Ninja Dragon (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit and Godfrey Ho

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon; Paulo Tocha as Paul; Pierre Tremblay as Pierre; Chung Tien Shih; Jean Tang; Tien Miao; Hsieh Wang

Canon Fodder

 

Benjamin-chan, that sort of thing went out with the ark.

Whilst Ninja Terminator is a more infamous film, and has the more compellingly weird content, there was a time I liked Ninja Dragon more even if surprisingly drier in comparison, owned back in the days when not only these films were second DVDs which got their own martial arts section in second hand stores, but that two sided DVDs were commonplace. The reason, to immediately get to the point, is that when Godfrey Ho and his producer at a time Joseph Lai started buying up pre-existing and even unfinished Asian films, and cutting them together with newly filmed footage for the eighties ninja craze,  Ninja Dragon's source material would have been fascinating to see as it was originally.

They used some odd choices, not just martial arts films but a variety of genres for stranger results, but Hei juan tao (1982), the source film, would be interesting for me to see as it was intended. Immediately, as a Taiwanese production, this is from the final years of the Taiwanese black cinema movement, genre films from the country which could vary between films with legitimate political themes and/or pure exploitation, Hei juan tao showing this with the nude scenes it has. In fact, with the knowledge of the movement, and seeing the down-to-earth film here being used, the ninja footage does feel exemplary in its bright and gaudy nature. It does even add charm due to this odd juxtaposition of tones now as a result, from seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where ninja master where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with

In fact, the ninja footage really does feel exemplary adding to the charm of seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with gang leader Paul (Paulo Tocha) attempting to take over in power and wealth among their peers, cutting to the original source film. The leader of a gang called the Black Tigers, Ronald, is murdered on Paul's orders by his group and his henchman Mr. Fox, with his oldest daughter Phoenix taking over with a figure called Dragon the aloft man at her side. With the other group attempting to bump them off, from trying to kill Dragon with his door booby trapped with a rifle or kidnapping Phoenix's younger sister Fanny, Dragon will have to help from moles and turncoats in their own group too wishing to help Mr. Fox and Paul. As with all Ho ninja films, the two worlds are disconnected, even if they cut to close ups to Harrison's face and splice them in to footage talking to the main actor of the original film, or have Paulo Tocha spliced in shooting the heads off flowers for target practice with his own minions.

Ninja Dragon is a drier viewing experience but it has its charm, even in something that is inherently part of these films in their contraction, such as the dubbing and writing of new dialogue to make this all have "sense", characters in these films with quasi-English accents from the then-British commonwealth Hong Kong having their own weird charm, and English language names and a tendency for calling people "bastards" to go along with this. The one major difference here with this film is that Hei juan tao was not even a martial arts picture, instead a crime narrative where conflicts were resolved with guns and shooting people, meaning that the ninjas involved and all being (mostly) Western white men is surreal to consider as a juxtaposition. In fact this film even takes this aspect of these films, which were churned out by Lai and Ho at the time each year, to an added subjective tone in that the Ninja Masters live in their own heightened world of politics and high tier intrigue, only pushing pawns outside their own worlds with phone calls.

Enough is to be found in the source material itself that does have some unintentional humour, such as the fact (when it happens twice) that people will bash their own skulls in on rock (or gravestones) to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner, but this is one of the most straightforward and sombre narratives to latch ninjas upon. It does change how to view the film as, even with some of its broader moments, it is much more grounded then some of the stranger films. It even has more subplots and narrative complexity then others, which adds a great deal, such as Paul's gang having a mole kindly helping the Black Tigers or the figure of Benny, at first the comedic foil trying to woo Phoenix, even in something misguided as hiring goons to pretend to threaten her for a fake rescue, only to become a creepy whose involvement in the narrative adds an unexpected turn. That this is a Taiwanese film, from a crop of genre films that were made before the Taiwan government cracked down on them and the Taiwanese New Wave of art films came to be, now adds a greater weight as, for all the ones which were just pulp, this has their grounded and gritty tone even in its action, the matter-of-factness of the confrontations and ploys by the gangs standing out now for me.

