Killer of Snake, Fox of Shaolin (1978)

Right from the get-go, the title of this film tells us that nature will play a role in the action, and this notion is cemented when the opening credits run over slightly vertiginous shots of cliffs, rivers, and forests, backed by weird, orchestral Chinese singing. We start with a scene of two guys walking along a forest path, one about ten feet ahead of the other. The one in front looks like a forty-year-old guy poorly disguised as an old guy: he has an absurd blonde wig secured with a headband that makes him look like Richard Simmons, a typical kung-fu goatee, and the tuftiest eyebrows ever in the history of film. The guy behind him is a real old guy with white hair, super-long old-guy beard, and normal eyebrows. Real Old Guy keeps calling out to Fake Old Guy, "Master Wong, Master Wong!" Fake Old Guy / Master Wong is like, "What is it now?" and Real Old Guy says some stuff about how Wong's daughter is growing up nicely, blossoming like a flower, etc. and so why not have her marry Real Old Guy's son. Wong is contemptuous and says his daughter would never be interested in a chump like Real Old Guy's son. Real Old Guy stops in his tracks and says that Wong has insulted his family, and the camera zooms in on his face in a way that usually means fighting is about to happen, but Real Old Guy just holds the pose while Wong walks off.

Cut to Real Old guy and some younger people standing around a fire in the woods. There are two young men and a young woman, all wearing kung fu robes, and we quickly learn that this is Real Old Guy's family. There is some discussion of how best to exact revenge for the slight. Younger brother wants to take care of it, but older brother says, "If he won't give me her hand in marriage, I'll just kidnap her!" and that appears to be that, because no one says anything else.

Cut to Wong smiling as he watches a young woman turn flips and walk on her hands and stuff. She jumps up onto a tree branch, then flips back down, and he laughs uproariously. We understand that this is his much-coveted daughter. He tells her she should keep practicing and soon she'll be able to fly like a bird and they both have a slightly uncomfortable chuckle.

Suddenly they hear weird jangly music and the older son of Real Old Guy, whose name we will learn is Choy Ching Sing, shows up with some other guys behind him carrying some kind of mini-tent, and Wong is like, "what's with the wedding procession, sucker?" Choy Ching Sing calls Wong father-in-law and says he's come to take his new bride away. Wong is like, quit playin', so they start to fight. Wong seems to match him move for move, but then he runs away, along with his daughter (who, we learn at some point, is named Wong Koo). Choy Ching Sing's henchmen take a turn at trying to beat Wong, but he quickly dispatches them, then does and awesome leap over his whole house, followed by a roll, followed by holding his hands back behind his shoulder as if holding an imaginary stick, and then - bam! there's a little I-Dream-Of-Genie sound and a stick appears in his hands. This proves little use in fighting Choy Ching Sing, who seems on the verge of beating Wong.

Wong and Wong Koo manage to flee through the woods just as a beefy stranger in light blue kung-fu robes comes strolling along the path, carrying a small blue backpack. He hears the unmistakable sounds of kung-fu fighting, and hastens to the ruckus. He confronts Choy Ching Sing, and they start to fight (does anyone in this crazy world not know kung-fu?!). Wong Koo and Wong, instead of taking the diversion as an opportunity to get the hell outta Dodge, just chill and watch the fight, which makes you wonder whether kidnapping and forced marriage are so commonplace in their world that they don't even sweat it - in fact, the mood is so light that Wong Koo comments to her father about the beefy stranger that he's good looking, and Wong chuckles and says, "Oh ho, so you like him, do you?" The beefy stranger, whose name, we will later learn, is Todd, and Choy Ching Sing fight a while, then Choy Ching Sing pulls back a bit and strikes an ill pose with a seriously dopey face, and Wong Koo says, "Father, he's using black magic!" and she's right, if your idea of black magic is blowing blue dust out of your mouth onto a guy's face. It must be magic, though, because the blue dust knocks Todd right on his ass. Wong Koo then says to Choy Ching Sing, "You promised you wouldn't use black magic. God is going to punish you!" and on cue, we see stock footage of fast-moving storm clouds, the wind picks up, and it starts to rain. Choy Ching Sing is duly startled, which gives Wong Koo time to pick up Todd over her shoulder and run off, along with Wong. Then we cut from Choy Ching Sing looking disturbed to footage of a snake slithering through mud and rain, and it's not clear if he just turned into a snake or if God is sending the snake to get him, or what, and we don't find out, because that's the end of that scene.

So then Todd is convalescing at Casa Wong, and you can see that Wong Koo is feeling him a lot. It sort of reminded me of the scene near the beginning of Hard to Kill where Steven Seagal is in a coma at a hospital and Kelly LeBrock is improbably the nurse charged with tending to him, and she wishes he would come out of his coma because he has "so much to live for," and as she's saying that she's looking into his drawers, implying that he is well hung and also making me wonder whether it's ethical for healthcare professionals to take that kind of interest in comatose patients. Except that Wong Koo doesn't check out Todd's package, she just looks at him longingly, and when her dad prepares a medicinal tea to revive him, she takes it in her mouth and does a weird French kiss-CPR thing to get it down his throat (in front of her dad, no less!). Todd comes to and tries to get up, and Wong laughs his loud, kung-fu laugh and tells Wong he needs rest.

Wong Koo goes out to wash laundry in a stream by hitting the clothes with a stick against a rock (which makes you wonder, if Wong can make a stick appear in his hands and make tea that counteracts black magic, can't he devise a better way to wash clothes?). Choy Ching Sing shows up on a bridge overlooking the stream and tells Wong Koo he's mad sorry about how he acted before, and can she please forgive him? He's suprisingly nonchalant about the whole thing, and she is too, saying, "That's in the past now," and you kind of ask yourself, Isn't this the same guy who just attacked her dad with a gang of fighters so that he could carry her off and rape her? But whatever, I guess. She finishes up her clothes-hitting and is heading home and Choy Ching Sing gets all up in her grill as she crosses the bridge over the stream and she tells him to get lost, and he actually asks if they can just be friends (cue Biz Markie), but she's not having it (cue Positive K and MC Lyte), and then he quickly abandons his conciliatory tone and says how he could come get her whenever and how he's the greatest fighter in the world so why won't she roll with him? She says, "You're an evil snake," and he parries, "I'm the greatest snake and you are a lovely fox, so we're a perfect couple!" which doesn't make sense but is sort of a cool line, and then he purposely trips her as she walks away, but in a quick, kung-fu way so that you think maybe she doesn't realize it was him, and when she falls he comes over and asks if she's OK. She makes like her ankle is really hurt and when he leans down to look at it, she pitches him off the bridge into the stream and skips merrily off. For reasons unknown, he just swims around and does not give chase. Did I mention that he wears a super-tough-looking, Karate Kid-style headband? He does.

Back at Casa Wong, Todd has recuperated and his saying his farewells to Master Wong. You can get a good idea of what a serious dude Todd is because he keeps a straight face while interacting with Wong, notwithstanding Wong's absurdly tufty eyebrows. They keep doing that salute where you put one fist inside the other palm, and Wong Koo shows up and acts pouty that Todd was going to bounce without saying bye. She asks when he'll back and he gives this line about being a wandering man who never knows where he'll end up, then heads off. Wong Koo watches him ruefully and Wong says she shouldn't sweat it because he has a foolproof plan to get Todd to fall for her. Without asking what the plan is, Wong Koo thanks her father with a big hug, and as they're embracing he notices that she has a bushy reddish fox tail coming from the back of her dress, and instead of being like, WTF?!, he just says, "careful, my dear, your claws are showing," leaving me to be like, huh?

