House of Traps (1982)

As film fans, we all discovered our favorite directors as we’ve navigated through a sea of movies and each one’s specific filmography.  It usually starts with one amazing film and afterwards we must seek out the rest of this person’s output.  This is followed by a domino-effect of knocking off one great film after another until you reach the more obscure and less than perfect films released.  Selfishly, we want to turn our friends and family onto these filmmakers so that we have someone to discuss their work with, but also to take some credit for turning them onto great cinema.  Additionally, we want them to have the same thrilling experience we had when we saw these films for the first time and have them thank us for the recommendation.  That’s why when attempting to convert our friends to liking what we like, we always give them the best of the best.  It’s too risky to give them one of our favorite filmmaker’s lesser efforts if we intend on them continuing on with the rest of their works.  For instance, if you were trying to convince someone that they should check out the work of Brian De Palma you probably wouldn’t have them start with Raising Cain.  Not a bad film, but it likely won’t knock their socks off.  The masterworks should take priority over all others.  The flawed films should be explored once they’re hooked.  In the case of master martial arts filmmaker, Chang Cheh, his 1982 film, House of Traps, falls into the latter camp.  By no means a bad film, but rather one that should be seen once all of the classics have been viewed first.

Potential viewers of House of Traps should know one thing going in; the plot to this film is convoluted as hell!  We are quickly given the back story to a family feud that has raged on for generations.  The information dump is so quick that we as viewers are a bit confused if the current state of the feud is over greed and the desire for power or simply revenge.  A prince is planning a revolt against his uncle, the emperor, and anyone who wants to join the revolution must break into the emperor’s palace and steal one of the empire’s priceless valuables as a way of showing devotion to the cause.  Anyone who joins the rebellion signs a contract which is kept, along with the valuables, in the titular House of Traps.  This is when things begin to get complicated.  Numerous characters come in and out of the story, there are several double-crosses, and we’re not sure if we’re supposed to side with the prince who’s leading the rebellion or the emperor who has dispersed spies to infiltrate the enemy and learn the mystery of the House of Traps.  Because the plot is so confusing and Cheh is giving us perspectives from both sides of the feud, we’re given a lot of exposition and scenes of dialogue that I can only assume is an attempt to keep the viewer up to speed on everything that’s going on.  It makes for a frustrating watch, especially if you’re just looking for a kung-fu film that’s light on plot and heavy on fight sequences.  It’s best to just let the movie wash over you and not get too caught up with the overly-complicated plot.

There’s still plenty to like with this Shaw Brothers’ production, despite the confusing storyline.  House of Traps has the usual production value that makes these films so charming and what one comes to expect from the Shaw Brothers if you’re already a fan, especially of their kung-fu films.  You get the colorful costumes, stagey set design, awesomely fake facial hair, bright-red blood, excellent fight choreography, supernatural abilities, cool weapons, and cool characters with cool names like the Black Fox.  Most importantly, the movie has the House of Traps and it sure delivers on its promise.  The multistory house has three levels of potential death within it for all those who attempt to take back the emperor’s valuables and the rebellion’s list of supporters.  The ground level has guards hidden behind a sliding wall (How do they occupy their time waiting behind that wall the whole time?) and spikes that rise from the floor.  The second level has trapdoors and the third and final level has a spiked cage and one more surprise that I won’t disclose, as it’s not revealed until the finale of the film.  It’s a very cool set that’s utilized three or four times throughout the runtime and each time it is we learn more about the secrets that the House of Traps has in store.

House of Traps finishes on a high note with amazing fight sequences and plenty of bloodletting.   The very end is comedically ironic, immediately following all of the carnage that has just taken place.  It left a smile on my face and made it easier to forgive the convoluted plot.  It should be noted that this film features the Venom Mob in one of the group’s last films together.  If I were trying to turn a friend onto Chang Cheh’s films, or just classic kung-fu films, this isn’t where I would have them start.  The Five Deadly Venoms or The One-Armed Swordsman would definitely be a better option to begin your education on Chang Cheh, the filmmaker.  For those of us who’ve seen our share of martial-arts films, this is solid and definitely worth a watch if you’re a fan of the Shaw Brothers’ aesthetic.