Even the great music choices "borrowed" from other sources are deep cuts, as the main theme for this film, at least the ninja training sequences with Richard Harrison, is from the anime film called The Dagger of Kamui (1985), a sadly obscure theatrical anime by the veteran director Rintaro which was befittingly a period ninja epic.  This film Ninja Dragon, surprisingly, even has an unexpected twist which shows the source film used was a bit more creative, a wedding reception leading to a tragedy and a bleak ending even if Ho includes a ninja battle to leave the film patrons happy. That even that ninja fight has its own charm, set among urban Hong Kong and still having talented martial artists in the ridiculous ninja costumes fight, shows that this is one of the times Ho's weird logic with Joseph Lai to make these films, whilst still an awkward creation, almost makes sense when it works as here. This is definitely a film you visit later into your obsession with Godfrey Ho, as you do not get as much as the absurd lunacy that made these cut-and-paste ninja films notorious. It was one of the first I ever saw, and did leave a good impression, but I will admit that, if you were to even to attempt to argue for these films, this was one of the many he and Joseph Lai churned out should be one of the later ones to visit. It is, however, one of the ones which I can argue is legitimately entertaining though too, and I am only arguing for seeing later as, whilst more accessible, you need to understand the weird world of these films by jumping on a Ninja Terminator, then seeing how these films could have almost seemed a sane concept when one like this actually works.

Taiwan Black Movies Part 3

 

Taiwan Black Movies (2005)

Director: Hou Chi-jan

Since I have quoted this documentary throughout these reviews about Taiwan genre movies, I should cover this even though, as previously mentioned, its structure for myself makes it difficult to critique. As it is a talking head production with clips of films, I find that it is hard to scrutanise a production where all the content is less in in-depth subtext but the information being carried forwards.

It is nonetheless a document of great interest, one I wished had been longer as it tackles its subject where, after Never Too Late to Repent (1979) became a success, suddenly there were so many films made in its wake that, as one editor explains, he could be working on fourteen films at the same time. Or that real world gangsters wished to work on these films, starring as extras and even bending producers' arms for money to film in downtown Taiwan. A lot of the film is about the distributors continually dodging the censors, including a montage of censored scenes, an issue that eventually lead to government intervention which stopped this movement.

This is sad. Alongside those I have seen, there are films shown in the documentary which shown various tangents in these genres films which entice - Queen Bee (1981) a martial arts film where the female lead has bees tattooed to her collar bone and chest; Girl with a Gun (1983), where the documentary has a gruesome but compelling sequence from the film where the female lead is cutting up and disposing of a body, which cuts to reverse negative in the midst of for haunting effect; the evocatively titled Gunshot at 6 o'Clock in the Morning (1979); and Girls' Concentration Camp (1983), which in the trailer shown looks the most lurid, as a Taiwanese women in prison film with all the clichés, but as a film from that country is immediately interesting to see for any cultural differences.

On the other hand, this censorship is talked of, alongside these genre films already burning out by 1981, having led to the New Taiwan Cinema of 1982 onwards existing. So this means, whilst we lost this original movement, we got instead the likes of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, so one would not want to change time and lose films like A Brighter Summer's Day (1991). In hindsight, the only thing I would wish to have been different if that this original movement of genre films had gotten recognition much quicker, so many survived in better quality than what we got. None so more than the last film cover...

*****

On the Society File of Shanghai (1981)

Director: Chu-Chin Wang

Screenplay: Yung-Hsiang Chang and Ching Wang

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Fu-Mei Chang, Chi-Chun Chen, Yung-Hsiang Chin, Ji-Chi Chou, Chieh Huang                          

 

Contextually based on "scar literature", anti-Maoist literature which came in the late seventies soon after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, the first scenes of Society File is of men trying to flee mainland China only to be captured by the leaders and called unpatriotic, emphasising this point. This follows a trend of these films avoiding their Taiwanese culture, here setting itself in China where the main narrative follows the story of Li Li-Fang (Hsiao-Fen Lu), a female suspect in a stabbing of a military chief's son, a figure with a scar on her forehead, and scars on her chest and lower belly which alongside her demeanour leaves the investigating detective Mr. Shung and his younger male assistant curious to how she ended up this way. Against the will of their seniors who just want to throw the book at her, they wish to work backwards and learn why this young woman is even in this scenario.