We quickly learn that Wong's foolproof plan involves having Todd stumble upon Wong Koo as she is about to commit suicide by hanging herself from a tree in the forest. How do we learn this? We watch it unfold in the next scene, that is how. Todd gets Wong Koo down from the noose before she is harmed and asks her what's up. She says Choy Ching Sing will keep coming after her and she can't bear the thought of being married to him, so she might as well, you know, end it. Todd valiantly asks what he can do to help, and then Wong is suddenly there with his crazy laughter, and tries to oblige Todd to marry Wong Koo. Todd is like, "easy there, old man," and insists that he will help but never said he'd marry her. For a minute, it seems like Wong and Todd might fight, but Todd just walks off with his stupid backpack, leaving Wong Koo more frustrated than ever. Wong, predictably, laughs.

We go back to the campfire in the forest, where Real Old Man and his family chill out and plot against Wong and Wong Koo. They've realized somehow that Todd has captured Wong Koo's elusive affections and decide that he needs to be dealt with. Real Old Man's daughter, who is very bejeweled and has the sidelocks of her hair plastered to her head in a cool pattern, thinks they should just drop the matter, and points out that it was a bad play for Choy Ching Sing to use black magic on a human being, because that's the sort of thing that angers God. Choy Ching Sing smacks his sister to the ground and calls her a bitch, leaving absolutely no doubt that he is a really not-nice guy. His younger brother then volunteers to take care of Todd, despite repeated protests by the sister. We then see the younger brother, Choy Chang Long, walking in a field somewhere, carrying a garden snake. He comes across a cobra on the ground and walks around it, then uses the garden snake to smack it. He smiles wanly throughout, and jaunty, disco-influence Chinese flute music plays in the background. This happens at a beach. We are starting to realize that the Choy family's relationship with snakes goes beyond simply likening themselves to snakes when boasting about their fighting skills.

Happily for the advancement of the movie's plot, Todd comes loping along and suddenly sees a cobra, which seems to be the same cobra that was recently smacked by a garden snake. He proceeds carefully, then notices another one. He then executes a cool flying flip, presumably to get away, but lands right in front of Choy Chang Long, to whom he says, "Who the hell are you?" (People say this a lot in kung-fu movies. Todd himself will say it again later.) "I'm Choy Chang Long, and you're trespassing on Snake Mountain. My family kills trespassers, so what are you going to do about it?" Naturally, they start to fight, except suddenly, instead of being on the beach, as before, they are on a hilltop above the ocean. From out of nowhere, Choy Chang Long produces a rope and starts to go all Indiana Jones on Todd, requiring Todd to do many awesome flips. Eventually, Todd grabs the rope, making you think that he might turn the tables on Choy, but OH. MY. GOD. The rope turns into a cobra! Todd jumps back, and he and Choy exchange meaningful close-up tough-guy looks. Here is what the looks say: Todd: "Holy fuck! I am dealing with a guy who has some crazy magic." Choy: "This sucker has now seen that I have more than one trick up my sleeve that is reminiscent of Indiana Jones (first the whip, then the pit of snakes). He is probably afraid that I will, at any moment, have him running away from a huge boulder, or better yet, that I will rip his still-beating heart from his chest (sure, it's from one of the sequels, but it was still a cool scene). He is totally going to lose to me." But what neither of them has thought of is that Choy's sister, she of the crazy sidelocks, will show up. She does, of course, and kicks Choy Chang Long's ass - not a lot, but enough to let Todd get away ("Hurry, run away," she tells him. "or he'll kill you."). Choy Chang Long is peeved, but he doesn't give chase.

Wong, meanwhile, ever laughing, has not given up on getting Todd to fall for Wong Koo, even though at this point in the movie, I was beginning to suspect that Todd was, ahem, a Tiger who Preferred the Company of Other Tigers, as they say euphemistically in the Shaolin temple. But Wong is clearly an optimist, so he uses magic to create a sumptuous house in the countryside, and when he shows it to Wong Koo, she somehow understands immediately what his plan is, because she says, "Don't forget to turn into your younger self!" which makes absolutely no sense when you hear it, but then Wong starts spinning around like Wonder Woman and when he stops spinning, his goofy blond hair and tufty facial hair are gone, and he is a dark-haired, clean-shaven version of himself. This allows him to pose as a homeowner who offers Todd shelter after a long day of walking. (At this point, I began to wonder, how do any of these people make a living? Wong and his daughter just hang out practicing flips and doing laundry, the Snake Family Robinson does nothing but make campfires and kick ass, and Todd just roams around. But anyway.) Young Wong, who looks and sounds exactly like his older self, is not recognized by Todd, even when he prepares him a medicinal tea to help him feel better. Then there's a knock on the door and, surprise surprise, it's Wong Koo, who needs shelter for the evening. Todd is like, "Wong Koo?! What are you doing here?" and she plays it totally straight and gives away nothing. And then they snuggle up, which I didn't quite understand, and Young Wong laughs his crazy laugh (because he's still right there in the room), and still Todd doesn't realize the scam (which makes us wonder, or it should, why a young woman who can turn crazy flips and grow a fox tail at will is so into him when he's such a maroon).

The next scene is one that has been repeated in kung-fu films since time immemorial: A young waitress is waiting on rowdy hooligans. One of them cops a feel, she resists, and her brother steps up to defend her honor. The hooligans kick his ass and start to carry her off (this brother and sister seem to be the only people in this movie who don't know some kung-fu) when a stranger intercedes. Of course, here the stranger is Todd, and Wong Koo is with him (how did that happen? was snuggling at the house of Young Wong the kung-fu movie equivalent of exchanging letterman jackets and name bracelets?). He fights the thugs and beats them, of course. The best part of the fight is when he challenges them, because he actually tells them to come at him all at once, not one at a time. Why is this cool? Because it explains to me that for some reason, one-at-a-time fighting is the accepted norm in the kung-fu world so I shouldn't think it so odd when huge gangs of fighters take on one guy serially instead of en masse. Anyway, after Todd dispatches the thugs, the waitress and her brother explain that the thugs were the employees of Kim Tai Fong, "a local gangster who is responsible for many crimes." They then offer Todd and Wong Koo dinner and a room, which partially explains how wandering fighters make ends meet. (It occurs to me that the business of being an itinerant fighter is sort of like being an academic - you study for a long time to get this very specialized skill, then you go out in the world and there are very few practical applications for the skill, so maybe you scrape by and make it work, or maybe you end up just finding a gig where you can teach other people the skill, and the cycle repeats itself. Also, you travel around with a backpack.) Todd tells the waitress that Wong Koo is his cousin so they will need separate rooms, and Wong Koo looks crestfallen, and you want to tell her, Give up! He's gayer than Ikea on Super Bowl Sunday! but she's blinded by her love.

That night, a thin lady in a whitish dress with a greenish pallor to her face appears in the corner of Todd's room. She looks kind of like Shelley Long. Todd looks mildly alarmed and asks, "Are you a human or a ghost?" (I don't know if I'd have the presence of mind to ask the same thing if Chinese Shelley Long suddenly appeared in my hotel room.) The lady says she's a ghost, which doesn't seem to surprise Todd that much, and tells him she was raped and murdered by Kim Tai Fong (that same local gangster! what are the chances?) and she needs Todd to help take revenge. Todd does not commit to helping her, and she leaves.

