Come and Drink with Me
1966
Directed by King Hu
I should preface this review by saying I love martial arts movies. If you really want to explore the genre, you have to um, carve your way through a lot of cheese, so to speak, before you get to any good stuff. As such, I have a very high tolerance for cheesiness with this movies; I would say more so than the average person. But I have to admit, some of the scenes in this movie even had me cringing. At the very least, this is a fun film to mock with friends (she wrote as she sat alone on a Friday night).
The plot of these movies is never really important but I will do a brief summary anyway. The general's son is taken hostage so his daughter, Golden Swallow (no comment), is sent to rescue him. Yay, a female is sent to rescue a male? And she fights off a bunch of warriors? Yes...wait what do you mean she still ultimately has to be saved by a man who ends up stealing the show? Damn, better luck next time. I guess we will try again with Thelma and Louise.
Like I said, the plot isn't that important. What is really crucial is having amazing fight scenes. And wow, the fights were just horrifying. I mean, offensively bad. Like none of them had ever seen a sword before, let alone held one. I do have to give them credit for their fake blood, which looked quite real, except when it was randomly spurting out of sword wounds.
I have no idea why this is on The List but I did have fun with it. Even though it was terrible, it was never boring, which I suppose is something.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
Quentin Taratino is rumored to be interested in directing a remake.
Jackie Chan supposedly appeared as a child singer in the beginning of the film.
Somewhat hard to find so if anyone needs a link to this let me know. What's with all the obscure films lately? The Listmakers are testing me. I hope I am worthy!
I think I will pass on much comment on this one..
ReplyDeleteYou may have gathered that I'm not all that keen on these martial arts films... Doing the book list introduced me to seeing them at all - and that was good.. and seeing one or two was.. interesting. But after that.. well, they all started to merge and I have trouble remembering which one this was..
So QT may do a remake? Right. OK.
You can sense me getting really excited by that can't you? Sorry...One you you and Andrew to enthuse on.. Well time you two got together to despair at my taste..
Haha they are certainly not for everyone but I always have fun with them.
DeleteCuriously I never noticed this was particularly bad. In fact I found the technically quality surprisingly good. Not all the story worked out so well, but in a martial arts movie I can live with that. I actually think I have bigger problems with the celebrated Bruce Lee movies.
ReplyDeleteSome of the fight moves were quite bad, but not all. To be fair, it's a different stylised way of performing them, it's not supposed to be Raging Bull.
ReplyDeleteAnd the dubbed dialogue was jarring when they were standing on an open hillside but the voices had obviously been recorded in the tiniest of echoing broom cupboards.
But overall I found it to be good fun.