"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Alex Man’

Bastard Swordsman

Thursday, May 29th, 2025

BASTARD SWORDSMAN is a 1983 Shaw Brothers production that tells the story of Yun Fei Yang (Norman Chui, HEROES OF THE EAST, ZU WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN), a miserably treated servant of the Wudang kung fu school. He cleans floors and delivers soup and stuff but also in the opening scene the motherfuckers make him run around holding wooden targets for knife practice. When he complains that they’re throwing the knives at him instead of the targets he gets chewed out and called a bastard.

“You can beat me, but don’t call me bastard,” he says, so they immediately beat him and call him a bastard. Sister Lun Wan Er (Leanne Liu, HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD), daughter of the chief and only female student at Wudang, not only intervenes but brings him to the Hall of Justice to report what they’re doing to him to the uncles. She means well but all it does is get him dressed down some more and told “You’re being unreasonable.”

When Sister says the uncles are being unfair one o them says, “Nonsense. If we were unfair would the chief assign us to be guardians of the law?” In other words authority is always correct by reason of being authority. And authority has decided that the bullies get to keep bullying but Yun Fei Yang has to carry fifty water pails a day. (read the rest of this shit…)

China White

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

CHINA WHITE (1989) is the movie where Ronny Yu tackles the ’80s Hong Kong gangster genre that we all fell in love with when we found out about John Woo, Ringo Lam and those guys. Like A BETTER TOMORROW or BULLET IN THE HEAD it chronicles the tragic rise and fall melodrama of dashing young anti-heroes who run a criminal empire and care about family and loyalty and what not. Like CITY ON FIRE it deals with somebody undercover getting too close to a crook, but in this case it’s a female informant falling in love with a guy who she doesn’t know is bad (so, a little bit like THE KILLER). But along with these standard genre themes we have the strongest example so far of Yu’s international world view.

That’s because it takes place in Amsterdam, where the Chow brothers, Bobby (Russell Wong, ROMEO MUST DIE, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR) and Danny (Steven Vincent Leigh, RING OF FIRE, SWORD OF HONOR) have made a home, but must make peace or war with gangs of other nationalities. They’re most threatened by the Italians, led by Scalia (Billy Drago shortly before DELTA FORCE 2). This is a cutthroat internationalism, but Yu sees opportunity for these immigrants, and seems to come out in favor of cross-cultural/interracial relationships. (read the rest of this shit…)