The next day Todd tells Wong Koo he needs to go to Tien Shin to see his master, a buddhist Abbot with the hip-hop-ready name G. Kwan. Wong Koo starts to bug out about being left alone, but Todd says he'll be back for dinner. We see him walk purposefully along a path and there's another guy walking in the opposite direction, and they don't acknowledge each other or anything until they are about to bump into one another, and then the other guy, who has very dark hair that looks like a wig (but also looks kind of awesome) suddenly starts to do kung-fu moves on Todd. Todd, by the way, is still wearing his light-blue kung-fu robes, which look sort of like kung-fu scrubs, and they remain immaculate. He has ditched the backpack, though. Anyhow, he and Wig Guy have a ferocious fight, although it seems like Todd draws it out a little - there are a couple moments where he has Wig Guy on the ground and could easily give him some good kicks to the kidneys, and instead swings his foot up in the air, intending to bring his heel down on the guy's gut. That's a fine move if your opponent is truly prostrate, but Wig Guy always takes advantage of that moment when Todd's foot is in the air to, you know, get away. At one point, Wig Guy sends Todd tumbling down a hill, and Todd stands up, brushes himself off, and says, "Who the hell are you?" (I told you it was coming!) Wig Guy says, "It doesn't matter," which is surprisingly selfless in a world where everyone swears that their kung-fu is the hottest. Eventually, of course, Todd has Wig Guy on the ground and he punches his gut over and over and asks who sent him. Wig Guy says, "Kim Tai Fong" (who, if you're keeping score at home, is the local gangster who employs the thugs at the restaurant and raped and murdered the ghost lady). Between Wong's crazy magic tricks, the animosity of the snake-charming Choy family, and the ghost visit, it is becoming clear that poor Todd is one of those guys who is snatched up by fate and put to use for greater purposes.

Anyway, back at the hotel-restaurant, Kim Tai Fong and some of his thugs show up and confront the waitress and her brother to find out the whereabouts of "that fighter who is staying at your hotel" (why is everyone hating on Todd?). The brother says Todd left early that morning, and Kim says a'ight, then takes the waitress, presumably for later raping, because that seems to be how he rolls. As the henchmen carry off the waitress, they are confronted in the road by Wong Koo. Kim is like, "Who the hell are you?" and before she can even answer, he orders one of his thugs (but only one, because that is the kung-fu rule) to seize her. She says, "stop!" and thrusts her hand forward, and it's as though she's physically restrained the henchman. Then she puts her hands together, prayer-style, and closes her eyes for a sec while the camera zooms in on her and funny music plays. Then she opens her eyes and says the the still-frozen henchman, "You will do exactly as I say." He's like, "OK." So she tells him to attack his men, and he pulls out a ginormous chain and wilds out on them till they all run off in fear. Then she tells him, "Now it's your turn," so he wraps the chain around his own neck and strangles himself to death. The waitress and her brother ask Wong Koo, "what the fuck was that?" and she's like, "He must have been driven crazy by your pretty face! See ya later!" and they apparently accept this explanation.

Meanwhile, Todd sees G. Kwan at the temple. G. Kwan is a real life old guy who sits under a big gold Buddha statue. He tells Todd that he can tell from Todd's aura that evil is close to him. He gives Todd a book of Buddhist mantras and tells him to read those to keep the evil away. As he walks away from the temple, Todd has a flashback of G. Kwan mentioning evil (which is weird, because that happened for the first time about a minute earlier), then of all the other ill stuff that's happened to him (the ghost lady, the waitress saying the name Kim Tai Fong, the black magic/blue dust attack by Choy "Jake the Snake" Ching Sing) and then a flashback of Wong Koo saying, "I'm not going to eat you!" which I didn't notice the first time around. This makes you think that somehow Todd is putting it all together (the Choy family are snakes, the Wong family are foxes, etc.), but it's hard to know, because he is kind of a meathead.

When he gets back to the hotel room, Todd tells Wong Koo about the Buddhist mantras and sort of thrusts the book in her face, as one might accusingly present 8" x 10" black and white photographs of one's spouse engaged in an extramarital affair to said spouse, said photos having been taken by the private eye one hired after getting suspicious after one too many late night hang-up phone calls. Wong Koo practically wilts in the presence of the book, and you think that right there, Todd would be like, "Oh, of course you're bugging out about these mantras, because they're like garlic and holy water to your vampire ass!" But instead he blithely accepts her explanation that her father is an atheist and thinks religion is bullshit. (Note: My father is an atheist and thinks religion is bullshit, but when people show me a bible, I don't shield my face from it. Why? Because I am not secretly a magical fox!) Wong Koo then deftly changes the topic to the whole where-is-this-relationship-going conversation, which sounds so much like something that would go on between Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth in Sex and the City that I almost can't bear it, but then it is OK because Wong Koo and Todd get to sexin'. It is the least explicit sex scene ever, with nothing but five minutes (seriously! five minutes!) of an out-of-focus close-up of them kissing. You can kinda see that they don't have shirts on, though, so you know it's going down. What you don't know is that Wong, now back in his old-guy-with-tufty-eyebrows form, IS RIGHT THERE WATCHING! How do you find out? Well, the next scene shows Wong Koo looking triumphant the next morning. She is standing outside, gazing at the new day with a face that says, "I totally bagged that guy and it was worth all the shennanigans!" Then, I-dream-of-Genie sound!, Wong is there all of a sudden! (The special effects in this movie all amount to telling actors to freeze while the camera is paused and some other person or item is inserted into the scene. It looks super-ghetto.) He says, in essence, that the F. went down and he was there to see it, but he didn't say anything because he "didn't want to disturb you two!" [loud kung-fu laughter, which seems oddly perverse in this context].
Wong Koo doesn't seem to mind this intrusion on her privacy. (If it were my dad watching me, well, I would mind. But I guess my dad and I aren't magical foxes. Also, there's no way my dad could watch me without my noticing, because he's a noisy breather, which made it super-embarrassing to go to movies with him when I was in high school.) Then Wong tells Wong Koo they have to leave because it will never work with her and Todd, owing to the whole interspecies thing, and you're kinda like, Jeez, Wong, all this time you were trying to hook them up and now that it finally goes down, you're nixing it? Not a good look.

Anyhow, Kim Tai Fong and his crew, recently defeated by Wong Koo, are out walking somewhere when they come across Choy Ching Sing, who challenges them to a fight to prove that he should be a fighter in Kim's gang. Guess what? He wins! The first of the three henchmen to challenge him ends up head down in a hole in the ground with his feet sticking up, and Kim Tai Fong goes over to pull the guy out while Choy Ching Sing fights the other guys, but then Choy's style is so dope that Kim gets distracted and leaves his employee upside down to go and watch his other employees get whupped. These guys need to form a union. Naturally, Choy joins up with Kim, presumably to have another go at beating up Todd and marrying/raping Wong Koo. That night, Choy Ching Sing is visited by Shelley Long the ghost, who tells him not to work for Kim Tai Fong because Kim raped and murdered her. Choy is completely unmoved, being a rapist and murderer himself, and tries to fight the ghost lady, but she just laughs at him and drifts out of there.

The next day, while Todd and Wong Koo are out somewhere doing something, Kim Tai Fong's crew finally succeeds in kidnapping the waitress. Kim has just given her to one of his henchmen for raping (really - the henchman asks, Kim assents, and the henchman says, "OK, I'll take her now," and tosses her over his shoulder) when Todd shows up and saves her and starts to kick some ass. But then everyone runs into Kim's courtyard and, surprise! Choy Ching Sing is there ready to finally get Todd. (See, that's the only reason that Kim Tai Fong was willing to outsource the raping - he didn't want the waitress for himself, she was just bait to get Todd into the place.) Todd and Ching "Cold-hearted Snake" Ching Sing fight a little, then Ching busts out a nasty-looking dagger, which he throws at Todd, impaling his right shoulder. Todd then says some sort of sore loser line about how fighting with magic is a dick move, and runs out of there, clutching his shoulder. (It is a dick move to fight with black magic, but when you say that after a guy just threw a dagger through your shoulder, you come off like a whiny punk.) As he runs off, Choy tells him he has till midnight, when Choy will come to kill him and take Wong Koo.

