Fire Dragon (1983)

 

Director: Chester Wong Chung-Gwong

Cast: Chung Kwan as John; Yi-Chan Lu as Jessie; Chien-Ping Li as Jessie; Hung-Lieh Chen as Sai-ichi; Ti Chin as Wesley; Jackie Chan as Alan (archive footage); Brigitte Lin as Lily (archive footage)

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is nice to know, early in his career, martial arts superstar Jackie Chan’s filmography gets into the more unashamed luridness and exploitation of Hong Kong cinema, where it is not enough to fire guns at a car in the opening scene to kill the driver, but to drop a giant net over it, as nets even confound automobiles let alone human beings, and then blow it up with a rocket launcher. The opening theme is going to break out into Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Hi-NRG dance music, and between this and Fantasy Mission Force (1983), Chan has even in just two films has a surprising amount of times where Nazis have been the villains, which is fitting as, part of its own tradition in this region’s cinema, this shamelessly recycles and re-contextualizes Fantasy Mission Force footage into a new film from the same year that film was released.

That film can be viewed as an early production in the “mo lei tau film” genre which the likes of Stephen Chow became famous for, which as a phrase can be translated as “makes no sense”¹ and in itself explains the tone of Fantasy Mission Force perfectly. That film was already weird and on purpose, with actors abruptly in a variety of costumes from steel helmets to dressing up as Scotsmen in kilts, to its tonal shifts from slapstick comedy to a jarring serious ending with characters dead. Fire Dragon manages to be its own take on what is usually equated to Godfrey Ho and producer Joseph Lai, a duo infamous from this period of re-contextualizing existing or unfinished films into what I have called for myself cut-and-paste ninja films, and here Fire Dragon shows this was something others did themselves, with the added peculiarity that the director of this film, Chester Wong Chung-Gwong, only has this film on their Internet Movie Database page. This possesses the same unpredictability of a Godfrey Ho film, when you can have someone get decapitated underwater abruptly by a motorboat engine passing by, or killers jumping out of birthday cakes to knife someone. The use of Fantasy Mission Force alone, a film where Chan was a comedic side character who took centre stage in the ending, is to the point of retelling a new story from it even when it makes no sense to, the scenes involving a haunted house of real ghosts from the previous film, strange in themselves, more strange here to use to introduce the characters, leading to actually bizarre results.

There is new footage here, a plot involving Chinese Nazis, nefarious individuals connected to two new heroes to fight them, a man and a woman, whilst the original cast of Fantasy Mission Force (including Brigitte Lin, a star in her own right including in Wong Kar-Wai films) are reused and attempted to be linked to as a band of criminals after gold. Jackie Chan gets ridiculous dubbing here as in the older film, more goofball with random blues guitar licks scoring his fight scenes here rather than the Godfrey Ho-like English dubbing he got earlier, reintroduced as in FMF fighting an evil sumo for his first scenes. It is clear this also comes when Chan started becoming a big name in his homeland, as there is a stand-in used in scenes whose face we never seen, even introduced in a room with posters and photos of Chan himself from other films used for the close-up shots instead of an actual face. Martial arts cinema had done this before Fire Dragon with Bruce Lee after his abrupt death in 1973, but there were actual actors playing Lee such as Bruce Lai as “Bruceploitation” stars, with their faces seen, which makes Fire Dragon a very odd contrast especially in mind that, decades after this film, Chan was very much alive and breaking in Hollywood by the nineties.

Adding to the strangeness is that this stunt double, alongside weaving new footage around Fantasy Mission Force (and old costumes from that film), does their own elaborate fight scenes with comedy and that blues lick. That is certainly memorable, and it explains touches like having the Nazis, or that they have women in cave women costumes, even fighting to the death, reflecting the scene where the leads (as reused here) encounter a village of Amazons. Fantasy Mission Force was already a bizarre film, and needing to match the footage here for a new narrative, the results get even weirder at times here even if they co-exist as equals in different ways of strangeness. It is also clear this managed to even access unused footage, or more versions of Fantasy Mission Force exist, as there are a few scenes that I never saw and feel hallucinated from out takes there, like torture involving German shepherds licking one’s feet on pain of a metal ball hitting repeatedly in the head when you twitch your legs back. There is also an attempt, not well, to link such scenes, such as the potential death by snu snu with regular sized, petite model-like Amazons for one too-lucky male figure. Fire Dragon, for someone not used to this type of cinema from Hong Kong, would not be viewed as good film making, not how cinema is meant to be constructed this way. Even Bernard Hermann’s legendary shower scene score for Psycho (1960) is used at one point, this region of martial arts cinema its own mad delirium that has to be accepted on its own terms.

It is the kind of film you still also have to admire for the chutzpah, where people were still filmed as extras on crucifixes at the Nazi camp, there just because as set dressing even if it would have cost more to film than add more spare old footage, the logic not found yet still earnestly trying to be entertaining if still exploitation. The story is thread bare, and yet as a Frankenstein’s project to retell a new film with vast limits of new footage, that in itself if you are prepared becomes the pleasure in its own form, the mechanizations of trying to make a new film from an old one like an experimental game, including the Jackie Chan factor, adding to the curiosity factor.

Abstract Spectrum: Random/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1)      Stephen Chow & Hong Kong Mo Lei Tau Comedy, written by Nick Dodet and published for Pig China on March 8th 2016.