Set in 1960, cutting to the summer of 1969 too, the film builds a narrative from flashbacks about Li-Fang's downfall, trying to learn why a woman who was a nurse suddenly contributed to the son of a major figure being stabbed by multiple men on her prompt, especially a person by the name of Wang she was close to. This films exists in how Taiwan, with its uneasy relationship with China over the years, wished to view its communist neighbours and their ideology next to their capitalist culture, though the result has much more nuisance than this even if by accident. It has absurdities, the female teacher of Li's old school, Principal Wong, is forced to wear a dunce's cap and work by young Maoists in blue uniform, broad caricature between them, whilst however contrasting this with a more profound image, of an old senile man at said abandoned school changing "Long live Chairman Mao" in his chair outside. Or Mr. Shung existentially wondering how the ideals he exited with has lost its way among broken windows and abandoned old buildings where he tells his assistant these concerns.

It is definitely a drama as much as a genre film, as alongside Li-Wang and the man she had stabbed Wang being half siblings to different mothers, the Principal his own dismissed and divorced as a bad element by his military father, there is the more sombre plot of how Li-Fang went as a nurse in 1969 to tend old figures of power in a building of rest, retired suddenly and is shown to be in a less emotionally healthy state moving back into her father's workplace. Gender politics plays into the narrative too, with her being told to marry a doctor twice her age on her father's encouragement. Her new husband is shown as being spineless and her father becoming paranoid and abusive when it is realised she is not a virgin before her wedding day. The plot reveal is not that difficult to realise - [Major Spoiler Warning] that she was raped by one of the old military members whilst caring for him as a nurse [Spoilers End] - but the build to the truth does take this seriously in between its pieces of genre storytelling, such as how most of the scars (including one she inflicts on herself) are in scenes of pure shock value. It is a compelling melodramatic film because it does take its subject seriously.

It's use of a very well worn archetype, an older and wider detective, helps immensely as a plot point as Mr. Shung becomes the compelling and sympathetic lynchpin alongside Li-Fang, always carrying a pipe with him, and showing both the wariness of his work but the skill he has acquired over the years, such as an unprofessional but blunt way to deal with a prisoner feigning madness by opening a window encouraging him to jump. Li-Fang herself, a figure as much of others' recollection as seen, is just as distinct, on one hand powerful but the other broken, actress Hsiao-Fen Lu committing to the performance. When the film does finally answer the question it has built up to, why she has ended up arrested and on trial for murder, it is a tragedy. Returning to its source, it does come off as an anti-communist China film, arguably propagandist, but more meaningful than this to a much symbolic idea of how power in general corrupts.

Also in a less then stellar print in the version I saw, looking like a VHS scan with burnt on English subtitles, On the Society File of Shanghai nonetheless closed the book on a fascinating festival of films on the right note, with the fact that that they were from a movement I had never heard of having a richer profoundness. All of them were rewarding, all sadly difficult to access and, with their restorers having to use what survives, cursed to their disadvantage in a world of smoothing over the past, a hurdle in the way of their greater access as these films, for the open minded to their scars, all have something interesting to see both as genre films and in what they were tapping into culturally as Taiwan Black Cinema chronicles. As time capsules, before the New Taiwanese Cinema came in 1982, they are enlightening.

Taiwan Black Movies Part 2

 

The Lady Avenger (1981)

Director: Chia-Yun Yang

Screenplay: Yun Chu and Kang-Nien Li

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Lun Hua, Nien-Kuo Kao, Hsiao-Ling Hsu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Hsuan Lung

 

Can't forget that strange image, won't let me...

Barely surviving oblivion, viewing The Lady Avenger was a reminder why film preservation is important, and in this case, you sadly see the handicaps of films having to be "perfect" when one like this had to be preserved from a very battered and scratched print, which will be a hindrance in giving The Lady Avenger a wider availability. This is sadder as this is a Taiwanese entry in the contentious "rape and revenge" genre however directed by a woman, Chia-Yun Yang, adding a different context alongside turning into one of the strongest films I saw from a collection of Taiwanese genre films.

Chia-Yun Yang, who is interviewed in the documentary Taiwan Black Movies (2005), was a script supervisor amongst many roles before she became a director of films like this, which was a production where the script was being worked on whilst being shot as she described in the documentary. It is however compelling from the get-go as a lurid pulp film still pointedly relevant in its subject, the soundtrack already strange and intense, befitting a bizarre opening where a sexist commercial is being shot where, even when shot in the back with a gun, a woman would still crawl and reach out for a cosmetics product.