Back at the hotel, Wong Koo again ministers to Todd, this time by having a red marble in her mouth and passing it to his mouth with a kiss. (We will later learn that this is her "Fox Pill.") Just as Todd is getting up, he asks Wong Koo what time it is and she says it's about midnight, and then BAM! Choy Ching Sing bursts through the door, except he doesn't so much burst through as he is standing well beyond the door in a tough fighting pose, and the door just flies open. Wong Koo starts to scream at Todd to get his Buddhist mantra book, and Todd is looking for it everywhere, and Choy is running through his "I am the baddest" spiel, and right as he's about to start landing some choice blows on Todd, Todd finds the book (it was tucked inside his fucking robe the whole time) and holds it up to Choy, who falls back. Todd starts reading mantras, causing Choy to keep falling backward and hollering, and his hair gets all messed up like he touched an electric socket. Meanwhile, Todd doesn't notice, but Wong Koo's hair turns from well-coiffed black to dirty blond with a Karate Kid-style red headband, and her complexion gets much darker, and when Choy is finally driven away (swearing revenge at a later date), Todd looks up and sees that his mantras have revealed Wong Koo to be a fox (when he looks at her, the shot flashes between her face and a fox's face over and over again). He asks what happened and she starts by saying, "I am a one-thousand-year-old fox," which is what nowadays is called a cougar (ha!), and then she explains everything. Todd proves to be the first man ever to be angry when he wakes up to discover he has bedded a fox, and he then crosses his eyes comically and passes out. He wakes up later and Wong Koo tells him (a) that he should go take refuge in G. Kwan's temple because it's the only place he'll be safe from Choy, and (b) that now that she is revealed as a fox (or an olive-skinned blonde, at least), it will take her another 300 years to get her light skin and dark hair back.

That night, Shelley Long the ghost goes over to Todd's joint and visits him again. He asks (sensibly) why she can't just take revenge on Kim Tai Fong herself, and she explains that he wears a jade amulet that protects him from spirits (we get a flashback to him tossing her on the floor, presumably to rape/murder her, and the camera zooms in on his amulet), so if Todd will just rip that off, Shelley Long can come in and kill him (or whatever), but also, she was given three years to take her revenge and this is the last night, so it has to be right now. Also, Kim Tai Fong was her brother-in-law, so he's not just a rapist, murderer, and gangster, he's also so out of control that he can't even draw the line at family.

Todd jumps up and goes to Kim's pad, where he calls out to him, "Kim Tai Fong, did you rape and murder a woman?" And Kim first says, casually, "Why yes!" then quickly makes a full denial: "No, not me, you've got the wrong guy!" (Apparently, under Chinese law at the time, admissions of guilt freely made were not considered competent evidence if they were followed in the same breath by lengthy denials. Evidence law is weird.) That's good enough for Todd, who jumps in, rips off the amulet, and gets the hell out of there so Shelley Long can get her revenge. She does this with a lot of screaming and cackling and floating around, and ultimately, Kim Tai Fong screams a lot and just dies - it's not really clear how. After that, Todd holes up with G. Kwan at the temple, and tells him all the crazy stuff that happened, which G. Kwan completely gets and explains further (it is at this point that we learn about the Fox Pill). He also says lots of stuff about how awesome Buddha is.

Meanwhile, the Snake Family Robinson is plotting what to do. Choy Ching Sing has apparently already set off for the temple, and his brother and sister are debating whether to help him. Brother says yes, sister (wisely, we'll see) says no, pointing out that for snakes to go into Buddha's house is totally not wise. Choy Chang Long ignores sister (typical!) and heads off. He is intercepted in an open field overlooking the ocean by Buddha himself, a fat-faced, fortyish guy in a cool gold helmet. Buddha tells him that as a cobra, he can't go in the temple. Amazingly, Snake Boy then elects to ENGAGE BUDDHA IN KUNG-FU COMBAT. Stupid, right? Yes, very stupid. Buddha doesn't fight, he just summons some crazy-looking guys, one of whom has dyed-white dreads, and they fight little brother Snake. Despite a few moments where Choy Chang Long's kung-fu moves are deemed so sweet that they are shown in slow-motion with Chariots of Fire-type music, he is ultimately killed. Then Choy Ching Sing arrives at the temple and, not to be anti-climactic or anything, but Todd beats him. They fight a lot and then G. Kwan comes to the temple balcony and tosses Todd a huge-ass Buddha sword, and Todd throws it at Choy and impales him against a tree, at which point he turns into a snake impaled against a tree. So even though the movie is called Killer of Snake, Fox of Shaolin, the real Killer of Snake is Todd, or possibly Buddha. (Maybe the title is just a catalog of separate attractions offered by the film (Killer of Snake and Fox of Shaolin)? Or maybe the whole thing was a complicated ruse on the Snake family, carried out by the Fox family, with Todd as the unwitting tool (and what a tool) of their supernatural feud? I don't know. The movie was a little too long. (That said, at least I took the trouble to watch it and make a decent pass at summarizing the plot (although I now realize that I forgot to mention that when the Snake family daughter first intercedes to save Todd, there's a scene where she and her brother are wrestling, and they show two snakes fighting, which is cool, and then a random old dude comes up and tries to mediate between the snake siblings, to little effect). I looked on the New York Times website where they summarize the plot of every movie ever, and they say, "Killer of Snake, Fox of Shaolin stars Carter Wong as a man whose father and daughter are threatened by a snake god well-versed in martial arts." Um, hello? He has neither father nor daughter in the movie! About the only parts they got right are "stars Carter Wong" and "well-versed in martial arts." Come on, Times!))

Ganar o Morir (Nowhere to Run, 1993)

It is a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and I watched it on TV dubbed into Spanish, so as far as I am concerned, it is called Ganar o Morir, which means "Win or Die." (Imdb says it is called "Nowhere to Run." I don't know why they couldn't call it "Ningún Sitio Adonde Huir," or "Sin Posibilidad de Escapar," but whatever.) I will tell you that there were a few plot points I never got, in part because I watched the movie with my father-in-law and I was translating it from Spanish as we went so sometimes I wouldn't hear some of the dialogue.

Anyway, the movie starts with a prison bus driving across a desert highway. Van Damme is on the bus. He is a prisoner. An awesome red Corvette with black racing stripes passes the bus in the oncoming traffic lane, which isn't so surprising because it's a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere and buses go slow, but the bus driver, who is wearing aviator shades, starts to bug out a little because the Corvette kinda just paces the bus without passing for a little while. At this moment, Van Damme looks out the window portentously, and we understand that the driver of the Corvette is his confederate. Then the Corvette does a crazy move that they probably teach you in cop car driving school, where it pulls abruptly in front of the bus, cutting it off in such a way that the bus driver turns the wheel hard to the right and the bus rolls over on its side. The Corvette skids to a stop a short distance ahead of the bus, and all the prisoners in the bus, who are handcuffed to their seats, start bitching about how the bus driver, who is unconscious from the crash, is a lousy driver.

