Fearless Tiger (1991)

 

Director: Ron Hulme

Screenplay: Ron Hulme, J. Stephen Maunder and Jalal Merhi

Cast: Jalal Merhi as Lyle Camille; Monika Schnarre as Ashley; Lazar Rockwood as Saalamar; Jamie Farr as Sam Camille; Bolo Yeung as Master on Mountain; K. Dock Yip as Do Man; Sonny Onoo as Peng; Glenn Kwann as Boh; Jean Frenette as Jacques

Ephemeral Waves

 

All you think about is entering those *stupid* tournaments and chewing that *stupid* gum!

 

At one point, I was collecting a lot of second hand DVDs in the martial arts genre. Storage lead to many being sold off, the physical limits of what you can access always an inherent problem especially when, even if not the best of films, these titles in themselves are still fascinating as historical objects. I admit as well a changing taste at the time too, but I also admit regret with this. Many of them were, frankly, not masterpieces and represented within the martial arts genre how, when the genre took hold, these films were continually made. Godfrey Ho, including his regular martial arts films before the infamous cut-and-paste ninja films, was a regular on shelves of second hand stores at one point where I come from, but so were the many Western straight-to-video productions of the nineties and eighties. I have to be careful with my words as Fearless Tiger represents the Canadians entering the genre, rather than the Americans as I always presumed before.

Certainly returning to this film, when as well I always thought the DVD copy I had was no longer playable due to not being even able to scroll on the DVD menu to press play, it is amazing to think that the straight-to-video era had as many tangents as it had. Even an ultra obscure film like this offers a history in itself as I kept crossing paths onscreen with the figure who, the lead figure here, appeared as a side character in other straight-to-video films I found second hand from a DVD distributor calling themselves Hollywood Films in Britain. That figure was Jalal Merhi, who played a greater part in the gestation of the likes of this to a film called Talons of the Eagle (1992) that Hollywood Films released in the early years of the British DVD industry. A Brazilian-Canadian of Lebanese descent, his role here is oddly autobiographical. Here he is a graduating student who decides to reject a job at his father's lucrative business to invest in becoming a better martial arts practitioner in Hong Kong, especially in mind to his younger brother dying of a drug overdose. Merhi himself invested the original business he was in, jewellery selling, to found Film One Productions, where he would produce and direct films as well as star in them.

His debut onscreen is a simple premise. As long as drugs are seen as a taboo, so films like this exist, where a secret drug dealing organisation lead by Saalamar (Lazar Rockwood), masquerading as monks who compete in martial arts fighting competitions, are creating a type of opium flake called "Nirvana". Merhi's lead is pulled in when his brother tragically dies from an overdose, being brought over to Hong Kong by police detective Peng (Sonny Onoo) to train with his teacher, wishing to find himself in the wake of his loss, and being pulled further into Saalamar's territory. If I am to be blunt, Fearless Tiger is a pretty dry film. The martial arts in adequate, and the plot progression, including an underground tournament on a ring in the middle of the Hong Kong woodlands, are hurdled through quickly. The acting including by Merhi varies considerably, and feels like a film churned out from the middle of a wave of countless martial arts films made at the time. (In fact, for the latter, it is the police offices in the Hong Kong police force with Peng, when it was still part of the British Commonwealth, which came off the broadest of the lot).

Far more interesting to view a film like this through is by the figures that drift through them. This is Merhi's first film, so the most prominent name is martial arts actor Bolo Yeung. Distinct with his barrel chest, even if he keeps his shirt on here, it is a change for him to not be playing a villain but instead a master for Merhi to learn from. Sadly, he is only in two scenes, never having any real importance to the film baring teaching Merhi how to catch steel balls. Only a peculiar scene of he and Merhi training with a woman, playing Yeung's daughter (never seen again after) doing dance poses between them all lets the cult actor have any real fun in the film. His involvement did however kick the door open for the likes of Billy Blanks and Cynthia Rothrock, alongside Yeung himself in meatier roles, in later Film One productions, so this was a necessary start.

The cast here, whilst obscurer, is a peculiar one to say the least. Sticking out like a gaunt Billy Drago, just from his coloured headbands, is Lazar Rockwood as a main villain who never gets into a fight, is not in the final confrontation at all (when Merhi has to fight one of his minions instead) and abruptly leaving the film, but is still compelling. Rockwood, as a Yugoslavian-Canadian actor with a small filmography, would have passed me by as a younger man with significantly less knowledge of cult films, but is more meaningful knowing how, bizarre, he got here from Beyond the 7th Door (1987), a peculiar micro-budget film that sticks out in no genre, a proto-Saw thriller where Lockwood (with his idiosyncratic acting style) has to survive through traps in a mansion, with puzzles to solve some, for a fortune.

Probably more perplexing for me, now as a wiser person, is that Peng is played by Sonny Onoo. Onoo is not Chinese, but Japanese American, and if you draw a little moustache on him and give him sunglasses, he becomes the prominent non-ring character for the professional wrestling company World Championship Wrestling who he began working for over many years. His character sadly played to anti-Japanese sentiment for the Southern based company, with the unfortunate end of his role there suing a writer named Vince Russo for racial discrimination, but Onoo is a fondly remembered figure to older wrestling fans. Alongside the fact he would be the on-screen manager to Japanese wrestlers who were likely first seen for the first time by American viewers, legends of the profession including female Japanese wrestlers considered some of the best of any gender, it is surreal to see him here. Seeing Onoo, as Peng, not only show some martial arts skill as well as show his charisma, including a constant smirk he would use in his more well know acting role, is stupefying to witness, and a really fascinating example of pop culture filtering into each other.

As a film, Fearless Tiger is a slight martial arts film. The quality of the fight scenes, even in just the context of American films from the time, is average and it does in context feel like a tentative push into a genre from an outsider. The underground fighting tournament, where death is apparently common, feels instead like a jaunt in the woods baring being kicked in the head in matches and some gambling. It knows it is goofy sometimes, for in the final act a hostage negotiation transpires in an art gallery, and sometimes it probably did not, when as Merhi first goes after the drug dealers, you have a stereotypical edgy metal bar where the trash metal playing is a ridiculous song of the era about the ordinary dulled working person being a "bad dog". Surrounding a specialist drug hidden in cheap Buddhist statues, this does not change the wheel at all in its genre, but feels with hindsight to its origins like a small company, and Merhi himself, trying his hardest to get into this industry. He eventually would succeed as this production company would continue on in the nineties, and as much because of the back-story of binging on these types of films at the time, I find myself becoming fonder of a movie like this.