REVIEWS: Kung fu fighting [part 2]

The last three of the recent batch of Soulblade / 55th Chamber DVD releases includes something of an anomaly - among all the high kicking martial arts and swordsplay movies is Mr. X [sorry, can't tell when this one was made], a low-rent entry in the heroic bloodshed genre. Directed by the marvellously named Ed Woo [named to align himself with the king of heroic bloodshed, John Woo, but accidentally revealing his real inspiration, Ed Wood], Mr. X is almost incomprehensible, a messy melange of guns and mayhem devoid of story or characterisation.

The fact that the nefarious Godfrey Ho - scourge of Hong Kong cinema - gets a credit at the end gives you some idea of what to expect here [there's a chance that Ed Woo is actually Ho]. And sure enough, it has all the qualities of being one of Ho's cut-and-shunt jobs, with some footage clearly shot fairly recently [it's on video!] intercut with the faded film stock of some much older film. The newer material features real life martial arts champion Joe Lewis giving a performance that could charitably be described only as bloody awful...

The body count is extraordinarily high to the point where it almost becomes laughable [the opening sequence alone features the massacre of hundreds of guests at a lavish wedding] and all of the heroic bloodshed boxes are ticked - long coats, mirrorshades, slow motion shootouts. But it's all for naught - the print is in terrible shape, the dubbing is worse than ever, the story is non-existent and, curiously, when people get shot, the muzzle-flash from the guns is superimposed on their bodies...

Godfrey Ho turns up again as the director of the execrable Dragon Lee's Ways of Kung Fu, a retitling of Bruce Lee's Ways of Kung Fu [1982], which title it still bears on the print itself. It really is hard to get across just how awful a Godrey Ho film is you haven't already seen one - they exist in a very special place well below anything else you may have seen that you thought of as unwatchable. They are, truly, some of the worst films ever made and Ways of Kung Fu is no exception. I will, eventually, if my sanity holds, do a full review of this over on the main EOFFTV site as it contains a fair bit of fantasy, but for now approach this release with extreme caution - not only is the film unbearably terrible in every respect but Soulblade's presentation of it makes it even more of an ordeal. Clearly shot in some form of widescreen, the horribly cropped print isn't even panned and scanned properly - the opening sequence, up to the titles, are squeezed so everybody looks eerily long and thin and the rest just presents the centre of the image, regardless of whether or not the action is actually taking place at the now invisible edges of the screen.

God help me, I think I can feel a Godfrey Ho feature coming on...

Finally, to round off this particular batch of Soulblade releases, we've got the wonderfully titled The Idiot Swordsman [1979], a swordplay epic starring Lo Lieh which also goes under the title Drunken Swordsman, a daft Taiwanese production which casts Shih Feng as the moronic sword-wielder in what may be a comedy - it really isn't easy to tell. The best part of this one is the hilarious dub track, which features some fantastically awful regional British accents [one guy refers to everyone as "mate"] and at least one who sounds vaguely like a jive-talking pimp from a 70s blaxploitation movie! One gets the impression that the dubbing cast did this one at the end of a very long week and just decided to have a bit of fun with it.

The action is pretty poor, mostly played for laughs, and made to look all the worse by the poor full screen transfer. That said, it did prove to be the most mindlessly entertaining of the three films under review here, though I suspect that a few friends with a similar taste for trash to share it with and copious amounts of alcohol would make it ever better.

None of these Soulblade releases is going to win any awards for quality - of either the films themselves or their presentation - but at the bargain price of just £5.99 [wait a few months and they'll end up in those £1 shops that are proliferating across the UK's high streets] they're silly enough to tempt the die hard fan of martial arts mayhem. Anyone else would probably give up even before the titles have started...