The other guard who was on the bus grabs a shotgun and goes out to the Corvette, where the driver appears to be unconscious and slumped over the wheel. Naturally, he is really fine, and as soon as the guard lowers his shotgun and says, "Are you alright?" the driver sits up and points a pistol at the guard and says, "I'd be much better if you put that gun down!" So he takes the guard hostage. The Corvette driver makes the guard unlock everyone's handcuffs and all the convicts start running off in every direction. Probably the reason that some of these guys became convicts is that they had no manners, because some of them go and try to steal the very Corvette that just moments earlier was the engine of their liberty, so the driver and Jean-Claude Van Damme have to go kick their asses. This takes only moments, and then they are on their way. They drive far enough for the driver of the Corvette, who is now in the passenger seat, to tell Jean-Claude that he is so glad to break him out, because he's the one who should have been in prison anyway, and then the previously unconscious bus driver comes to, gets a rifle, and very carefully aims at the fleeing muscle car and fires one shot. The camera does that bullet's eye view thing where it zooms toward the target, and the the rear window of the Corvette shatters and Jean-Claude's friend is shot in the back. He says, "Good timing - I couldn't have died with your imprisonment on my conscience," then he dies. Inexplicably, there is a shovel in the Corvette, which Van Damme uses to bury his friend somewhere with a scenic sunset in the background.

The next day, Van Damme has traded in his prison jumpsuit for a grey suit and white shirt with no tie. He stops at a convenience store and the news is on, talking about the prisoner escape, and the old guy who works at the store looks at him funny and says, "You're not from around here, are ya?" and Van Damme says, no, he's here to go hunting, and the old guy is like, "in a suit?" and Van Damme says he staying with some friends, and that is the end of that weird interaction.

In fact, Van Damme is staying by a lake in a wooded area, which was apparently the agreed-upon meeting spot for him and his buddy in the event of a jailbreak, because there is a tent and an old ammo box full of money, and a tape recorder, on which his buddy has recorded a message, to the effect of "if you're hearing this, I guess I'm not there to split the money with you, but anyway, it was nice knowing you and you were a good friend." Hearing this gets Van Damme choked up. Later, around dusk, he pushes the Corvette into the lake, which is a shame, then creeps through the woods at night and spies a farmhouse, which he goes and looks into. Inside, Rosanna Arquette is putting her two young kids (a son and a daughter) to bed and then getting somewhat undressed, which Van Damme watches with a mixture of tension and melancholy. Once she is in bed, he goes inside, creeps around a bit, steals the salt shaker, and has to run off because the son, who is about ten, wakes up and comes downstairs. The son sees a figure retreating into the dark across a pasture and smiles, which is totally not how I would react to weird intruders, but I didn't grow up in the country. The son, by the way, is played by McCaulay Culkin's little brother whose name I don't remember. Anyway, the next morning, the son says something about someone coming in the house and the mom brushes it off and we come to understand that the absence of a father (we will learn at some point that the dad died of a stroke) has led to this boy's having a rich inner life. Also, the salt is missing. Also, the whole house shakes for a little while and you can hear explosions in the distance, but Rosanna Arquette and her kids are totally calm, and in this way we learn that there is mining going on nearby. Then, to cement that knowledge, we see an old, fat-cat businessman in an office in a construction trailer at . . .surprise, a mine. He is sitting with a sinister-looking guy in slightly high-waisted pants (though not as high-wasted as Van Damme's because holy fuck, that guy's pants are up to his fucking armpits in every single movie he's in). The sinister guy is the guy who played the killer in Silence of the Lambs - not Hannibal Lecter, but Mr. "It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again." Anyway, he's there and they're talking about getting Mrs. Anderson to sell her land (aha! Rosanna Arquette is the lone holdout, a la "You Can't Take It With You," except Frank Capra would roll over in his grave if he knew anyone in the whole history of filmgoing had compared his magnum opus to "Ganar o Morir"), and fat-cat says he's not sure the local sheriff can do the job and serial killer says, "I'll handle it," and just then the local sheriff walks in, and his name is Looney, and serial killer suggests that he is sleeping with Mrs. Anderson (that is, Rosanna Arquette) and Looney doesn't deny it, but still assures fat-cat that he will persuade her to sell her land, and fat-cat gives him a manila envelope, and serial killer does a card trick but fails to fins Looney's card, until Looney is outside in his car and opens the manila envelope and sees the two of clubs there (along with a lot of cash), and the audience is like, Whoa! This serial killer, like Wu-Tang, ain't nothin' to fuck with!

That night, Looney and Mrs. Anderson have sex (I think - they don't show it, but you see them come out of the house onto the porch and he says, "I liked that," and she says, "Me too." She is in her bathrobe, which implies recent nudity, but he's still in his dorky sheriff's outfit, so it could be that they just watched a movie or ate some exceptionally good Chinese take-out. This is a failure of the narrative, but they do kiss during the scene, so we at least know that they're more than just friends.) Jean-Claude Van Damme is lurking in the shadows by the barn and watches them, and at this point we have no idea why the hell he's picked this particular single mom / farmer / property owner to stalk.

The next morning, Jean-Claude is washing up in the lake when Mrs. Anderson's son, Maury, comes around and they chat. We learn that Van Damme is named Sam. Sam asks Maury not to tell his mom that Sam is camping there. Maury's little sister comes around too, and she says she will tell. Apparently, though, she doesn't tell.

That night, Mrs. Anderson is coming home with the kids in her beat-up pick-up truck (none of them are wearing seatbelts) when two mean guys start smashing the truck with bats. One also has a meat hook. They order her out of the car and she refuses and backs up over one of them, but then gets the truck stuck in a ditch, and the mean guys are clearly about to bring the ruckus when Sam shows up and dispenses a two-part ass-whooping to them. One thing about this I didn't like is that in dispatching the second thug, he slams the guy's head against the pick-up truck's headlight, breaking the light. Now, if that had happened accidentally during a brawl, well, fair enough, but it was completely gratuitous - the Muscles from Brussels could just as well have broken his arm, head-butted him, or some other bad-ass move, because the guy was already defeated and this was just the coup de grace. So why break the truck of the person you're trying to help? Anyway, at this point, Mrs. Anderson says, "Thanks. Who are you?" and Maury says, "It's Sam," and I finally realize that Sam really has no prior involvement whatsoever with the family, which makes his continued presence there all the more perplexing. Nevertheless, now that Anderson knows Sam, we learn that he is from Quebec and she invites him to stay in the barn rather than in the tent by the lake, which he accepts. He also eats with the family now, and showers in the main house, which provides an opportunity, the following day, for Looney to surprise him in the shower and pull his service revolver on Sam, who, of course, is standing there naked, and then Mrs. Anderson comes in and sees Sam naked, which lays the groundwork for them having sex another 45 minutes into the film (in fact, their sex scene, which is totally inevitable, comes remarkably late). Also, when Looney asks Sam who he is, Sam says he's a friend, but Mrs. Anderson says he's a distant cousin on her mother's side. This, plus the fact that Sam is totally fucking ripped, makes Looney not like him.

Then there is a Footloose-style, country-bumpkin town meeting at which the fat-cat mine owner tries to convince the townspeople that the mine is a good idea. One townie, who looks like a cross between Bruce Boxleitner and Collin Farrell, is vociferous in his opposition to the mining and storms out, and Silence of the Lambs guy is there and looks at him with scary eyebrows, and in movies, that kind of scary-eyebrow-looking is called "foreshadowing." So later that night some thugs (did I mention that the thugs always wear suits? it's like the director wants to make it very clear that business interests are behind all the misbehavior in this film, to the point where the mining company couldn't even hire local, overall-wearing thugs, because even they recognize how inherently wrong it is to drive hardworking farmers off their land) come and set his barn on fire. Boxleitner-Farrell is out there pulling horses out of the barn and Sam emerges from the night to help. Once the horses and other valuable farm stuff are out, everyone stands back to admire the fire and curse the mining industry, but they see that the flames are burning some hay and reaching the propane tanks, which are conveniently next to a water tower, which is conveniently next to a bulldozer. Sam, in addition to knowing kung fu, apparently knows how to work all those crazy levers on construction machinery, because he runs over and starts driving the bulldozer against the base of the water tower and eventually makes the water fall over and douse the propane tank so there's not a huge explosion. This climax is preceded by several tense, up-close shots of the paint on the side of the propane tank bubbling from the heat of the fire.