Said actress named Chu storms off the set, only to be raped by the male driver she hitchhikes with, all within a sequence where you find, even in its lurid tone, the sympathy is on the female cast as, running from him in the muddy countryside, all the violence is ugly when happening to the female cast. Attempting to get a trial set up against him, the bias against this woman, including the actress likely to lose her reputation even if she was to win, is uncomfortably potent still decades later, especially as with the point made that the perpetrator also happens to be from a rich family, this film not feeling alien to a post-MeToo movement that transpired in the late 2010s at all. Even after that movement lead to woman speaking up of previous real molestation and sexual violence against them from powerful figures, this Taiwanese b-movie still possesses salient comments or moments which sadly are still relevant today.

Step in the real lead, a female reporter named Hsu, tackling the case only for Chu to not be held up as a highly moral and loose woman, even by Hsu's male fiancée, and the trial to go against her. Even when Chu tried to get revenge by knife, her body is found days later washed up and the shore and, as Hsu digs and openly taunts the male perpetrator, she is becoming more of a target. Even in this pulpy narrative that comes after though, this is taking the material seriously even in its heightened tone, uncomfortable and eventually nightmarish when Hsu unfortunately encounters four drunken men. It is a long sequence what transpires as, the film requiring a trigger warning for anyone interested in the film, she attempts to escape them through a grungy urban environment and fights back, long but to the point that, when it is not possible, the film tastefully cuts away and you get the impact of what has happened. That this was a set up by the rich man of before sets up the genre plot but does not demean how the film tells the story.

Even the song that plays afterwards is used fully to represent the lingering agony, the same words repeating in the shower for Hsu. It is an exaggerated film but the content is still strong, when she gets drunk and, despite the over-the-top drunken acting from lead Lu Hsiao-Fen, you get in the space of a few minutes someone being unable to tell her fiancée she has been raped without pain, and becoming traumatised to the point she would rather be drunk. That the fiancée himself is more concerned about saving face, twisting a metaphorical knife in, makes it worse; it is to the point that, destroyed and a woman devoured by revenge by the end, Hsu and he have long split up and a haunting image of them passing each other on an escalator in opposite directions takes place much later in the film, he already with another woman in a separate life again.

You can argue that, getting to the action tropes as she picks off the assailants, and the villain is trying to get rid of her, it undermines the point, but in context, you accept this as a heightened reality appropriate to tackle the subject. Those revenge scenes are fantastical - a poor stunt man is hung upside down by a leg off a crane on top of a building, whilst there is a repeating shot of a giant gory splash of fake gore, deep red, hitting on white which fits the film's mood. Even its music, between a sad solo saxophone, to electronic droning synth and guitar, is a bar higher than many genre films in turning uncomfortable and real subject matter into a primal scream, where every detail keeps you on your toes.

Even with the first images being a montage of all the revenge scenes out of context, gut stabbings to recreating the Most Dangerous Game in the woods, The Lady Avenger despite its sadly battered and mangled presentation befits the hyper-potent tone of a film whose luridness actually makes such uncomfortable subject matter more meaningful. This, even with some strong films I saw, was the one above them all I was blown away with from this batch of movies.

*****

Never Too Late to Repent (1979)

a.k.a. The First Error Step

Director: Yang-Ming Tsai

Screenplay: Yen-Ping Chu

Based on the memoirs of Sha Ma

Cast: Sha Ma, Hui-Shan Yang, Hsiu-Shen Liang, Hsiao-Fei Li, Min-Lang Li, Chi Wang, Mo-Chou Wang, Hsiu Chuan Yang

For a completely different tone, we get to the film argued in Taiwan Black Movies as the catalyst for this movement of Taiwanese genre cinema. Lead Sha Ma, introducing the film in narration, says he is not an actor as the scene presents him in a prison being lead along in chains by guards. In truth, whilst he would eventually become a prolific actor (including in Woman Revenger (1981)) Sha Ma was a reformed criminal turned author who in this fictionalised take on his life tells a cautionary tale of a man, within genre tropes, ending up incarcerated and the hard climb back up to salvation. In this film's case, whilst working at a brothel, when upon being stabbed multiple times by a surly gangster with their gang, even losing a finger to the blade in the process, he went beyond self defence to stabbing the man to death with a giant sharpened pole-like object. The film is fictionalised - Taiwan Black Movies, with one of its interviews, reveals that Sha Ma was charged for "obscenity" - but that does not stop the film as an interpretation of this real man's life from being compelling.  

