"Fearless Hyena"(1979)d/Jackie Chan, Kenneth Tsang

Here's a favorite Chan-man flick of mine, a glorious return to Lo Wei's studio from a highly successful two picture loan to Seasonal Films that yielded both Snake in Eagle's Shadow(1978) and Drunk Monkey in a Tiger's Eye(1979), a charmingly rough variation on those two films co-directed by Jackie himself, his debut.Before the departure, Chan's unmistakable flair in front of and behind the lens was becoming more and more obvious to old Wei, and with each new picture he was given more creative license than the last.Though Hyena certainly offers nothing new or innovative concerning plot("You killed my teacher!"), it serves up boatloads of fight choreography, techniques, and slapstick comedy that was hitherto unheard of in the martial movie world.The film stands as one of the vehicles Chan used to change the face of said world forevermore, and though kung movies have evolved several times since then, it makes for an enjoyable look back to when Jackie singlehandedly got the ball rolling.Along for the ride here are James Tien in old age makeup and wig, Once Upon a Time in China's Yen Shi Kwan as the main heavy, Tien Chi Cheng of Five Element Ninja(1982) fame, Hui Lou Chen, and wiry Dean Shek as a coffin seller.The soundtrack ...ahem, borrows from The Pink Panther and Superman:The Movie, but you won't dwell on the larceny for very long whenever Chan fills the frame, especially the finale here, lengthy as it is fucking awesome, trust me on that.Classic martial mayhem as only Jackie Chan could deliver it.Onwards.

Pssst, that bumpkin on the left? Yeah, that's Jackie.
Shing Lung(Jackie Chan) lives a meager existence with his overbearing grandfather/sifu(James Tien), whose rules are simple:Don't show your martial skills in public, and don't gamble, or I'll thrash you.Lung, unaware that the reason his grandfather demands pugilistic modesty, is that a caped bastard named Yen Chuen-Wong(Yen Shi Kwan) has been tirelessly scouring the countryside for all proponents of that particular style of kung fu, and snuffing their candles, immediately, if not sooner.Looking to make some extra money after a stint at the funeral parlour goes instantly sour with the director(Dean Shek) getting trapped inside one of his own second-hand coffins(!), Lung offers his services to a local would-be gym as run by 'Tee Cha'(Lee Kwan), a conniving weasel and friend to three bumbling idiots(Great Bear, Iron Head, Stoney Egg) that Lung easily defeats, and who doesn't know a lick of martial arts, naturally, fighting all challengers and drawing potential new students to the school in the process.To avoid news of his pugilistic contests getting back to Grandpa, he poses as various disguised characters, battling "The Willow Sword"(Tien Chi Cheng)(who he calls 'Shit Sword', mind you) and others, first as a simpleton in a foppish hat, then as a hairy Chinese schnoz-heavy broad(!!), clobbering a fat womanizer repeatedly in the face with bricks.As per usual, Yen stumbles upon the school, now dubbed "The Everything Clan", fights with Lung, recognizes the style, and uses the young man's naivete to lead him directly to his grandfather, who he pulverizes into a corpse in minutes.Lung is prevented from aiding his pummeled pops by an elderly cripple, who also foils his attempts to run off and exact revenge in revealing himself as 'The Unicorn'(Hui Lou Chen), one of his grandfather's old classmates.

"Is that a monk's spade in your pants, Fatty, or are you just glad to see me?"
The Unicorn becomes Lung's sadistic interim sifu, plaguing him during dinner by keeping the meat off of his chopsticks in a show of hand skills, and torturing him with impossibly difficult training exercises, like pulling huge sacks tied to ropes(sometimes with the Unicorn on top), and upside down situps.For the special purpose of vengeance, Lung is taught 'Emotional Kung Fu'(seriously), where Joy, Sorrow, Happiness, and Anger are separate techniques to be utilized in discovering an opponent's 'emotional weak spot'.After busting out a nifty form montage showcasing each of the styles with Unicorn narrating over the top, Lung is finally prepared to avenge his grandfather's death(yeah, I know) and return prestige to the Sien Yi clan by issuing a hearty beatdown to Yen and whoever else he's got in his corner.First up, Lung squares off against three of Yen's associates, who are armed with folding bladed staves, trying to dice up Lung's teacher with them.After getting some hair cut in the acrobatic process of whooping their asses, Lung turns to Yen for the big finale.At first, the caped bastard in the ponytail gets the better of Lung, mocking him and any techniques he utilizes as ones "he learned as a small baby"(how's that done, then?).Then Lung unleashes the secret Emotional style on him and the tide instantly turns, with the older fighter unable to figure out his younger opponent's attacks, which fly at him with riotous laughter in one instant, and uncontrollable sobbing the next.In the end, Lung does the villain in with a flurry of Anger style, exhaustedly turning to his injured sifu as the movie reaches it's end.