MVT: The actual house of traps, of course!

Make or Break Scene: The first introduction to the house of traps.

Score: 7/10

Diary of a Lady Killer (1969)

**SPOILERS**

I tried to keep a diary for a while, way back when (men call them “journals,” damn it!).  It was, essentially, a five-subject notebook, not the sort of leather-bound, classy tomes you see in films like Ko Nakahira’s Diary of a Lady Killer (aka Lie Ren aka The Seductive Accounts of a Hunter aka My Amorousness Ruins My Life).  The thoughts I had at that time were what you would expect from a guy in his early twenties.  That is, a couple of interesting insights/ideas and then a whole lot of grousing, garbage, and emotionalizing.  Re-reading it, even then, it was painful, and I completely don’t regret shredding the whole damned thing.  Sometimes, one’s musings are better left in one’s head, to come and go like a prostitute’s trick (a crass analogy, yes, but apropos, nonetheless).  Sometimes, what you have on your mind is mundane and only interesting to you in the moment because you’re exorcising some tiresome demon.  Sometimes, keeping a diary will only help get you convicted of a crime, as is the case in this film. 

Lin Qiuhua, at the end of her rope (insert rimshot here), flings herself from her upper floor apartment to a spectacular dummy death on the pavement below.  Her sister, Lin Hongzhu (Ha Yee-Chau), suspects foul play, since Qiuhua was six months pregnant at the time of her death, and she had only slept with one stranger six months back.  Enter said stranger, Zhou Guoxiong (Han Chin), a womanizer engaged to Su Xiulan (Fang Ying), a society deb recently returned from Japan.  And then there’s Li Donghai (Wu Fung), an associate of Zhou’s who pines for Su just to complicate matters as Zhou’s former flings start turning up dead.

Diary of a Lady Killer is, first and foremost, Shaw Bros’ stab at a Hitchcockian thriller, and it has all the basic ingredients for this and then some.  There is a slow build of components (perhaps a bit too slow) that are revealed to drop another puzzle piece into place (in a puzzle that is fully assembled to start off).  There is a level of misogyny at play, and Nakahira delivers on some skin as Hitchcock wouldn’t be able (but really, really always wanted) to do until Frenzy in 1972.  There are shots laying out the machinations going on against Zhou, attempting to ratchet up tension.  Most importantly, there is the Wrong Man trope in which Hitchcock specialized.  Zhou is being set up for a fall, and it’s intriguing to watch the aligning of these elements against him (most clever is a bit where a straw broom drops onto his face, scratching his cheek like a woman’s fingernails would).  This being said, Zhou is also a patsy in the most reactive way possible.  These things happen to him, he knows they’re happening, but he does nothing to stop/prevent them, and he’s taken out of the narrative for much of the back third so Su can try to exonerate him.  This wouldn’t be so bad, in and of itself, if any attention had been paid to Su up to this point.  Instead, the film focuses primarily on Zhou and his horndogging escapades, none of which cast him in even a slightly sympathetic light.  Consequently, one couldn’t care less whether he’s railroaded by a false accusation and sent to prison.  I suppose in some way this is meant to be his penance for the way he treats women, but it’s difficult to give a shit whether or not this character is redeemed.  

Yes, as we all know, men are pigs, and this film does its level best to underline this while simultaneously playing to the men in the audience and tickle their libidos.  The opening credits are a series of women in colorfully stylish boudoir settings and various states of undress.  When these women aren’t posing seductively for the camera, the camera is focusing on different naked (sometimes even tastefully photographed) body parts of theirs (alongside frisky kittens; surely, not a metaphor for anything).  When Zhou can’t get Su to give it up for him (she’s waiting for marriage), he instantly dumps her, heads off to a bowling alley, and picks up the first single woman he sees there (totally not skanky).  These flings are manipulations for Zhou.  He claims to have physical needs that MUST be satiated.  Fair play, but he also treats these women like things because things are all they are to him (any port in a perpetually raging storm, so to speak).  Thus, he lies to all of them, giving each a different name or occupation.  When they say they would like to see him again, he agrees and then blows them off (at least once actually showing up to see if the woman is gullible enough to wait for him).  Zhou’s life, what we’re shown of it, is little more than a quest for power fueled by lust.  This could be interesting if any of this had consequences outside of how it fucks over Zhou’s life, but the women in these scenes are merely warm (soon to be cold) bodies, and the scenes don’t build as anything other than a daisy chain of conquests repeated over and over for the express purpose of trying to be a little sleazy.  The film simply spends far too much time detailing these filler encounters (skirting close to being porn without the porn).  While they are important to the main point of the movie (narratively and exploitatively), they swiftly become repetitive, and the viewer is left only with the desire for the plot to move the hell along, already. 

