What I know about kung-fu movies wouldn’t fill a thimble, including whether I should call them “kung-fu movies” in the first place. The correct term is probably “martial-arts feeeeelms,” and no doubt I will receive several wearily condescending emails to that effect, emails which will also inform me that “aaaaack-tually, it’s pronounced ‘kah-rah-taaaaay‘” before schooling me on the difference between Wing Tsun and Wing Chun styles or “throwing a technique” or whatever the hell, and it’s not that I don’t care…oh, wait. It is. I don’t care. I mean, I’m not uninterested, but first of all, it’s inevitably some dude named Barry or Trevor who’s all pointedly saying “gung-fu” so you know he’s an expert, like, thanks for the tutorial, Sonny Dweeba, but you’re from Bergen County so give it a rest, and second of all, DVD-wise, I really just want to watch a bunch of dudes kicking and punching and flipping the living hell out of each other, to the point where the entire Foley team has to seek treatment for dehydration. I don’t need to know anything about the genre to enjoy a good skull-thumping.

If I knew anything about the genre, you see, I might feel somehow obligated to qualify my statement that The Victim is the most awesome kung-fu movie ever — but I don’t, so I won’t. The Victim is the most awesome kung-fu movie ever, and you simply must go rent it immediately so that you too may find comfort in the warm embrace of its awesomeness (or, if you like, its awesome-fu). Even if you don’t like kung-fu, you will like The Victim — nay, you’ll love it, for at least one of the reasons below:

Prompt, frequent fighting. It’s often the case in a kung-fu movie that before you get to the fighting, you have to sit through a good fifteen minutes of pastoral scenes, or exposition about a longstanding grudge, or a muddled flashback that features a lot of broody focus pulls and meaningfully kooky camera angles and unlucky flocks of birds and children in the act of getting emotionally scarred for life and blah blah blahhhhhh bl-bl-blah. Not so in The Victim. Credits; an annoying but mercifully short interlude involving a grade-schooler and a stolen dumpling; aaaaaaaand fight, two minutes in. Next fight? Three minutes later. Next fight? Three minutes after that.

Sammo Hung, who plays The Victim, a.k.a. Chan Wing, a.k.a. Fatty, also directed The Victim, and according to the commentary, he’s the godfather of the Peking Opera School who begat Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and all those dudes. See above re: not knowing fuck-all about the various stars in the martial-arts-movie constellation, but the guy comes on screen all Asian Cousin Oliver, you think to yourself, “Oh, I am so sure,” and ten minutes into it, he’s demolished a local master with one of those segmented-staff doodads (and now you can email me, because I’d like to know what to call those bad boys, the better to order one and use it on the cats). So then you think to yourself, “Wow, he’s awesome,” but he’s not even the baddest fighter in the movie — the guy he pesters to become his master is even badder than him, and then the pesteree’s nemesis, Big Brother, is also a bad-ass. In a number of ways both fight-related and not, which I will get to shortly.

Simple but satisfying Foley design. The Victim has five Foley sounds: punches; kicks; blocks; The Wocka-Wocka Pedal Of Particularly Impressive Blows; and wood breaking. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, but each sound is effective in that it suggests the actual sound used to create it — in other words, the kick sound denotes not only a kick but also an inch-and-a-half leather belt folded over once and lashed against a chilled side of beef. The punch/slap sound is also a wet-notebook-thumped-down-on-a-mattress sound. The wocka-wocka needs no explanation, and the wood breaking kind of sounds like an underwater bowling alley, and the block sounds like an egg getting cracked on the side of a bowl. Not much to them, really, but most of the fight sequences have subsets of blocking maneuvers, whole chains of them, dozens in a row, crack crack crack crack crack (notebook) crack crack crack (belt) crack (belt) crack (belt belt) crack crack crack crack (nnnnnnnotebook!). Gone are the days when a Foley team actually whipped a cow hock to make these sounds; one guy probably pressed the same five buttons over and over, but the advanced Simon-Says skills he must have needed to get a sequence right…I know as much about Foley design as I do about kung-fu movies, but still.

Stupid film-school tricks. The use of slo-mo is seemingly not governed by any sort of relationship to what’s happening on screen; you’d think a switch to slow motion would indicated a climactic blow, but it doesn’t. I think Sammo just picked shots at random. Chun-Yau knocks out three henchmen with a single kick? Regular speed. Chun-Yau is strangling Big Brother? The frames actually get sped up. Then it goes to slo-mo for your run-of-the-mill back blow and it’s like, what? Nobody even spun in that shot. But the wocka-wocka-wocka echo-chamber effect fills the soundtrack, so you just assume that it’s a death blow, until everyone gets up and dusts themselves off and keeps fighting, like, seriously: what? And then for the actual death blows, he just settles for pushing in for a close-up.