Shing Lung(Jackie Chan) leaves 'em all slicing at air.
Chan followed this one up with Lo Wei's Dragon Fist(1979), a period piece that's unusually serious for a Jackie Chan movie, and 1980's The Young Master, which we'll be looking at this month.The first exposure to Hyena, for me, was as a 'Crazy Monkey' trailer with a disco pop theme song sung by girls(!!!) on another rental VHS from Chinatown, with no English subs.Years later, I scored the Columbia TriStar dvd, which, despite the goofy box art that has zero to do with the movie inside, provides the best print I've seen of the movie to date.I doubt it'd set you back more than a couple of bucks, at most.Though it might not match up to the apex films of the genre after forty-plus years, it more than displays a glimpse at everything that set Chan apart from the rest of the pack at the time.The fourth three Wop movie in a row.Will the streak continue, my pugilistic pals? Time will tell.

Jackie be nimble, Jackie be quick, Jackie go undah de limbo kick.

"Spiritual Kung Fu"(1978)d/Lo Wei

The screenshots for tonight's review come from my dvd burned from an original Chinese language print, letterboxed VHS original I snagged out in Manhattan's Chinatown in the early eighties, though I'd never hold such trivia over anybody's head.But I suppose you could say I was a hardcore Chan-man fanatic while you were somehow impressed by Chuck Norris' non-acting and clunky fight choreography on a cable box in your parlor with a bag of Taco-flavored Doritos sitting on your belly and a two liter of 7Up resting against one of your Nike Cortez.And you'd probably be right.Watching Jackie in any of his pre-Yuen Woo Ping movies, while he was under contract to Lo Wei's production studio, is tantamount to seeing Clint Eastwood in Tarantula(1955) or Lee Van Cleef in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953), in that you can sense bigger and better things on his horizon with untapped skill and presence beginning to shine through.This and 1979's Dragon Fist are probably his best efforts under the old man, who was also responsible for Bruce Lee's earliest successes in the early part of the decade.Chan also provides the fight choreography here, which was fairly innovative at the time, but compared to the rollercoaster ride movies he would later produce, it wouldn't be outrageous to hear people call this boring stuff.As it stands, there's a helluva lot of Jackass-style buffoonery, dime store skeletons, poverty-level special ghost effects, and surprisingly good fights on board here, enough to keep you from crashing the fuck out midway through at least, I'd ponder.

This unsuspecting poultry is about to become an ingredient for a Hungry-Chan dinner.
Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) is a mischievous student at the Shaolin temple; when he isn't being naughty, he's being punished for being naughty.The peace-loving monks usually come up with tasks for the young man to do that border on sadistic, whether its balancing a bench with a bowl of water on the end around his neck and two bowls full in his hands while his equally naughty classmates throw him food on the sneak-sneak, or wielding a giant calligraphy brush to stroke tiny, intricate characters on paper.When he's given temple guard duty, a mysterious man in ninjutsu threads breaks in and steals the "seven deadly fists" manual, with every intention of mastering it and using it for evil, as is usually par for the course.Ye-lang is appropriately punished for not performing his job along with the other students who allowed the unspeakable theft, which, it would seem, knocks the yin and yang of the universe off balance, causing a cosmic counter-occurence, where an ancient lost training manual for "five style fist" is unwittingly stumbled upon by...yeah, you know who.The book is protected by five pasty-faced ghosts with magenta wigs, each topped by a toy rubber animal that coincides with the forgotten style kung fu that they've mastered, and white leotards and hula skirts(like some experimental Chinese jazz musical off-off-Broadway or something), who manage to frighten the bejeezus out of just about everyone in the temple with some pretty low-brow holy x-ray paper and plastic skeletons, save for Ye, who's graduated from catching live frogs, snakes, chickens, and eels for a stew and stuffing them into his drawers for safe keeping, loosens his sash and takes a hearty piss(!) on the spirits as they're hiding behind a bookcase in the corner.After being wedgied and grab-assed like a Riker's Island blow up doll by the gaudy-looking ghosts, he bullies them into teaching him their potent styles of kung fu, by apparently tearing open his frog buttons to reveal the manual, the home of the ghosts themselves, tied to his chest.I'm warning you, I'll sweat all over it, guys...you know I will...Come to think of it, that'll probably come in handy later in the film, because...

