The One Armed Boxer (1971)

Du bei chuan wang, aka The One Armed Boxer takes its sweet time getting to the point where Tien Lung, the titular hero, loses his arm. As stories go, the plot is a mish-mash of formulaic kung-fu elements. There is the disgraced school of martial arts fighting for its honor. Causing trouble is a sinister school running a corrupt racket of drugs and extortion. Then mix in a slew of ringers from exotic locations like India and Thailand, each with their own fighting styles. Finally, introduce the defeated hero, sans one arm, forced to adapt and re-learn his martial arts technique if he hopes to avenge the death of his master. It’s all there, each element given a personal touch by diretor Yu Wang the same man behind Master of the Flying Guillotine.

From the opening sequence in a tea house, where an argument breaks out over rare birds to a final show down set against amongst a smoldering waste land,  the chop-socky is non-stop. Pushed along by a kinetic fuzzy guitar that rips through the sound track the film throws in a few interesting cinematic flourishes, such as a still image montage and jovially old-fashioned camera tricks.

To accuse a film like this of being formulaic is both honest and simplistic. While many of the plot elements reoccur in various kung-fu films their occurrence is no different than the number of action films or crime shows that recycle the same plots over and over, only slightly tweaking the details to create differences. As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. Here the details are devilishly good.

While other people can spend hours watching shows like CSI or Law & Order I would far prefer to indulge in kung-fu marathons with films like The One Armed Boxer. It is the lack of politics that make this more enjoyable.  Such a statement is not to say that I don’t want politics in my art. That, I enjoy. However, when it comes to entertainment, something meant to simply bide the time and provide a small visceral response, I would far prefer to watch something that does not pretend to solve the problems of my modern times. Instead, it solves its problems with iron-fisted fury!

The Hand (1981)

“You never know what you can do, the unconscious is capable of anything.”  So says, one of the characters in The Hand. Unfortunately, The Hand is made with a very conscious mind.

Oliver Stone has always been a filmmaker with an agenda. In The Hand, one of Stone’s earliest features, that agenda is to create a Brood like horror film.

Michael Caine stars as John Lansdale, a well known comic artist. Like Mandor – the warrior hero Lansdale created – Lansdale himself has little care for human psychology or unconscious impulses. That is, until Lansdale loses his hand in an auto accident. With his career cut short, his marriage on the rocks, and his hand missing Lansdale spirals downward into a lonely see of bitterness. All while, those who anger him suffer brutal beatings. Is John Lansdale behind these attacks or has his errant hand returned to do his subconscious bidding?

The answer is obvious. Oliver Stone does little to hide the mystery behind each act of aggression. At the same time, he does even less to heighten the horror of this story, seemingly plucked straight from an E.C. Comic. Caine’s efforts breathe some excitement and tension into a rather mundane tale of horror. Where as, Stone’s interest lies not in the disembodied had or the murders it commits, but in Lansdale’s emasculation. With his wife leaving him for her new age yoga instructor and his comic book about to taken over by a brash, young artist (wonderfully played by Charles Fleischer) Lansdale’s world is crumbling around him. Retreating to the north woods of California and a small teaching gig at a small college Lansdale quickly falls in with a young co-ed. She’s a buxom blond, the kind who brings beer to her instructor’s house and quickly pops her top minutes after walking in the door. We all know this sort of girl, right?

Stone apparently knows this sort of girl. He also knows something about the homeless and this is why he casts himself in the role of a bum. To make matters worse, he lingers on his cameo for an embarrassingly long time. Thankfully, he becomes victim to ‘The Hand’. Sadly, the film plods onward attempting to explore the subconscious mind and the horrors that it can bring to life while casually positioning new age philosophy and psychology in a negative light.

Though, those two fields are not the only aspects of culture looked down upon by Lansdale. The college Lansdale retreats to is full of dullards and dummies. The faculty appear to be has-beens or never-weres. Everyone Lansdale encounters appears beneath him, from the reckless driver he calls a ‘silly cow’ to his own wife. This growing bitterness peaks when the affections of his student wander and his wife comes to break up their marriage.  Finally, Lansdale’s anger rises and the film reaches an expected climax.

Not before a nice, but brief cameo from Tracey Walter.

The Defilers (1965)

David F. Friedman and Lee Frost are two men with too many notorious films to their credit. Love Camp 7, Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, Scum of the Earth, Chain Gang Women, and The Black Gestapo are some of the titles these two men have worked on. Schlock runs through each man’s veins.

The Defilers tells the story is of two young beatnik/bohemian looking for ‘kicks’. Rough play with their girlfriends soon turns kidnapping as the young thugs capture a cute girl the can hold captive in their lair and turn into their own sexual plaything. In the end, The Defilers bows with a cruel blow of justice, as it was still untimely in 1965 to let wrongs go unpunished.

It’s not wonder that Frost and Friedman would crank out a little black and white roughie such as The Defilers. Back in 1965 there was certainly a market for this sort of sick study of perversion. It’s the kind of film you’d expect to find at an early 60′s stick floored theater. By today’s mainstream, torture porn standards – see Hostel 2 or Saw - The Defilers is rather tame; very misogynistic, but not exactly profane or pornographic. For it’s time it may have been considered rough, but times change and so do limits. In a world that now grapples with films from the Guinea Pig series or even more artistic fare like Irreversible, The Defilers is antiquated. It harks back to a day when souls had to brave going outdoors and patron a theater that would play such a film. Today, the films are nastier, but with the advent of home video one can revel in psycho-drama in there own home.

Presently, the yarns ripped straight from today’s headlines and twisted into primetime police procedurals are as twisted as the story of The Defilers. The only difference is that shows like Law and Order deliver human madness and then use the grounding sanity of the police to explain how humans can be so cruel. The Defilers does away with the psychoanalysis in favor of sick thrills. It plays to its audience without ever making its audience question why it enjoys witnessing brutality.

So which is worse, making a buck off of the trenchcoat crowd, who shuffles there way down to the theater each week to get their fill of sickness or a culture at large, so fascinated by the minds of mad men that it tunes in week after week or even day after day to see just how low humans can sink? At least with the former, there was an odd stigma attached to those dank little theaters, relegated to less family friendly parts of town. Now, the dregs of society show up in prime-time or they play 24/7 on crime and law cable channels. Personally, I like it better when perversion isn’t sugar coated in police drama trappings. Can’t most folks just admit that they tune in each week not to see how the cops are doing, but to see just what sort of twisted crime can come to light?