Tragically as well, this is another film only surviving from very damaged materials, with the version I saw battered and with a lot of the sound track lost, only with the relief that it is not the whole film, just snatches, and that this proves that the visuals of a film can still tell a story even muted, like Sha Ma being bullied the moment he is put in a group cell. Early on, the film plays out as a prison escape film, including tools being hidden in food for the cellmates, including a comedic rotund figure named Chicken who bumbles through the escape plan. It even has a much more creative ways of drawing straws, writing numbers on torn up pieces of paper, to order who goes first to last to get through the window they spend days removing the bars from, with money for everyone to use if they manage to all flee.

However, despite escaping briefly and even meeting his real father, a man abandoned and left to be looked after by his grandmother in his back story, Sha Ma is eventually back in jail and even shipped off to Orchid Island, a literally island compound for re-education. It is a place closer to military training, but the film is not about anti-authority or crime pulp, whilst the later is occasionally seen, but a tale of a man now on the path to redemption, starting with the island being ran by a former classmate who wishes to help him. The film is instead a drama more than a genre film, but that is not a bad thing. Never Too Late to Repent was held in high regard, against quoting Taiwan Black Cinema, because it tackled subjects that were never seen before in Taiwanese films considered taboo, such as the narrative drifting into locations like brothels and especially tackling the Taiwanese prison system, particularly as the real narrative is that Ma Sha's fictionalised life eventually tackles the stigma of being a criminal even when you have reformed.

Be it being picked on by police when a crime is committed by someone else, or being fired when people see Ma Sha's tattoos, the real man's full body ones striking and likely to have stigmatised him in real life, the final quarter which deals with the hardness of ordinary life outside of prison is the most rewarding passage. With happiness marriage but even a simple job of selling magazines on the street needing a license, it offers a distinct change of pace to a drama about a criminal seeing one try his hardest to redeem himself but the society around him completely unfair in its structure. This is all melodramatic, but in melodrama, you still reach a meaningful conclusion which is a triumphant ending here. The genre tropes, as in Western melodrama, allows for intensity, here as he goes alongside his way to reforming and becoming an author, literally bleeding onto his art and actually bleeding his own manuscript as a result of a fight when defending a woman. As a non-actor, Sha Ma is charismatic, and in mind these genre films were meant to be "social realist", Never Too Late to Repent definitely shows the template for what this genre was originally meant to be, showing real Taiwan by way of genre plotting. I can see how, even if sadly underappreciated to the point it only survives in a damaged form, why people in its home land praise it in Taiwan Black Movies, and how it kicked off a movement of similar films.

To Be Continued...

Taiwan Black Movies Part 1

Introduction:

The following is based upon an online, free-to-watch streaming festival from the Anthology Film Archive, which screened between the 2nd to the 15th December 2020¹. This multi-part review as a result, covering five films and a documentary, is as much a time capsule, a diary, to remember this event as it is a review covering these films.

Attempting to review the documentary Taiwan Black Movies (2005), a production by Hou Chi-Jan about an hour or so long about a period of Taiwanese genre films made from 1979 to 1982/3, will be difficult to review fully for me personally. Talking head documentaries for me are difficult as they are very much analytical pieces, talking to figures from this era and film critics, but it is a great guide to these films, a cultural landmark that was entirely unknown to me. Sadly, it was not appreciated and rediscovered until a time later, having to be preserved from immensely damaged materials in many cases, a hindrance in a 4k fixated world for cultural growth. Taiwan Black Movies does point out that, from first film being Never Too Late to Repent (1979), they were made as pulp, enticing with lurid content particularly in terms of female nudity, but they had much more in hindsight in their meaning.

******

 

The Challenge of the Lady Ninja (1983)

Director: Tso Nam Lee

Screenplay: Hsin-Yi Chang and Hsin Wei

Cast: Hui-Shan Yang, Kuan Tai Chen, Yun-Peng Hsiang, Yi-Tao Chang, Ying-Chi Chang, Kai-Chun Chen, Sung Young Chen, Yi-Chun Chiang

 

What, a whore can't love her country?

