Yuen Biao makes a martial art out of doing the laundry, but this mashup of genres goes too far for anyone to come out clean…
After the Snake and Drunken Master, and everything that came after it, action choreographer and director Yuen Woo-ping must have scoured high and low for the inspiration on how to trump himself with another quirky ‘martial art’ – until he remembered the washing pile.
Yuen Biao (Iceman Cometh, The Prodigal Son) stars as the aptly named Mousy, a certified coward whose attempts to collect payment for his sister’s laundry service end in naught. Even his sister, in a fine but under utilized performance by Lily Li, The Magic Blade, The Oily Maniac) kicks the proverbial arse in comparison. Unbeknownst to him the manoeuvre he uses to wring out the washing is ‘Short Pinching Toad Trap’, a crafty kung fu move if ever there was one.
Meanwhile Mousy hopes his best friend Leung Foon (Leung Ka-yan, Legend of a Fighter, The Postman Strikes Back) can get him into the Wong Fei-hung school. (Kwan Tak-hing appears as Wong Fei-hung for the last time after over 30 films since the 1950s. It became a recurring theme for Yuen Woo-ping, who’d already portrayed Jackie Chan as Wong in Drunken Master. Later he would choreograph much of Tsai Hark’s Once Upon A Time In China series with Jet Li, before adding to the mythology with Iron Monkey, set in Wong’s childhood.)
Unfortunately for all concerned a psychotic killer criminal hiding in the towns theatre group, Wild Tiger (Yuen Shun-yee, Death Duel, Drunken Master, Iron Monkey), is driven insane every time he hears Mousy’s lucky chain ringing around his neck, causing all kinds of gruesome murders. Mousy must finally stop hiding and face up to his fears, but can he clean up this mess.
Let’s get this straight from the off, the kung fu and martial arts seen in the movie are amazing. Yuen takes his by now trademark close shot hand work to new heights, outshining even Drunken Master for cleverness. The Lion Dance routines shown, so much a part of Wong Fei-hung’s legend, are absolutely incredible. Far and above the routines featured in Once Upon A Time In China, even though they were also choreographed by Woo-ping. Even Kwan Tak-hing, a Hong Kong actor from a very different generation of action movies, looks like he can really kick arse.
Unfortunately the whole thing is bound up in a weak script by filmmaker supremo-to-be Wong Jing (High Risk, City Hunter), tenuously linking ideas (even for a Hong Kong movie) purely to set up each scene. For instance, two thirds of the way through Wild Tiger suddenly starts using the ‘flying sleeve’ technique, where his sleeves miraculously fly out 20 metres or so, simply to make sense of Mousy’s counter laundry folding manoeuvre. It’s feeble at best.
The biggest problem with the film is the tone, the extreme violence (occasionally cut by BBFC on an earlier video release) jars against the predominantly broad, hammy comedy played throughout. If feels very much like two different films that never truly meet, and Yuen Biao performance is, understandably considering what he has to work with, overplayed and far too comedic to gain any resonance. In fact, because we never see the violent crimes Wild Tiger has performed in the past, his character actually becomes the most sympathetic in the whole movie.
It’s just plain messy. Packed full of great scenes, but nothing to hold them together as a coherent movie. And to think the classic The Prodigal Son, which revisited the Chinese theatre motif, came just a year later!
DVD details
Distributor: Hong Kong Legends (UK)
This beautiful restoration is truly what the now defunct Hong Kong Legends label became famous for. Great picture quality with a good, if somewhat over produced, sound transfer. (There's only so much you can do with the sound remix considering how poor it would have been to start with - HKL always tended to over do it!)
For the main part the extras are what you'd expect for HKL too. A 'featurette' - a text essay with that terrible music they loved to use - explains who Wong Fei-hung was and his attraction, but goes little beyond titles also released by HKL (funny that!). Again, this would be more watchable kept as simply a text essay, no moving, sound, etc, if not more so.
Thankfully, as well as the trailers there's also a 20 minute interview with Lily Li, who goes into depth about her experiences as an actor on Shaw Brothers movies as well as on Dreadnaught itself.