Zhou and Li, the two main males in the film are sociopaths.  They ritually display callous indifference for others throughout the film.  But they have an excuse, and her name is Su.  In Zhou’s diary, aside from depicting the various chicks he’s laid, he includes a statement intended specifically for his fiancée.  Basically, he says that, gosh, he really does love Su and wants to spend his life with her, but her reticence to bang him is what forced him to find other outlets for his concupiscence.  Sure, love is all about spirituality between two people, but it’s also about physical enjoyment, and clearly, the latter trumps the former.  It’s such a dickheaded rationalization for dickheaded behavior, but, naturally, Su buys it lock, stock, and barrel, because the film doesn’t actually give a shit about her.  Likewise, Li looms around Su constantly, desperate to pick up Zhou’s scraps and eager to profess his more earnest love for her.  It’s no surprise, then, when he just can’t help trying to take advantage of a drunken Su after Zhou has been taken out of the way.  Li and Zhou are two sides of the same shitty coin, the only difference between them being that Zhou will fuck anything that moves while waiting for Su to come around, while Li will kill (it’s insanely obvious who the bad guys in the film are from the outset) anything that Zhou fucks while waiting for Su to come around.  And that’s what Diary of a Lady Killer is: killing time waiting for some fucking satisfaction.

MVT:  The film’s premise is solid.  It’s just poorly handled.

Make or Break:  By Zhou’s second pickup, it becomes clear that the film is more interested in these fantasies than it is in what story it has.

Score:  3/10        

Men From The Gutter (1983)

Pre-digital Hong Kong genre cinema holds a great fascination for me, not so much for the technical achievements, the jaw-dropping stuntwork, or the bonkers ideas they throw around, but for the ambience of their visuals.  They can look beautifully garish as in many of the set bound Shaw Bros martial arts films or dirt-lickingly grotty as in some of the sleazier Category III films.  They even manage to mix the two from time to time.  The way Hong Kong is often portrayed is as alternately glamorous as it is dangerous.  Decked out nightclubs with gorgeous women and men in white suits are a staple.  Conversely, blown out ratholes where people in jeans and cheap tee shirts are forced to live provide the flip side.  

It’s not so much that this dichotomy exists, it’s that these films give the impression that these two strata of society exist essentially on top of one another.  There is the distinct sense that if a character opened the wrong door in a discotheque, they’d be met with a sweaty, stabby, rapey nightmare to set the old spine a-tingling.  It’s as if everyone is trapped within the city, like a real-life Escape from New York, and some denizens have merely managed to crawl to the top and accumulate wealth which only further buffers them from the dregs beneath them (or so they hope).  

Now, I’m no expert on Hong Kong films, and I’ll admit I haven’t seen nearly as many as others have, but the one thing which partly defines a lot of them from my perspective (particularly in the Crime arena) is this idea of the callous villainy of the wealthy versus the desperate ambition of the poor.  This is reinforced for me through the texture of the visuals.  The more realistic Hong Kong films have a certain grainy, desaturated look, and the worlds created are often filled with box-strewn warehouses, cluttered streets, and clogged up piers.  I can’t say how close to reality any of this is (and that’s really not the point anyway), but from films like Lam Nai-Choi’s Men from the Gutter (aka An Qu), I would suggest that my theories only gather more support. 