Contextually the first of these films I saw may seem an outlier to that introduction, as it is closer to something I am very familiar with, as The Challenge of the Lady Ninja is not only a martial arts film, but belonging to a type I have bought old second hand DVDs of countless times in my past. Not just Godfrey Ho films but the many martial arts films which have always been a huge market, made in this era not only in Hong Kong but in countries like South Korea and Taiwan. This could have easily appeared on one of those DVDs, its premise a clear one - in a period setting, in the midst of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the opening scene has a figure named Li Tong betray his country for the Japanese imperial army, his uncle being killed. This slain man's daughter Xiaohui, learning the gifts of the Iga ninja clan in Japan whilst this is happening, returns to her home for revenge and patriotism.

This patriotic side, where she joins the Anti-Traitor Squad against Li Tong and his four unconventional bodyguards, does develop a new meaning when you learn, as documented in Taiwan Black Movies, the Taiwanese genre films started borrowing ideas from "patriotism" films to avoid controversy in their more explicit content. Despite a lead taught magic Japanese ninjutsu, from a ninja clan who do not discriminate against a Chinese woman good enough to pass their ultimate text, and oppose militarism contrary to their country's behaviour, as a result of this tone we end up with a film very anti-Japanese at least in them being moustache twirling villains. It definitely feels out of place among a movement which pushed for "social realist" genre films, but again one has to be reminded these were still genre films to sell. The evocation of Godfrey Ho, who is held as a notorious director, is not an insult as not only are the coloured smoke bombs used through something he (and the films by his frequent producer  Joseph Lai) was obsessed with especially in his infamous cut-and-paste ninja films, but one evokes the pure manic unpredictability of lower budget martial arts films particularly from their group, the sound effects of swords clashing enough in themselves to evoke the numerous I have binged in over the years.

Xiaohu's final test in her introduction does immediate shown this - spinning to change your red ninja costume to a pink bikini to seductively win over four male ninja, only for this to be an illusion that explodes; fake hand decoys to chop off; shadow clones; even a final part which involves an actual puzzle, of acquiring the prize out of a tube too long to reach by hand. Throughout the film you can suddenly have tangents involving unexpected techniques and fights transpiring: a moment requiring someone having to be poisoned involved letting the woman tasked to the job of seducing have multiple back up contingencies and even poisoned fake front teeth, and the final fight even includes the act of spinning deep into the ground and charge your opponent under the soil like a giant mole. The main conceit as well is that, with emphasis on the men being doubtful the women are able to get the job done, Xiaohui not only disproves them by training a small band of women, including Zhi Zhi the sex worker and an acrobat, but that they are better at the job, especially after training. Said training, involving painful limb stretching exercises with ropes pulling one's limbs, to seduction training, where using editing the women can create seductive illusions of themselves that can also explode, feels just on the sane side of a type of cinema which, to use a Godrey Ho example from one of his films, where he had a lead learn to be a better martial artist by kicking mirrors.

Li Tong's bodyguards are a trope in martial arts cinema themselves, of figures with distinct abilities from a female fighter, or a man armed with a razor sharp boomerang and net, to the most prominent, a man with a sky blue scorpion tattoo that goes down from his bald head to where his eyebrows should be like they are painted on. The four even get, long after their introductions shots, out of time against black, footage showing their techniques fighting people. The film does become conventional as it goes along, which is Lady Ninja's biggest flaw but not one which does any real damage to the film, merely that there is a bit of predictability among what is the more overtly genre structured film of those I saw.

Even if set in, say, the nineteen forties the hair and the headbands are of the eighties, and undeniably this was a film made to entertain, a film that can abruptly include a fight scene between two women in an oil filled ring, which does have a kinky edge in their leotards until it gets ugly and violent, and plenty of deeply silly material trying to side with a film meant to be taken seriously as there is drama in these characters fighting a force in the Japanese Imperial Army which is all powerful. You see the tug and pull between what this movement was here as, undeniably, this production was entirely for entertainment, some of which is just lurid, but also means we have the sense of unpredictability from these martial arts films that I grew to enjoy amongst these production issues.

