If You Like Quentin Tarantino... by Katherine Rife

Author:Katherine Rife [Rife, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004010; PER004020
ISBN: 9780879108182
Publisher: Limelight
Published: 2012-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHINESE BOXER, A.K.A. THE HAMMER OF GOD

Chinese Boxer, a.k.a. The Hammer of God (1970) is the OG (that’s “original gangster,” squares) of kung fu movies. A landmark film and a favorite of Tarantino’s, this is the flick that introduced the world to the “open hand” style of fighting. Oh sure, there had been wuxia (martial arts) movies made in Hong Kong since the movies first came to Hong Kong, but Chinese Boxer broke all of the rules. It was the first wuxia movie where the hero didn’t fight with a sword but with his hands, and thus, with a nauseating punch in the gut, what we know today as the “kung fu movie” was born.

Jimmy Wang Yu was ever so briefly the king of kung fu before his fame was eclipsed by “The Dragon” Bruce Lee, and like Lee, Yu peddled his own revolutionary blend of kung fu, karate, samurai, and traditional wuxia styles. Also, like Bruce Lee’s 1972 movie The Chinese Connection, Chinese Boxer is a shamelessly jingoistic bit of flag waving that seeks to exploit the ancient rivalry between the Chinese and Japanese for maximum bone-crunching, eye-gouging effect. Many elements of Chinese Boxer may seem horribly cliché when you first see it, particularly its climactic “1 vs. 100” final battle sequence, but you’ve got to understand one thing: this is where those clichés came from. To wit:

A cocky dickhead comes to challenge an entire kung fu school to a fight, only to be put in his place by the master in charge. But being a cocky dickhead, the challenger refuses to accept defeat and brings in Japanese karate expert/hired thug Kita (Lo Lieh) to terrorize the school some more. The resultant bloodbath leaves only one survivor, a student named Lei Ming (Jimmy Wang Yu). Does Lei Ming then go underground and transform himself into an untouchable badass to get revenge for his slain comrades? You bet he does! Chinese Boxer is that simple, and that profound. The icing on this cake (a cake shaped like a fist, of course) is that now that he’s a superhuman assassin type, Lei Ming dons a surgeon’s mask and rubber gloves before every fight. Why? Because he’s a doctor now. A doctor of death.

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