"To Kill A Mastermind" (1979) d/ Sun Chung

1979 was a productive year for Shaw Brothers director, Sun Chung, who'd planted his martial flag the previous year with the epic Avenging Eagle, starring Ti Lung, Fu Sheng, and Ku Feng. Tonight's review is the third of his efforts from the decade's end, with The Deadly Breaking Sword and The Kung Fu Instructor preceding. Mastermind has always been the most difficult of the three to score a decent print of, having been unavailable in anything clearer than a ghostly VHS print with cut-off subtitles and a bootlegged rip from Chinese YouTube for what seems like forever. Don't let the mostly unknown cast scare you off,  this one's got a little bit of everything, from one of Ku Feng's "Avenging Eagle" metal claw-gloves to dart-shooting backpacks to  modified Venom Mob masks. Besides, where else are you gonna catch Johnny Wang Lung Wei, strawberry variant?


"Poison Clan? No, no, no, we're the Seven Evil Spirits Clan. This isn't the Snake, Number Two's mask, either."
Some eight years earlier, a failed attempt by the Imperial Court to bring down the murderous Qisha gang sent it's surviving chief into anonymous seclusion, where he plotted to raise his syndicate from the ashes back to criminal prominence. Now, with the Qisha receiving orders from their mastermind through an elaborate Electric Company-esque gold ball maze in their secret headquarters, they have again become the target of the court and Lord Yang, who has enlisted a spy among the ranks of their eight chiefs, setting up an ambush for their ranks after intercepting gang orders, raising the levels of mistrust and dissent among the bandits and to ultimately flush out the titular mastermind, whose identification is unknown even to his own chiefs.


"Of course, I haven't the balls to call Wang Lung Wei 'Strawberry Shortcake', are you kidding?"
Despite their array of flashy, hidden weapons, the Qisha chieftains fall one by one to Yang's carefully concealed counterintelligence, and he fells a large stone effigy of each bandit with a rope noose with every successful mission. With trust disintegrating as rapidly as their numbers, it isn't long before the Clan Leader reveals himself to be...Wang Lung Wei! Big surprise there, right? He of the strawberry hair streaks in turn, reveals his insidious plot to flush out the spy, while blowing up Clan HQ with most of Yang's army inside, and when he flexes his shoulder muscle to send a sword blade flying out of his torso into a nearby clay pot, destroying it instantly, you just know this cat isn't effing around anymore. What follows is a wild wushu finale, that you're gonna have to see for yourselves.


At that moment, Zan and Jayna both realized they'd left Gleek out in the hot car with all the windows up. 
 Though widely considered a box office flop, Mastermind is an excellent showcase of everything one could love about Sun Chung movies: excellent swordplay and fights (choreographed by Shaw reg Tang Chia), with his trademark picturesque wide shots and dramatic slo mo sequences at the height of the martial mayhem up on the screen. Perhaps competing with the genre hits of the day like Jackie Chan's Fearless Hyena, Samo Hung's Magnificent Butcher, and Fu Sheng's Proud Twins, combined with the audience's unfamiliarity with most of the cast proved too great a task, but to Chung's credit, he gets memorable performances from everyone involved. Interestingly, among those formidable Qisha chiefs are Lo Chun and Lo Sheng, brothers in real life of Venom Mob strongman, Lo (The Toad) Meng. Needless to say, this one should not be missed, at any cost. On the scale, Mastermind schemes and plots its way to three Wops, and comes highly recommended. Catch it!


"I'll give you some strawberry shortcake, you bastard!"

"Dynamo" (1978) d/ Hwa I Hung

Yeah, set aside that Game of Death(1979) tracksuit in the one sheet  for a moment (besides, he wears two different JKD tracksuits in this one), as such Brucesploitative imagery might sour you on an otherwise entertaining Ho Tsung Tao(Bruce Li) movie; Ho being the most  recognizable of all the Lee imitators and the one with the largest body of work, having appeared in thirty-eight movies dating back to the Taiwanese production, Death Duel(1972). Despite being peppered with a supporting cast of the usual overmatched suspects (i.e. Ku Feng, Chiang Tao), this one gets by with passable fight choreography provided by Yuen Cheung-Yan, but eyes familiar to the more dynamic stunt work of Jacky Chan, Sammo Hung, or Liu Chia Liang might find these brawls as primitive as a pair of cave bearskin knickers. Still, the odd rapport between Ho and Ku is laugh-worthy enough, and let's not forget about those "Bruce Lee and I"(1976) inserts.

 
"The bottle ends before these Bruce Lee rip-offs ever will...", gurgles Teacher Chow (Ku Feng).
A movie producer named Miss Mary arrives in Hong Kong for Bruce Lee's funeral ("They wouldn't sink so low as to include actual Bruce Lee funeral footage here, would they?", he asked knowingly) and manages to catch cab driver Lee Ting Yee (Bruce Li) putting the hurt on some common street trash, offering him ten grand a month as salary to be the next big action star on the silver screen. She hires a heavy boozer named Chow (Ku Feng) as Lee's Sifu, and he informs his student, "Feel free to attack me any time, because I'll do the same." A strange request, to be sure, but Lee obliges, and suddenly attacks his elder at every juncture. Lee also often dreams of the real Bruce (or Danny Lee doing a pretty bad Bruce Lee imitation from another movie, if you've got eyes), and before long he finds himself in similar shoes to the late kung fu actor.

 
"Sometime when we touch, honesty too much."
The cabbie turned actor's sudden popularity draws the ire of rival movie producer named Mr. George who sends random gangs of toughs to every country that Lee is filming in, leading to a headache-inducing number of  attacks in what's supposed to be America (it isn't even), Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, sating the viewer's need to see a bellhop fight, and even James Bond-style ski slope brawls, but Lee reigns triumphant over all comers, forcing George and his cronies to up the ante by kidnapping Lee's girlfriend and forcing him to throw a fight in an upcoming martial arts tournament if he ever wants to see her alive. Natually, Chow helps rescue her in the nick of time, and Lee wins his match in the end, but he gives up the glamorous movie lifestyle for good, having had enough of it, and returns to happier times as a cab driver.


"I'm not Bruce Lee either!", boasts Li Hsiu-Hsien, in a scene from a different movie altogether.
The plot of tonight's review mirrors lead actor Ho Tsung Tao's rise to fame, much like his later effort, The Chinese Stuntman/ Counter Attack (1981).You might notice Steve Sander, also an extra in Enter the Dragon(1973),  in one of the fight scenes, in his trademark funky stocking cap, can you dig it, baby? Director Hwa would go on to work with Billy Chong on Crystal Fist (1979), A Hard Way To Die(1979), and Kung Fu Zombie (1981). Perceptive readers might wonder how one of the better Bruce Li efforts only merits two wops on the scale, but I think that rating speaks volumes on how much worse most of his other stuff really was. Then again, compared to the next most prolific Lee imitators, Huang Kin Lung(Bruce Le) and Dragon Lee, whose collective unwatchable stink-bomb rate is prodigious as all fuck, average is pretty much as good as it gets in this subgenre.

 
"Sayyy, are those Swingster ski pants?"