Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree by Price Michael & Wooley John

Author:Price, Michael & Wooley, John [Price, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Leo Fong:

Kung Fu Missionary

A SIDE FROM MIKE PRICE: Leo Fong is hardly a horror-movie presence per se, but the martial-arts sector he represents flourished from the 1970s into the 1980s—running apace with the emboldened gore–film and Grindhouse/drive–in movements and crossing over in terms of both popular appeal and affiliations with such Forgotten Horrors eminences as Richard Lynch and Cameron Mitchell. A rambling career interview during an early-1990s session of the Dallas Fantasy Fair yielded the following survey, amended from an appearance in Issue No. 19 of Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Video magazine.

Leo Fong, a Methodist preacher from China—by way of Arkansas, Texas, and Stockton, California—speaks in the measured drawl of a Southerner. He orchestrates the canniest martial-arts maneuvers this side of Bruce Lee, and he shrugs it off as unremarkable that he should have devoted his life to a combination of social work, the ministry, and the crafting of extraordinarily violent filmed entertainment.

An upbringing straight out of Mark Twain must have had something to do with the way Fong turned out. For he is at once an archetype of the Assimilated Immigrant, a textbook example of the nonconformist entrepreneur, and a Huckleberry Finn who, even at an age customarily considered past retirement, has resisted Growing Up in the accepted sense of stodgy conventionality. Fong has been a fixture of independent moviemaking since a long-standing friendship with Bruce Lee helped to land him a star turn in 1974’s Murder in the Orient. (A purportedly earlier Fong picture called Asian Cowboys is ill documented and apparently lost beyond reclamation.)

By the middle 1990s, Fong had graced approximately 25 feature films and dozens of instructional video productions. Credentials notwithstanding, Fong’s name is missing from most of the Respectably Authoritative Reference Books.

Belonging neither to the Hollywood Establishment nor to any particular fringe group of Maverick Cinema, Fong is a sui generis talent whose pictures involve virile conflict. He has filled the roles with littleknown dependables, starting with himself, and with name-brand actors of lapsed prominence. Richard Roundtree (of Shaft ET SEQ.), the rugged character man Richard Lynch, and Cameron Mitchell, intense and flamboyant even in advanced age, surface in the Fong films. These productions trade upon facile caricatures and broad-stroke ethnic portrayals, and they usually depict the consequences of greed and violence, steeped in money, drugs, and artillery.

A combative sense of justice emerged early in Fong, who was born on Nov. 23, 1928, in Canton, China, and traveled with his mother in 1934 to join his father in America. His recollections follow:

We settled in Widener, Arkansas, where my father had already established this little grocery store, having first had a restaurant in Chicago. Arkansas—now, that was cotton-growing country, and my Dad’s cousins, who had come over earlier, said the South was a good place to make a living. Lots of black folks there, and so my father catered to a mostly black clientéle.

The pace of living was a lot slower than either my family had known in China or my father had known in Chicago. I

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