Better to be pissed off than pissed on:Movement number one, novice Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) pisses on Five Style Fist ghost sifus.
The stolen seven deadly fist manual turns up in the mitts of the diabolical Luk(James Tien), who's perfected the style with full intention of restoring dignity to his family's name by becoming the master of the martial world.Naturally, Luk cannot achieve this without handing out some serious martial beatdowns to the competition, so he does so, every chance he gets.Meanwhile, back at the temple, Ye offers himself as an escort for the hot-to-trot daughter(Mo Man Sau) of a visiting Wu Tang master.He questions whether she's really a girl(!!), then gets his monkey ass handed to him when he tries getting fresh with her.Embarrassed by the prospect of getting housed by a chick, he improves his technique further with the aid of the martial spectres, enough to defeat the fiesty girl and administer a hearty spanking to her wushu-proficient ass.Her father has the nerve to up and mysteriously die, when Ye suggests that he leave the temple to do some detective work on the unsolved murder.The head monk tells Ye that he cannot leave until he's proven his mettle with two tonfa batons against the eighteen lohan priests, all wielding bo staves(one of the better tonfa v. staff displays ever committed to celluloid, I'm here to tell you).Fifteen breath-taking minutes or so later, Ye is on the case.Luk challenges the orphaned girl to a pugilistic square off when Ye jumps in to help out, getting Pwnd instead.The monks recognize Luk's vicious style as the one from the stolen manual, and arrange more fisticuffs between the two, which Ye emerges victorious from, drawing Luk's father(!!!) out from behind his monk disguise and into the fray.With the help of the five ghosts released from the manual tied to his chest, mid-scrap, Ye is able to pulverize the old bastard into the afterlife with leopard fists as his unearthly sifus hold him in place.Afterwards, Ye mistakenly steps on the manual, causing the ghosts to attack him as he jumps into a mid-air freeze frame.We hear the "Goodbye....goodbye" lifted directly from the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1978).

Snake-style fist says, "Ssssssss.....sssssssss....ssssssss."
Stickler for detail I no doubt am, I added the original Cantonese trailers found at the beginning and end of several of my VHS as extras on my custom disc.There are previews for Fearless Hyena, Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, and an outrageous trailer for To Kill With Intrigue that incorporates a terrible dated pop soundtrack in a miserable pony-tailed period piece where Chan gets his face burned and his ass repeatedly kicked by a sadistic kung fu honey before barely outlasting his final opponent in the final reel.The misleadingly hip trailer is pretty amusing.Yeah, I'm a goober like that.I dug the hell outta this one growing up though Chan's propensity to consistently outdo himself once he'd achieved international superstar status sort of leaves it undeservedly buried in the back of the minor classics closet.Wei would follow this up with three more Chan vehicles(Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, Magnificent Bodyguards, and the silly, incoherent Half a Loaf of Kung Fu) all in the same year, and one in the next(Dragon Fist).James Tien, who co-starred in Bruce Lee fare early on, has never looked better than when he's been choreographed by the Chan-man here.On the scale, it merits two wops, and comes recommended for Jackie Chan completists and lovers of kung fu movies everywhere.Hunt it down!

Don't you love when guys call out what they're hitting you repeatedly with?In this case it'd be...dragon fist!Dragonfistdragonfistdragonfist!