And boy, does Sammo like him a tiiiiiight close-up. Not as much as he likes a nice hammy focus push from heroic face-acting in the foreground to even more heroic face-acting in the background, though…

Ham-tastic acting. Okay, nobody watches these flicks for the thespionics, which is a pity, because every single character in The Victim makes William Shatner look like a soggy piece of driftwood. The commentary helpfully let me know that that sort of over-the-top mugging is de rigueur for the Hong Kong school of that era, and it’s not like Drunken Master is a moody character study either, but: holy crap, people. Imagine if Jackée Harry and Al Pacino had an Asian child and fed it nothing but Fun Dips and Jolt, and then it ran away to join a mime troupe. Yeah. Welcome to the “acting” in The Victim.

The hilarity of the acting pales in comparison to the hilarity of the dubbing. I just do not know what in the hell inspired the dubbing here. Part of it is just the nature of kung-fu dubbing and the fact that the voice actor is trying to cram seventeen English syllables of information into the same screen time as two or three syllables of (I believe, in this case…don’t email me) Cantonese, and if you aren’t watching for the acting, Lord knows you aren’t watching for the snappy repartee. But the issue isn’t the timing of the dubbing; I’ve seen movies in which a character delivers an entire paragraph of dialogue and his lips don’t move, and that doesn’t happen here. It’s the delivery of the lines that’s completely insane. Chun-Yau’s dub is the dictionary definition of constipation, and it’s the least crazy of the lot, because Chan Wing’s dub sounds like John Wayne via Top Cat, the wife’s sounds like Madonna doing Breathless Mahoney doing Yeardley Smith, and most of the tertiary characters get a degraded Cockney-meets-root-canal “accent.” And God forbid a reaction shot contain a silent reaction — it’s not like these guys aren’t straining every muscle in their faces to telegraph “confused” or “frightened” already (see: #4), but no, the dub has to make sure we get it with a series of “I’ve eaten nothing but cheese for a month” grunts and moans. “Heeehhhnnnnh?” “Oaaaaaaahhhrff.” “Whhhhaaaaaaahhhht?” The cheap seats called; they’d like you to know that they get it.

Chun-Yau is the Asian Barry Gibb. His hair is fantastic. He fights off four attackers at his wedding while his wife is piggybacked serenely on his shoulders and he still looks as neatly blow-dried at the end as he did at the beginning.

One good hairstyle turn does not deserve another. Big Brother is a tremendous villain. He’s venal, but petty at the same time; he has a wonderful angular face and horrible teeth which really work for the character, and either the dub of his evil victory cackle is an homage to Ming The Merciless from Flash Gordon or the other way around, but whatever, it’s rad. And did I mention that Big Brother wears an eyepatch made from a rectangle of jade? Because he does, and it is rad also. But then he’s also wearing one of the fakest, most ludicrous wigs in the history of celluloid entertainment. It comes complete with sideburns, and it never moves, but the fact that it looks the same in every shot isn’t a positive; it’s scary, because the wig is clearly made from cotton candy that some poor PA had to spray-paint brown and affix to Yi Chang’s head with about a gallon of spirit gum. And the wig has no function whatsoever. Yi Chang doesn’t look like any of the other actors, so it’s not like they had to use the wig to distinguish him from someone else in the cast. Nor does it play any part in the flashbacks, since he has it both in the past and in the present. The movie is not terribly concerned with costuming or continuity just generally — “aging” is indicated by spraying the relevant character’s hair with that Nestle gray-in-a-can stuff, or, in the case of the Shao Lin abbot, fraying several hundred Q-Tip ends and weaving them into the actor’s eyebrows — but I have seen and made fun of a few wretched wigs in my movie-watching career, and they all pale beside Big Brother’s Humidified School Mascot Pelt Of Attempted Rape.

The Dracula costume. We know Chan Wing can fight; he’s gone into an eight-on-one and prevailed. So why, instead of just straight-up fighting the four gravediggers, does he dress up in a vampire costume (yes, “complete with cape and fake teeth”) to scare off three of them so that he can fight the one? I won’t even ask why the green levels in the Dracula makeup change in every shot, because the entire concept is just totally beyond me.

The quadruple-cross ending. The first twist, you see coming. The second twist, you don’t see coming because the laws of physics don’t allow it, but because of the second twist, you totally see the third twist, and then the last one is completely impossible but it’s the end of the movie, so you just let it go, except that they play it as an “oh, Alice” moment, which is weird. And the soundtrack is like, “Hey, wacky!” even though the frame is frozen on…graves. O…kay.

The double dick-flick. “You can’t mean what I think you mean.” Oh, but I can. It’s a fight scene in a public bath, everyone’s naked, and when Chan Wing finds himself, er, eye-to-eye with two assailants, what better way to fend them off than to twonk them in the twigs? The shot set-up is perfect, too; the camera is behind the two nude dudes, and Chan Wing makes a smug “well, you’ve left me no choice” face, and then “[bink!]” and they both double over. Excellent.

It’s not just a dick-flick. It’s a double dick-flick. Don’t just sit there, get your ass over to Netflix. You will thank me.

October 10, 2005

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