The next day, some guys from the mining company, including the fat-cat businessman, who is the same actor who once played some sort of mean South African in some movie I saw a long time ago, and probably had a role on the short-lived show, Manimal (which was awesome), and also probably on the A-Team (does that give you a sense of him? he's a very 80s sort of corporate villain - the sort who would say, "do you have any idea who I am?", which he does later in this movie too) pay a visit to Mrs. Anderson's house in the daytime. The visit is to try to persuade Mrs. Anderson to sell her land, which she refuses to do. She tells the fat-cat, "I was behind on the mortgage but it was worked out with the bank till you started meddling." Fat-cat says, "You can avoid losing lots of money if you just sell to me." Then Sam walks into the room (did I mention before that he told Mrs. Anderson that he was a lawyer in Quebec? It is never clear if he really is a lawyer (although he would surely have been disbarred after going to prison, even if he was wrongly convicted)) and says all this stuff about how a foreclosure would take a long time and would be costly for the bank, so if Mrs. Anderson wants to keep her land, she should just not sell and that's that. The fat-cat asks Sam how he knows all this and Sam says he was a lawyer in Quebec, and when the fat-cat offers his hand to introduce himself, Sam looks at the hand real suspiciously, as if he were visiting a foreign culture and had just been asked to participate in a strange custom, and couldn't decide if it was a real custom that he should go along with so as not to seem rude, or a made-up custom that the foreigners were pretending to have just so he would go along with it and they could get a laugh. Eventually, Sam shakes the guy's hand, but the look he gives to the hand first is indescribably tough, and you know right then who is the bigger and better man. Sam is!

That night, thugs in suits come to Mrs. Anderson's land and have a truck with big 50-gallon drums in the back, which they set to pouring out some brown liquid while the trucks drive slowly around. I assume this was gasoline and they were going to set a fire, but I suppose it could have been chocolate syrup (the scene takes place at night, so it is hard to tell what's going on). Eventually, Sam arrives and beats all these guys up a lot before they have a chance to prove definitively whether the mystery liquid is an accelerant or a condiment.

The next day, fat-cat, Looney, and Silence of the Lambs serial killer have a meeting to figure out what to do about this Canadian troublemaker in their midst. Looney says he found out that Sam is a fugitive and has the idea to simply threaten Sam with disclosure, thus forcing him to get the hell out of town while avoiding undue attention from the state police. Fat-cat actually likes this idea (he is usually disparaging of Looney when he's alone with the serial killer), and so Looney does it. It is convenient because Sam had been working on restoring an old Triumph motorcycle in Mrs. Anderson's barn, and it was just getting finished (because he's also a motorcycle repairman), so he leaves a tape-recorded note to Mrs. Anderson and Maury (with whom he bonded by working with him on the motorcycle project) and then hits the road. He stops at a diner to eat and has a brief conversation with a state trooper there, who admires the motorcycle. Sam's foreign accent, coupled with his leaving right away and leaving a whole steak uneaten on his plate, makes the trooper suspicious, so he takes down the motorcycle's license plate, and somehow, despite the fact that it was presumably the same plate that had sat on the rusted bike in the barn for all those years, they trace it to Sam and find him camping somewhere in some ravine, and he's just chilling, making a campfire, and then he does a little twitching-listening thing, then suddenly leaps in the air, lands on the bike, and starts going just as a bazillion cops converge on him, and apparently they're pretty certain it's him, because they make no attempt to detain him, they just start shooting shooting shooting. There's a couple of classic Chevy Caprice cop cars that quickly get overturned in a ditch, a police Suburban that runs into a tree, and a highly improbable, bright red police motocross bike, none of which can stop Sam's Triumph, which he jumps over a cop car at one point, without the aid of any visible incline. With some backup, the cops manage to corner him at the edge of a cliff, but then Sam just rides down the side of it (it's not a shear rock wall, but a very steep incline) and gets away.

At that point I had to change Reuben's diaper and fix some food for him, so I lost track a little bit, but when I came back, fat-cat, Looney, and serial killer had attempted to kill or harm Mrs. Anderson, which attempt had been thwarted by Sam, because Looney was tied up in the house. Unfortunately, fat-cat was holding Mrs. Anderson at gunpoint while Sam and serial killer fought. There was a lot of smashing around and knocking old slop sinks off walls and such, and eventually serial killer got a pitchfork and it looked like lights-out for Sam, but Sam did a lot of nice rolls on the ground to avoid getting poked before finally disarming serial killer, giving him some solid punches to the abdomen, and throwing him through the window of Looney's cruiser, at which point Maury appeared to say, "come help, the old guy is holding my mom hostage" and Sam was heading into the house when serial-killer roused himself inside the cruiser, grabbed a rifle, and was about to shoot Sam, and Maury shouted, "Sam!" and Sam turned around and you thought, "Oh fuck, how will he get out of this?" and then, out of nowhere, TEN-YEAR-OLD MAURY HAS A FUCKING LOADED REVOLVER, which he tosses to Sam in slow motion, and we see the long slow arcs described by the flying gun while Mr. Silence of the Lambs, shaky from his encounter with the windshield, tenses his trigger finger and prepares to give it the hose again, and the gun lands perfectly in Sam's hand and blam blam, it's like the part where Jodie Foster caps that guy in the basement when he's wearing the infrared goggles.

Then, anti-climactically, just as Sam is confronting fat-cat, who has a pistol trained on Mrs. Anderson's neck, a whole bunch of cops show up and fat-cat and Sam get arrested. When they're both being put in separate cruisers, fat-cat predictably (and incriminatingly) yells at Sam for messing everything up, and says, "Do you know who I am?" He then bumrushes Sam (they are both handcuffed at this point) and even though there are a million cops around, they let him do this, and Sam, who already has one foot in the cruiser, calmly pushes the cruiser door forward sharply so as to hit fat-cat in the face, then responds, "I know what you are." Bam! He exchanges a meaningful look with Mrs. Anderson, who is on the porch hugging her kids, and then gets in the cruiser. Freeze frame on Sam looking wistful as the cops drive off, and we suddenly realize that this film is a powerful indictment of the whole American system: the only person who can save the average American farmer from the depredations of unchecked capitalism and corrupt, sexually exploitative law enforcement officers, is a Canadian lawyer wrongly imprisoned in the U.S. . . who knows kung-fu!

Hands of Death (1987)

