Campy, explosive fun from the film that influenced the Lyre sequence in Kung Fu Hustle. Well, it’s not completely dreadful but…
In some quarters Deadful Melody is revered as something of an overlooked classic. I’m not too sure why. It’s campy, explosive fun all right, but hardly one of the better wuxia genre movies to come out in the nineties.
The Deadful Melody in question comes from a magical lyre that grants the player with explosive power. Understandably, all the different kung fu clans want it for themselves. The young Snow (Brigitte Lin, The Bride with White Hair, Swordsman 2) soon finds her parents and young brother slaughtered by the leaders of these clans and left for dead.
Years later she turns up again with the Magic Lyre, entrusting it to the security team of Lui and his son Lui Lin (Yuen Biao, Eastern Condors, Iceman Cometh) to deliver it to one of the heads of the clans. Of course, this soon brings the other clans out of the woodwork, their powers being far out of reach of Lin. Thankfully Snow acts as his guardian angel, really just a pawn in her plot to get revenge on all the clans. Neither of them realising that Lin was adopted, and he is in reality her younger brother…
Yep, it’s a real throw back to the Shaw Brothers days!
It’s no coincidence that the plot of Deadful Melody greatly resembles Buddha’s Palm - released just over a decade before it. The Shaw Brothers production Palm came at the end of that studios rein over Hong Kong cinema. Here presented with a tired vision of the wuxia/swordsman genre with no fresh ideas to fill it, they settled on throwing everything they had at the film. Why have one or two cans when you could have, well, loads? Ironically it was released the same year as Ching Siu-ting’s Duel to the Death, which along with Tsai Hark’s Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain helped completely revitalise both the genre and the Hong Kong film industry itself.
Like Palm, Deadful Melody, came at the end of this revitalised run of swordsman films, when virtually every angle had been covered. It was the Canto pop leads, fantastic effects and staged sequences, and comedy mix of Ching Siu-ting’s Chinese Ghost Story series that so successfully brought the genre back into the spotlight in the mid 80s. By 1993, when Melody was released, the genre had all but run out of steam again. Ronny Yu would take it to the most stylistic extremes that very year in The Bride with White Hair, making one of the finest wuxia films ever. Ringo Lam and Tsai Hark took a gritty, more basic stance on Burning Paradise and Blade respectively. But there’s no argument that little impact was made till Andrew Lau’s The Stormriders came along.
In fact it’s likely Buddha’s Palm influenced Melody, as the earlier film also had a sequence with magical lyres. Both films suffer from the same flaws - a rushed, often incoherent plot with big bangs that is in reality nearer to a pantomime, complete with hammy acting performances. In that respect, Melody suffers a lot more. The overuse of flashy slow motion shots, often contributing to poorly captured action choreography. Not helped by shockingly bad subtitles (on the Laserdisc version at least).
Director Ng Min-kun at least had a pretty short track record, and in many respects appears to be attempting a ‘Ching Siu-ting by numbers’ approach, but with none of the style, finesse or humour. That said, despite the obvious influence of Sui-ting’s movies, Melody is pretty stylised in it’s own right. The psychedelic technique used for the playing of the lyre works rather well in a cut-price druggy kind of a way. The majority of the budget, however, seems to have gone to the pyrotechnical department, as blowing things up (namely anyone unfortunate enough to get in the way of the lyre).
With a cast like Brigitte Lin, Yuen Biao, Corina Lau and Wu Ma you might have expected more. In fact, nearly all the actors turn in particularly hammy performances without the knowing of films like New Dragons Inn or Swordsman 2 - which at least have fun with the genre. Only Brigitte Lin is the exception, whose serious take on her role seems so out of place with the rest of the cast she almost seems like she’s in a different film. In fact, with her constant, yet completely unexplained, appearances dressed as a man can’t help but recall her role as Asia the Invincible in Swordsman 2 and it’s sequel The East is Red.
Perhaps it’s just too simplistic for it’s own good? Even Buddha’s Palm seemed to approached it’s subject with more knowing. Or maybe it was greatly cut to achieve a commercial length of 90 minutes? Whatever the case Deadful Melody never realises such promising potential. Like many other wuxia movies of the period, you never get over the impression the impression that both actors and filmmakers alike are simply going through the motions.
No, it’s not D(r)eadful perhaps. But if you want to see the films one gimmick - the powerful lyre itself - used really well you’d be better placed checking out Stephen Chow’s latest, Kung Fu Hustle.
DVD details
Distributor: Tai Seng (US/HK)
Yep. I know it's old school, but this was actually reviewed from a LaserDisc copy. (Now some of you out there are probably to young to remember what they were, but let's just say in comparison to a DVD they're the equivilent of an old vinyl LP. Except no one's making them anymore!)
In all likelyhood, this would have been much the same as the original Hong Kong DVD release. Meaning that the subtitles on that would also have been pretty shoddy. Fans of the film should head for the Special Edition US release, which includes extras and a commentary.