*******

Woman Revenger (1981)

a.ka. The Nude Body Case in Tokyo

Director: Yang-Ming Tsai

Screenplay: Chen Kuo Tai and Chen-hsiang Tai

Cast: Hui-Shan Yang, Te-Kai Liu, Sha Ma, Emily Y. Chang, Yi-Fung Lu

Woman Revenger also feels part of the films closer to pulp then this movement's shift to "social realist" genre films, belaying an attempt of mirroring a world where, when made, Taiwan was experiencing political upheavals in the late seventies to the early eighties, from the United States officially ending their relationship with Taiwan, to much more severe concerns such as protests and even the murder of Lin Yi-hsiung, a leader of the democratic movement, and his family in February 1980. for their politics. This feels closer instead to a film like Girls' Concentration Camp (1983) which, with the trailer shown in Taiwan Black Movies, sounds in premise exactly as it sounds.

To Woman Revenger's defence, it is still prominent, with the same lead Hui-Shan Yang as in Lady Ninja, how it still emphasises strong female characters even with the nudity and violence. Also with its set up emphasises the notion of many of these genre films of "de-Taiwanisation", in which the lead Lingling comes to Japan after a friend from when they were orphans at the Sacred Heart Orphangae was killed by the underworld after acquiring money for the orphanage from them. This was where these films deliberately avoided cultural symbolism or landmarks which directly evoked the country, in being based in other countries in the plot (like The Challenge of the Lady Ninja (1983)) or here setting and shooting the film in Japan, with Lingling trying to rescue her late friend's younger sister Meifeng from criminals who are after the drugs her older sister is said to have ran off with. Quite a bit of tourism on film is seen as a result, be it a scene near Mt. Fuji or live footage of a real sumo wrestling show, which makes this a vast contrast to Lady Ninja's anti-Japanese tone.  The most elaborate use, the first, is actually one of the most creative scenes when Meifeng is first being tracked down, shot in the midst of a huge real crowd of people in the middle of urban Japan, vast and as far as one's eyes can see with a cacophony of music and sound.  It is a fascinating piece of verité in what you see, from retro rockabilly dancers, young Japanese men and women dressed as American fifties bikers and in dresses performing rock n roll dancing, eighties shell suits, and four guys as a cheap makeshift KISS, with the band's makeup on, heads through a giant black cloth all of them are holding up as they have tiny little puppet bodies with instruments attacked under their heads.

I see the film actually being influenced by the Japanese films of the decade before, even if with some nuisances are missed, such as a scene of attempted hara-kiri where a gangster (played by a non-Japanese actor speaking Mandarin) just plunges the blade into the stomach (only to be stopped) without any of the ritual found in Japanese pulp films. Especially when very late on, when the lead has her eye stabbed out, this feels like the result of a film like Lady Snowblood (1973) getting imported to Taiwan, including such scenes as one in the snow, after an attempt at a kidnap while women are bathing in a small room, or how the setup for the film is the lead's friend being murdered in a giant bathhouse.  One thing that Taiwan Black Movies also clarified is that, with a set piece of Lingling winning Meifeng's freedom briefly with a game of dice, using inner strength to crack a die, is that it was surfing a trend when "piles of gambling films" by 1982 were being made, to the point that it became a concern in terms of moral indecency.

These moral guardians would have likely blushed at the nudity, or a woman being held upside down on a wooden cross, with the legs outwards, with honey and ants on the legs with the poor actress involved having real ants on her. Such moments are a reminder that a couple of these films were clearly shot for less than high minded content, which will be a concern for many modern viewers. This does become a conventional crime film with some fight scenes eventually too, about an evil prostitution ring and Lingling trying to rescue Meifeng, but I have softened to this film too as an example of unpredictable, lurid pulp. Any film where a male gangster gets a comeuppance, in the docks in one of the containers stacked up high, by having a gold snake slid under his gold thong is distinct at least. It does get interesting by the climax when you have a band of women being created to finally defeat the villains, a striking image even with the titillation when you have them with blades, wearing white bikinis closer to gauze, getting revenge on a crime leader in his lounge. Especially when it comes to the tragic ending - [Major Spoiler] when the lead is arrested for finally getting revenge, the final shot with the "End" title over a close-up of handcuffs on her wrists [Spoilers End] - alongside how it has the melancholic song playing over the images, this does get a lot right in terms of this type of filmmaking even if it is also predictable.

To Be Continued...

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1) The online festival, whilst closed, thankfully still has its introduction text up HERE.