tale I told in a previous review; track it down, if you dare).  This was more like…I hesitate to use the word “serendipity.”  More like dumb luck or shitty coincidence.  Either way, every single time I watch a film like Ringo Lam’s Burning Paradise (aka Huo Shao Hong Lian Si aka Destruction of the Red Lotus Temple aka Rape of the Red Temple), I’m reminded of this ignoble chapter of my life.  Thank Christ, I went completely bald before I was able to get this thing off the ground (but, sadly, before bald was considered sexy).

Burning Paradise is yet another in the long list of films about the legendary Wuxia hero Fong Sai Yuk (here played by Willie Chi).  He and his Shaolin brothers oppose the vicious Manchus, and, while escaping from their clutches, he and his elder Chi-Nun (Kuei Li) meet the lovely Tou-Tou (Carman Lee).  Needless to say, the Manchus clutches are, in fact, inescapable, and our protagonists find themselves prisoners of the reptilian Lord Kung (Kam-Kong Wong), warden of the Red Lotus Temple.  Much martial arts mayhem ensues.

I am in no way an expert on the character of Fong Sai Yuk, and, frankly, I simply don’t have the time to correct this.  I do know that he is an extremely popular character (I’m still confused whether or not he was an actual person, but that’s neither here nor there when discussing films like this one).  The picture’s scenario is one we’ve seen many times before.  Fong is young, highly skilled, and a staunch opponent of a totalitarian government.  This is nothing new in the Wuxia genre.  Truly, a great many movies from a great many countries center on this type of struggle.  The two cinematic genres that best capture this conflict, to my mind, are martial arts films and science fiction films.  This is because it is more palatable to a mass audience to augment the totalitarianism on display to encompass wild flights of fantasy.  It entertains while making a point, one that needs no true reinforcement since most people empathize, on some level, with the notion that their own government is not on their side.  Or worse, they are apathetic to the common folks’ plight (as people love to wryly exclaim, it can never happen here, right?).  What Lam and company do with this movie, and this is something that one could argue that the vast majority of martial arts films do, is play with elements of the western.  It is set in the desert.  The house at the beginning of the film is straight out of the American Southwest (I kept thinking of Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch whenever it was on screen).  The characters are more hands-on versions of gunfighters, their skills being continually challenged until a final duel settles all scores.  The heroes come into a situation where they are required to free a “town” (okay, here a prison full of Shaolin devotees) from a gang of “outlaws” (here an entire government; the major difference between the two genres being this dichotomy).  The heroes are attempting to civilize a savage land (here through their Shaolin beliefs and practices).  The dynamics are essentially the same despite the divergences in the details.  I would argue that Lam understood this connection, because he not only embraces it but also borrows (as just about every filmmaker in existence has, consciously or unconsciously; just ask Orson Welles) from the visual vocabulary of John Ford.  Burning Paradise is littered with frames within frames, and there is even a direct reference to Ford’s famous doorway shot from The Searchers.  This, layered on top of some classic Hong Kong action stylings helps push this film into the top tier of the genre, in my opinion.

The film also centers heavily on the idea of passions.  Fong is passionate about his fight against the Manchus.  He is passionate about how he finds his Shaolin brother Hong (Yamson Domingo) in the temple prison.  He is passionate about Tou-Tou, and not just physically.  Similarly, characters like Boroke (Chun Lam), Kung’s right hand, have passions outside the martial world.  She craves the touch of a man, allowing her feelings to sway her professional decisions.  Tou-Tou is a former brothel worker, a place where passion is rented, yet she cares enough about Fong to sacrifice her freedom for him.  The setting for the film is a metaphor for Hell, its inhabitants working constantly at blazing forges, shaping weapons for their enemies to use against the prisoners’ friends and families.  Perhaps the most significant symbol of passion is the villain Kung.  In public, he is aloof, can’t be bothered with these gnats that pester him so.  In private is another matter.  When he goes to Tou-Tou for the first time, he wants her to resist, to fight back, to give him some sense that he’s still alive.  His bigger passion, however, is art.  He paints throughout the film, dark, ominous images, reflective of his soul.  He even incorporates art into his Kung Fu style, using paper like flying daggers and paint droplets like bullets.  

Burning Paradise is as kinetic, inventive, and awe-inspiring as any Hong Kong action film I can think of (perhaps even moreso than many).  Lam marries the darker elements (and there are some pretty dark elements in this thing) with fast-moving action with bouts of gore with some great humor beats (that are refreshingly un-cringeworthy and mesh nicely into the rhythm).  It does all of this while giving its characters some depth and compelling us to want to follow the villains as much as the heroes.

MVT:  Lam’s near-flawless union of the variegated components.

Make or Break:  The bedroom scene between Kung and Tou-Tou is simultaneously scary, insightful, and melancholy.

Score:  8/10

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       

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