Somewhere, probably in mainland China, there is a serious opium-smuggling operation. The authorities in some other place, perhaps Hong Kong, have been trying to stop this smuggling. The movie opens with a scene of their undercover agent, amusingly called Spade in the English dubbing. He is sitting in some kind of kung-fu temple, in kung-fu pajamas, surreptitiously taking photographs with a little auto-focus, 35mm affair. Some dudes in suits come into the temple, talk about how he's a traitor, and kick his ass until he is dead. Cut to an office, where an older guy is explaing to a younger guy, named Young, that this opium ring "must be stopped. I don't care how the hell you do it, but do it." He then explains that Spade was killed, and another guy walks in, who turns out to be Cao, who will be Young's partner in this endeavor. They are both special agents. The older guy tells them they'll have to a take a train, then a boat. He gives them travel documents, which he makes a point of saying are "courier visas, very hard to get, so don't lose them." Cao and Young then head off. They are always dressed mod style, with slim-tailored black suits, white shirts, and no tie. Their suits must be made of some sort of polyester-wool blend, because they are constantly engaging in kung-fu fights while wearing them, and always emerge looking sharp. This is especially impressive in Young's case, because he favors roundhouse kicks to the heads of everyone. While traveling on the train, Cao and Young study photographs, presumably taken by the now-deceased Agent Spade with his little camera. All of these photographs are of buildings, cars, and guys in Nehru jackets. Cao and Young both smoke stylishly during this sequence, and throughout. Young uses strike-anywhere matches for dramatic effect, usually when he is on the verge of kicking some dude's ass. When Young and Cao get on the boat from the train, some guy with acne scars and a fedora eyes them suspiciously. Once they arrive, they walk around a while and watch the local scene. In this way, we learn that Mr. Ta Shan, the kingpin, has organized a syndicate that is driving independent opium dealers out of business. The most prominent independent dealer is Mr. Kwan, who tries to stand up to Ta Shan. At one point, Kwan's men kill one of Ta Shan's men, but Kwan figures it's no big deal because Ta Shan's people end up killing one of his men. No dice - some of Ta Shan's henchmen show up at Kwan's house and ask Kwan to come see Ta Shan's underboss (Mr. Lee, I think). They also dis Kwan's hot sister, who is playing solitaire and pouting. Kwan plays it cool and seems (and looks) sort of like a Chinese Steve McQueen, but when he gets to his sit-down with Lee, Lee is bitching about how his henchman who was killed was carrying all this opium on him, and now it's gone, and what is Kwan going to do about it? And it's tense, because all the guys sitting around the room during this conversation get their swords and nunchakus ready at this moment. So Kwan reaches in his robe (it's weird - some people in this place wear suits and some where kung-fu pajamas), and I thought he was going to pull out a wad of money, but instead he kind of reaches down under the table and grabs his own foot and smashes his shin against the table, totally breaking his leg, to show respect. Then he drags himself out of the place, and you think that is that, but Ta Shan shows up at Lee's pad and says, "What's up with Kwan? I just saw him alive. Take care of it." So Lee sends some guys to take care of it, and they do (although Kwan puts up a good fight for a guy with a shattered tibia - he uses his one crutch as a weapon as though he'd been doing it for years). Young watches this from the bushes, and also sees that a soldier has watched the whole thing without intervening, and afterward the soldier goes to all the bodies (Kwan had some henchmen with him, who got killed) and takes their rings and shit, and then actually cuts out one guy's gold tooth. So in this way, we know that the soldiers who patrol the area are crooked. (At a later point, we will see a soldier who sits on a road with a dog on a chain. Every time some peasant comes by, the soldier makes the peasant stand on all fours so the soldier can sit on his back till the next peasant walks by to relieve the previous peasant. Cao eventually beats the shit out of this soldier and cooks and eats his dog. Young then chops off his head.) At this point, Cao and Young basically start killing everybody - not just Ta Shan's henchmen, but lots of random people also. At one point, Young inexplicably dresses as a blind guy and wanders into some sort of spa. He goes into a room where two guys are soaking in a hot tub and one of them says, "What do you want?" and apparently in this part of China it is customary for blind guys to walk around giving massages, because Young-pretending-to-be-blind says, "Massage?" and the guy in the hot tub is like, "OK," and spreads a towel on the floor to lie on and pulls up a little stepstool for Young-pretending-to-be-blind to sit on while he gives the massage. Oh, and one important thing I forgot to mention is that Young does this shit where he punches guys and holds his fist against them while his knuckles crack, and then the guys die. So Young gives a little shiatsu action to the hot tub guy's legs, then does that to the hot tub guy while massaging him, then also kills the other hot tub guy, and it's not at all clear why these guys had to die. There is also a part where Young and Cao are playing poker at some sort of gambling house, and Young becomes involved in a super-high-stakes game, and when his opponent wins the hand and is about to take all the chips, Young cold-cocks him, then Young and Cao wild out and kill everybody in the joint. Toward the end of the movie, for no apparent reason, there is a random sex scene between Ta Shan and some chick, including a part where the various bustles and folds of her kimono-like garment are shown falling to the floor. After that, Young and Cao finally face off with Ta Shan. Cao battles Ta Shan's best-fighting henchman, who is maybe mentally retarded and definitely has some kind of burns on his face or a skin condition, but is also (naturally) a fierce fighter, and the henchman seems to be getting the better of Cao, and Ta Shan and Young are just sitting there chillaxing and watching the whole thing with nary a thought of stepping in, and Cao is on the ground and the retarded guy does a flying, two-footed kick that is meant to finish Cao, but Cao somehow manages to land a kick first that sends the retarded guy flying backward across the room, and when the retarded guy regains his footing, he is bellowing unintelligibly and assumes a fighting stance, then just dies. This rouses Young and Ta Shan from their torpor and they start fighting, and naturally Ta Shan is the hardest of the hardcore, even though he is about 50 to Young's 28, and even though he is wearing kung-fu pajamas rather than a stylish Savile Row suit. Needless to say, Young eventually triumphs, although not before the fight goes through various rooms. Young's finishing move is sweet because he kicks Ta Shan in the neck with both feet at once and Ta Shan flies out a window. The closing scene is of a steam train. Also, the entire soundtrack is ripped off from Superfly, which is sweet but also disconcerting.

The Street Fighter (1974)

An Okinawan street fighter ("the last of the Okinawan street fighters," as he describes himself) is on death row in Japan (we don't know why). Right before his execution, he's visited by a Buddhist priest for last rites, but the priest is actually this hardcore assassin named Terry something-or-other, and he does some crazy move that will cause the guy to go into a coma in about ten minutes. So the authorities take him to the gallows, and right as he's about to be hanged, he passes out. There's a lawyer there, and he says they have to provide medical care for all prisoners, so the execution is postponed and they put the street fighter in an ambulance. Naturally, Terry and his sidekick attack the ambulance and kidnap the street fighter (who's still unconscious). Why do they do this? Because Terry was paid by the fighter's brother and sister to free him. So Terry revives the guy and sends him off to Hong Kong. Then the brother and sister come around wanting to know where he is, and Terry says, "not till you pay me another 3000 yen." A fight ensues, and Terry ends up throwing the brother out the window to his death, and selling the sister into sex-slavery. Then, while relaxing, Terry sees on the news that some really rich oil tycoon has died of a heart attack in Cairo, and his hot daughter has inherited the whole business. Terry then gets a call from some associate of his, who wants to set up a business meeting with some other people. These people, an old guy and a young woman, who is the boss, want Terry to kidnap the oil tycoon's daughter. Terry asks for more money than they think is appropriate, and wants cash up front, which they won't provide. So he walks out of the meeting. This prompts one of the people, the old guy, to try to kill Terry to keep him from telling about the plan. Terry easily rebuffs his attack and leaves. The young lady is furious and orders the old guy to find and kill Terry. So later, the old guy shows up at Terry's apartment with thugs, all of whom are easily defeated by Terry. He finishes by hitting the old guy with a special punch that makes his teeth come dribbling out of his mouth, and tells the guy to tell the bitch he works for to go fuck herself (or something to that effect). So the old guy goes back to the evil young lady and tells her he could not kill Terry, and she is mad pissed off and shoots the old guy dead. Angered by this whole getting-attacked-at-a-business

