Killer Darts
(Zhui hun biao, 1968)
Ho Meng Hua
Hong Kong
83 min, color, Mandarin (English subtitles)
Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev
After recently being thoroughly impressed with Ho Meng Hua's The Lady Hermit, I decided to hunt down some more of his women-with-swords films, and this is one that has the bonus of starring the delicious Chen Ping and the handsome Yueh Hua. This duo has some undeniable chemistry although it is of the more innocent type and never really gets close to what Ti Lung and Ching Li could portray together. Still, there's stuff going on here, and it is pretty good. Throw in some mistaken identities, some manipulation, and lots of martial action, and you almost have a winner. You certainly have a winner if the director does his job competently.
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| Random violence against unionized extras | Chang Pei-shan in action |
Well, Ho Meng Hua does not disappoint. This early (1968) film has some pretty impressive swordplay considering that the starlet Chin Ping can only probably do ballet, if even that. She is a bit too delicate for wielding these long swords, and she is much more convincing throwing the killer darts instead. I have always found Cheng Pei-pei or Shih Szu to be persuasive with cutlery and other assorted killing implements. Still, we have some very nicely done fights, and as usual I very much enjoy the director's approach to shooting these sequences. There are very few cuts (although the occasional zoom is distracting), the camera preferring to track the progress of a battle and follow the heroine along as she wades through dozens of nameless bandits.
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| When you grow up, SEEK BLOODY REVENGE | Would be funny were it not after a massacre |
I also suspect that Chin Ping is invariably cast in a role that requires her to display some jealousy because of her inimitable pout. Now, pouting is an art form in Hong Kong films, and it has reached such potency that they have recently banned overt displays of pouting on account of male audiences having heart attacks. This here is an early instance that is safe enough for everyone except people with pacemakers. When she does not slash through flesh and bone, Chin Ping spends her time either gazing intently at Yueh Hua or else pouting because of his idiotic, but very gentlemanly, behavior. I am not complaining, mind you: there are worse ways to spend one's time.
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| Chin Ping offers Yueh Hua a (not French) purse | Chin Ping in cool battle stance |
Ho Meng Hua is not exactly a fan of the I Kuang-style stories that one cannot understand without the twelve volume concordance that comes with the film. (Every time I watch one of these epics, I just want to blurt out, "Is this going to be on the final?") Here, we have a relatively simple revenge plot that is somewhat sidetracked by a love story but that does eventually come to fruition. Villains are irredeemably evil so as not to complicate matters. One, the Arch Villain (Ma Ying), has been defeated several times but apparently re-education does not work well in China for he's lapsed into recidivism almost immediately. Another, Hu (Chang Pei-shan) attempts to rape a stranger, then murders both her and her husband. This, incidentally, triggers the whole revenge thing for Chin Ping's character Yu Sien.
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| Chin Ping is upstaged by rival femme | Hot sexual action |
Since these guys are really bad (they also run an extortion Buddhist cult), there are no problems dispatching them or their sympathizers, which is what Yu Long (Yueh Hua), Yu Sien, and Liu Wen Lung (Fang Mien) proceed to do with disturbing alacrity. Unfortunately, Heung Kam (Shen Yi) is lovesick as a puppy with Yu Long and intrudes into the happy revenge quest, throwing everything in limbo until Yu Long and Yu Sien can sort their non-sibling feelings. It would have been easy for Yu Long to tell the rather pushy Heung Kam to get lost were it not for the fact that his family resides on her father's property. So he's forced to romp around (clothed) with her (sometimes not fully clothed), and even he has nothing but chivalrous intentions (you have to see him bolt once when she got naked), his frequent dalliance with her is enough to send Yu Sien into one protracted pout.
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| Gratuitous pout a-la Chin Ping | These dolls prove I love you |
As Yu Sien is out pouting in the forest and felling trees like a mad lumberjack, the evil Hu spots her and plants misinformation whose purpose is to deflect her revenge (he's the one who killed her parents) onto her foster dad (who used to be Hu's sifu). Then there's a lot of fighting and some running through passageways of a castle full of traps. (I am always amazed how the heroes know exactly where they can run for 20 feet and where they can freeze before carefully triggering some deadly contraption that can show us just how dangerous the maze is. It is also a mystery why all the bad guys who live there always manage to get themselves trapped by these things.)
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| Yueh Hua is very cool | Why can't I just kill my foster dad? |
All of this running around eventually leads to convergence of the two revenge paths (Master Liu himself is trying to track down the Arch Villain and avenge the murder of his own wife). Hu has sought out like-minded company and has ended, conveniently, in the service of the Arch Villain. This makes things very easy: Yu Sien and Master Liu only have to unite forces to satisfy their bloody revenge fantasies simultaneously in an inevitable orgy of violence. Things do not quite work out that way, however, because of this misinformation and the jealousy thing. While Yu Long tries to parry the ever more adventurous and bold advances of the amorous Heung Kam, Yu Sien trains hard to off her foster dad (after saving him once, which counts as repayment for a decade of care).
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| How to irritate people | Gratuitous shot of Chin Ping |
It's always a problem in these films where the entire plot will unravel if only characters would speak to each other like normal people would. In this case, this would have exonerated Mr Liu very quickly, and before Yu Sien is tricked again by the treacherous Hu into revealing the one move that can counter Mr Liu's sword technique. When Yu Long rescues Yu Sien and they finally reconcile all the mysteries, it seems that time has run out: Mr Liu is about to fight the Arch Villain whose henchman Hu is in possession of the secret stance that would ensure his employer's victory.
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| Not to be confused with Star Wars | Our costumes do not look ridiculous |
The final ten minutes of the film are tense because Yu Sien and Yu Long must get to the place of the duel (a spectacular mountainside) in time to warn Mr Liu. Naturally, tons of obstacles are thrown in their way. There's a bizarre cymbal-throwing monk (killed), a somewhat more interesting small-disc-throwing monk (killed), several dozen of gratuitously slaughtered extras, and so forth. Will at least one of the two make it? Will they be late to help Mr Liu? It's all supposed to be really intense, but here the pacing betrays the director because the two series of events do not appear to be taking time contemporaneously, and the battle sequences with Yu Sien are too long to maintain the suspense about the other duel.
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| Chin Ping in action | Obligatory love non-confession |
Nevertheless, the sequences are enjoyable enough, even if the stop-motion special effects are a bit too obvious (always difficult to make them work in non-controlled environments, like shots on location). Interestingly enough, the pushy Heung Kam who did so much to disrupt everything earlier has by now retreated into the shadows voluntarily, abandoning her would be groom to her rival. She actually manages to look distressed enough to invoke some pity. However, in the end her role is essentially analogous to that of Lo Lieh in The Lady Hermit: to spark enough jealousy to cause one of the other characters to do something really stupid that would require enormous efforts of the others to deal with. Maybe it's trite, but hey, it worked here.
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| Who says duels are not romantic? | Money does not grow on trees but rocks |
Yet again Celestial offers a very nice video transfer at 2.35:1 that is anamorphically enhanced. The colors are vibrant, and the shadows are deep. This means excellent location shots and night scenes. Thankfully, they have not remixed the sound, so we get the mono Mandarin soundtrack. The English subtitles have no problems but there are several places with seconds of dialogue that are not translated (no loss in continuity though). The extras are limited to trailers, talent files, and a photo gallery. A very nice underrated early swordplay film with an excellent female lead, this one should be seen, and this DVD is the way to do it.
December 15, 2005