FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| VIDEO VULTURE If you've never seen Samo Hung in a movie, try to picture a round-faced fat man who can move and fight just like Jackie Chan. It isn't a coincidence. Chan and Hung grew up together in Hong Kong's once-famous Peking Opera, where they received rigorous training in acrobatics and martial arts along with Yuen Wah, Yuen Biao, and the rest of the young Seven Little Fortunes troupe. With the Opera long gone, the adult troupe members have transferred their remarkable skills to the medium of film. The Fortunes often make appearances in one another's movies. (Samo directed Chan in the recent Mr. Nice Guy.) Samo Hung, the oldest (and heaviest) of the troupe certainly deserves to be better known in North America. He's a talented director, actor, stuntman and fight choreographer who can bring out the best in his performers. In front of the camera, Hung displays remarkable charisma, an air of sincere naiveté, incredible acrobatic and fighting skills, and a spinning back-kick that could crush a minivan. He often plays a likable "regular guy," who finds himself in an extremely dangerous situation, and who rises to the occasion when heroism is called for. Unlike most "lone wolf" action heroes, Samo almost always appears as one of a team of good-hearted protagonists who all look out for each other. · Eastern Condors (1986): A suicide squad made up of Chinese-American convicts is sent into 1976 Vietnam to destroy an abandoned munitions dump before it can be found by the Viet Cong. Samo lost weight for his role in this action-packed war movie, and as a result his greased-lightning moves look faster than ever. This movie blends kung fu and guns in a way that makes sense. The heavily-armed protagonists have kung fu skills that would make Steven Seagal run home to mama, but they only use them when they've been disarmed or are in a room full of explosives. Sometimes they improvise. (Samo does a lethal trick with palm leaves that you're not gonna believe.) Miss Hong Kong 1986, Joyce Godenzi, appears as a Cambodian guerrilla who joins forces with the cons. Joyce and Samo later got married in real life, but there's no romance between their characters in this movie. When Godenzi's pigtailed warrior turns against her allies, Samo disarms her by lopping off her hand with his trusty machete! (Smooth move, Samo... where's she supposed to wear her wedding ring now?) · Pedicab Driver (1988): Set in 1930s Macau, this film focuses on the lives and loves of a team of bicycle/rickshaw cabbies. One of the first scenes is an amusing free-for-all fracas in a tea house, in which our heroes duke it out with a pack of competing motor-cabbies over a silly misunderstanding. (Two of the combatants have a STAR WARS-type duel with glowing fluorescent light bulbs.) From then on, it's a potent mix of comedy, drama and heart-pumping action scenes. (There's a pole-fighting scene between Samo and legendary Shaw Brothers icon Lau Kar Leung that you just have to see.) Things turn serious when pedicab driver Malted Candy introduces his new fiancée, Hsiao Tsui, to his buddies, and one of them recognizes her as the prostitute he patronized the night before. She runs away in tears, but Malted Candy soon realizes Hsiao has been forced into her profession by unfair circumstances, and he wins her back. Their marital bliss is cut short by the violent re-appearance of Hsiao's revolting pimp, Master 5, who is unwilling to give up any of his girls. By this time, there's an emotional bond between the characters and the audience that's rare in action cinema - you breathlessly sit on the edge of your seat, worried for their safety, as if they were real people. Samo Hung can also be seen in Project A, Wheels On Meals, Island of Fire, Enter the Fat Dragon, Millionaire Express, My Lucky Stars, Painted Faces, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, and in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon and Game of Death. |
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