-meeting-then-at-his-house business, Terry goes to the oil tycoon's daughter's uncle, who is head of a Karate school, and challenges him to a fight. (Well actually, first Terry breaks into the karate school, kicks the asses of a bunch of karate guys, finds the oil tycoon's daughter, who is on the premises, and tries to kiss her. Then when he is confronted by the uncle, he says he wants to fight. The uncle agrees.) The uncle, who is about fifty and very chunky, is really good and seems to be on the verge of defeating Terry, who fights using a blend of styles and thinks that Karate is bullshit. Just then, the oil tycoon says something about Terry's father, whom the uncle knew during the war (and who first had the idea to combine kung-fu, karate, and a lot of other styles to create an invincible fighter). This prompts a sepia-toned flashback sequence, in which Terry remembers his father being executed by the Japanese (who also insult Terry for being half Japanese and half Chinese), and remembers his father's advice to trust no one and never give up. This memory reinvigorates Terry in his fight with the uncle and he lands some choice blows. The uncle then stops fighting and says, "OK, I get it." Then they sit around while Terry's sidekick puts band-aids on him, and Terry proposes that the uncle hire him to protect the oil tycoon's daughter, which will give Terry the chance to stick it to the evil young lady who tried to have him killed, since he knows she will attempt to abduct the heiress. Terry says at this point that that lady and her people are punks, and he can't stand punks. The uncle agrees, but the tycoon's daughter, who is also there, is appalled and says Terry is a thug. Apparently though, even though she is the one who inherited the oil empire, her karate uncle has the final say. So the next day, Terry and his sidekick are driving behind the oil tycoon's daughter as she goes somewhere, but the evil young lady's forces cleverly box Terry in in traffic, then have a bulldozer pick his car up and drop it off a bridge into a dry ravine. When two thugs come down to the ravine with guns to finish the job, Terry, who was playing dead, is fine and kills them. Naturally, by the time Terry gets his shit together, the oil tycoon's daughter has been kidnapped by the evil young lady's forces. The young lady's forces, it appears, are in league with some Hong Kong mafia guys, one of whom runs a brothel. The Okinawan street fighter has landed somehow as an employee of this brothel (a doorman, sort of) and discovers that his sister has just been purchased by the brothel. He asks the mafia guy owner what he has to do to get his sister out of bondage, and the guy says, "come help me with this abduction of an oil tycoon's heiress," which is a win-win for the street fighter, because Terry will be trying to thwart the abduction, and so he will get to seek revenge for Terry's having sold his sister into sex slavery and killed his brother. So he says yes. Meanwhile, the evil young lady and her whole organization take the oil tycoon's daughter to some kind of mountain hideaway. Terry and his sidekick catch up to them. The heiress waves to them from a window, but in the time it takes Terry and his sidekick to get out of their boat (they came up a river on a boat to find her) and climb up to her window, some guy in a blue tuxedo comes in to rape the oil heiress. (In a turn I don't quite understand, he is the same guy who first raped the Okinawan's sister when Terry sold her into slavery.) Terry hops in the window just in time to kick the guy's ass and actually rip his dick off. He then wipes his hands off thoroughly with the guy's tuxedo jacket and saves the heiress. At this point, despite her earlier misgivings about Terry, and despite having just watched him rip someone's penis off with his bare hands, she seems kind of attracted to him. Unfortunately, by the time he gets her back to the boat, they are set upon by thugs, so Terry sends her with his sidekick in the boat and stays to fight. Eventually, he confronts the mafia guy who runs the brothel , who wears funny gold pajama pants at all times and is a really good fighter. The mafia guy makes a point of saying that he will not use his blue dragon, which is a big knife, and will instead fight Terry with his hands. They start to have a really well-matched fight, but then the evil young lady arrives and has a gun, and Terry is thus taken into custody. They take Terry up to a cliff overlooking the river, tie him to a tree, and hit him a lot with sticks to try to find out where the heiress is. Terry, of course, does not tell them. Just then, the sidekick, who was somewhere else along the river and could hear Terry being beaten, shows up and tries to save Terry by hitting some of his captors with a cudgel (really). This doesn't work, and he is quickly subdued by the mafia brothel owner. The evil lady then takes four of the six bullets out of her gun and tells the sidekick she will shoot Terry Russian roulette style unless he says where the heiress is. Terry orders the sidekick not to speak, but he loves Terry so much (we will later learn that Terry saved his life in Singapore) that he breaks down and says that the heiress is waiting at the next bend in the river. Then the evil lady is about to kill Terry anyway, and the mafia brothel owner says, "he's a fighter, he shouldn't go out like that. Let me kill him with the blue dragon." She says OK, but instead of killing Terry, the mafia guy cuts his ropes with one ferocious swing of the blue dragon, and Terry falls headfirst into the river. During the time that Terry is hurtling headfirst toward certain death, he makes weird kung-fu faces, and in this way we know that he is summoning the strength to survive. Somehow, they decide to let the sidekick go, and he finds Terry and drags him out of the river and of course Terry has survived. Terry, however, is contemptuous toward the sidekick and tells him to go away because he gave up the location of the heiress, which was a dishonorable move. So the evil lady and her crew (including the mafia brothel owner and the Okinawan street fighter) take the heiress onto an oil tanker out at sea. Terry actually manages to follow the evil lady and the heiress right up to the docks, but can't get on the boat with them because he has to fight a blind swordsman (who also was at the brothel earlier). At the beginning of this fight, Terry is wearing awesome goggles, but he takes them off. In the middle of the fight, some random guy on a motorcycle comes along and keeps trying to run into the blind swordsman with his motorcycle. Eventually, the blind swordsman knocks the motorcycle guy off the bike with his sword and goes back to fighting Terry. Terry then kills the blind guy and takes off the motorcycle guy's helmet to see that it was his sidekick, who refused to leave him. The sidekick says some nice stuff, then dies. Terry sheds a single tear. Then Terry gets a motorboat somehow and goes out to the tanker where the oil tycoon's heiress is being held. He gets on and fights a lot of dudes. Meanwhile, somewhere else on the boat, some white guy in a white suit and BluBlockers sunglasses is telling the oil tycoon's daughter that she has to sign over all her interest in the business to him. The evil young lady is there and explains that the white guy has joined her Hong Kong organization, and once the heiress signs, the organization will "control everything." This white guy also mentions that he actually killed the oil tycoon (it wasn't a heart attack). The heiress, who is very petulant, refuses to sign. Just then, Terry busts in. He kills the evil lady and the white guy. There is some other white guy who was in on the whole kidnapping somehow (an American mafia connection, maybe?), and he's trying to shoot Terry when the mafia brothel owner intercedes and says, "This one Okinawan street fighter would really like to fight Terry to settle a grudge. Let's let them fight, fair and square." The other white guy says OK, so Terry and the Okinawan go out onto the ship's deck to fight. Naturally, there is a thunderstorm going on. They fight some, and then the American mafia guy, who has been standing and watching (along with the heiress and the mafia brothel guy) gets impatient with the fight and shoots Terry in the leg. This angers the mafia brothel guy, who promptly kills the American mafia guy with the blue dragon. Terry, gunshot wound notwithstanding, continues to fight. Then, the Okinawan's sister (the one whom Terry sold into sex slavery) appears and tries to kill Terry with a nasty-looking three-pointed knife. Terry easily rebuffs her and knocks the knife away, but with Terry's shot leg slowing him down, the sister manages to pin Terry against a staircase by hugging him the way boxers hug each other when they need a rest from getting pummeled. While Terry is struggling to get her off of him (despite having sold her into slavery earlier, he seems disinclined to hurt her at this point), she shouts and gestures madly at the knife, and her brother the Okinawan street fighter understands that she wants him to stab right through her to get to Terry (there was some dialogue earlier where we learned that her time as a prostitute had made her not want to live except to get revenge). The Okinawan does this, and Terry is pretty badly hurt - he seems to have a punctured lung or something. This allows the Okinawan to knock him down, and it appears that he is about to deliver a death blow. But just as he is about to do a flying leap and land atop the prostrate Terry, Terry manages to lift up one hand and catch the Okinawan by the neck. Then he actually rips the guy's throat out and lies on the deck of the ship with the throat in his right hand while the mafia guy and the heiress look on in horror. Then the movie ends.