In his lousy tenement apartment, Wang (Parkman Wong Pak-Man) climbs out of bed in the middle of the night, crushes the cockroaches scuttling on his lunch, and ventures out to meet his ex-con pals Long (Lung Tin-Sang) and Brainless (Billy Lau Nam-Kwong) to discuss their big plan to get rich.  But the police are onto Wang, and an officer is killed while trying to apprehend him, sending Sgt. Zhao (Venom Clan alumnus Lo Meng) into a frenzy.  Meanwhile, fellow policeman Qiu (Michael Miu Kiu-Wai) is investigating the murder of Zeng Cai (Lee Hoi-Sang), bodyguard of criminal kingpin Xu Wen (Wong Yung), by Zi Jian (Jason Pai Piao) and their ties to each other.  Complicated stuff.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Men from the Gutter is that it is, on its surface, two separate crime stories the only linkage between which is the police officers.  Nonetheless, I would offer up that Lam and company are treating the Crime genre in a metaphorical way (while still delivering a cracking good Action film) and attempting to look at more than one side of the lower echelons of society in relation to crime.  Zi Jian’s motivations are revenge and honor.  He has no real avaricious goals in mind.  Wang’s motivation is one hundred percent monetary.  He gets very upset every time he thinks about all that  he doesn’t have.  He believes that money will solve all his problems.  As the title suggests, then, Zi Jian is coming out of the gutter to get at Xu Wen, to drag him back down into the gutter.  Wang is in the gutter struggling to get out by any means necessary.  Zhao and Qiu are the forces of order, standing in the gutter up to their waists, trying to maintain control while not going under.  In the gutter, a person has to do what’s necessary, but there is always the element of choice, and the end goal (personified by a freighter and its captain) is not guaranteed.  From this viewpoint, the film begins to take focus as more than the sum of its parts, even though it may not appear obvious at first glance.

The film is also loaded with images of characters watching and being watched, predominantly in the narrative of Zi Jian and Xu Wen.  Photos are taken of Xu Wen at a restaurant with Zi Jian in the background.  After being questioned by Qiu, Xu Wen looks at himself in a mirror while crime scene photographers snap pictures.  Zi Jian is shown making love to a prostitute in the reflection from his eyeglass lenses.  Later, he takes a slingshot and a metal ball and shoots the image of himself in his hotel mirror.  He checks his teeth in reflections in a store front window as well as in a fitness club mirror.  Point of view shots play into this as well.  At the gym, Zi Jian sneaks up on an unsuspecting guy (in POV) and knocks him out for his clothes.  Later, there is a POV shot following Zi Jian (and in which he again checks himself out in a mirror).  If these are just stylistic affectations or character quirks, they are lingered on longer and are more numerous than one might expect.  I tend to think that the reflections are how the characters remove themselves from their world.  By engaging with a mirror, staring into oneself, they are disengaging from reality and fortifying themselves for what lies ahead.  Similarly, POV shots like those herein tend to disengage the viewer from the film’s reality (we don’t share what’s in the minds of the characters through whose eyes we see), targeting where they’re headed rather than what surrounds them in the moment.  The characters are watchers and watched, within and without themselves, and a similar affinity is reached with the film’s viewer through these visual choices of the filmmakers.   

Men from the Gutter is surprisingly non-exploitative, as well.  Aside from one shot and a scene with some bare breasts, there’s no sex (consensual or non-consensual).  There is a decent amount of violence and blood, but not nearly to the levels of gore showcased in some of the Shaw Bros both at this point in time and in the past.  Outside of the film’s outstandingly heightened climactic sequence, the film is rooted firmly in reality.  That said, the final set piece does contain acrobatics and nigh-superheroic levels of stamina.  It also has a huge (and I mean that both literally and figuratively) concluding moment that will truly make your jaw drop.  But the film never goes off the rails, and it does a very admirable job of balancing its elements.  If you’re an Action film fan, and you haven’t seen this film, you need to (it’s available with subtitles on Youtube).

MVT:  I love the character of Zi Jian, especially as brought to life by Jason Pai Piao.  He’s odd and colorful, clearly dangerous, but also with a noble air about him.

Make or Break:  The heist scene is marvelously orchestrated.  It’s complex, gritty, and clearly blocked and edited.  I think that, in some ways at least, it encompasses all of the emotional heart of the film as well as the thematic points.

Score:  7/10