Solimsa jucheongwidong (1982)

... aka: 소림사 주천귀동

... aka: 少林寺酒天鬼童

... aka: Firefist of Incredible Dragon

... aka: Firefist of the Incredible Dragon

... aka: Juchon-Gwidong in Shaolin Temple

... aka: Le sang du dragon (Blood of the Dragon)

... aka: Revenge of the Shaolin Temple

... aka: Shao Lin zi Jiu tian gui tong

Directed by:

"Jimmy Tseng" (Jong-seong Kim)

Corpses materialize in the snow and a human heart pops out of one of them, flies around and then kills four men. I'm sure you're wondering how a little heart can accomplish such a feat, especially since all we really get to see at the beginning is it flying close to people and then them spitting up blood and falling over, but, fortunately, we do get to see it do some cooler stuff later on. This got me thinking about all of the killer body part movies I've watched up to this point. I've seen killer disembodied hands, heads, brains, eyes... And killer teeth, hair and intestines. And even killer dicks, tits and vaginas, but I believe this may be my first ever killer disembodied heart movie. Hey, at least that's something!

The wealthy and evil Master Wu-Hong Liao (Bao-Liang Chen) holds dominance over a small village with his army of brutal thugs, who regularly terrorize the locals. A street performer / magician named Kun-Kun (Pung Im) mysteriously shows up in town one day and looks awfully familiar... almost exactly like a girl Liao and his men had previously killed and buried underneath the snow in the forest. Kun-Kun becomes chummy with a handsome fella named Tin-Chi Chen ("Jerry Young" / Jae-yeong Lee), who is investigating the disappearances of many beautiful young women in the area. As it turns out, Master Liao has been having his goons kidnap these girls so he can turn them into his personal sex slaves. Some are kept locked up in a room where they are kicked, whipped and occasionally pulled out and raped, while the more disobedient ones are killed. So it really should come as no big surprise that Master Liao's neglected younger wife, Yam-Chi, is carrying on a secret affair with his right hand man, Tao Shang Yi (Chang-Ming Pan).

Noticing that Tin-Chi and Kun-Kun are snooping around their home, Master Liao decides to put the kibosh on their activities. He has his men beat up Tin-Chi and then they make him stand on a stack of bricks on his tiptoes with a noose around his neck. Kun-Kun is beaten, stuck in a bag and taken to the woods where they plot to bury her alive. However, they run into a ghostly double of their proposed victim and several other scar-faced apparitions that scare them off. Is Kun-Kun herself a ghost? Does one of the ghosts just happen to look an awful lot like her? It's rather difficult to tell at first but it's eventually revealed that Kun-Kun is on a quest to find out what happened to her missing look-a-like sister, Shu-Shu, and brother-in-law, Ming-Hoi, who both vanished without a trace while traveling through the area.

Kun-Kun eventually runs across an "old" cave-dwelling hermit, who's clearly played by a very young man in a terrible silver wig with half his face covered in clumpy oatmeal-looking "make-up," who relays a flashback about what happened to her sister. Not surprisingly, she was another of Liao's victims. After being kidnapped, raped and beaten, she lost her baby, escaped from the harem and then ran into the snow and died. The hermit made a grave for her and has been watching over it ever since. After hearing this, Kun-Kun wants revenge but must also rescue Tin-Chi, plus help a friend, Uncle Chao (Chai-Choi Ai), when his daughter, Ah Fa, is herself kidnapped. Meanwhile, when Liao finds out his "scandalous slut" of a wife has been cheating, he ties her up, beats her and sticks a hairpin in her breast. I guess it's OK for him to rape and murder countless teen girls but for her to have a consensual affair? A line must be drawn somewhere!

While all of the above is playing out, the killer heart flies around doing its flying killer heart thing. It knocks a guy over onto a tree branch so he impales himself, smashes a guy in the face so his eyeball falls out, knocks a guy into a quicksand bog, rips an arm off, scalps a man, resurrects a corpse into a kung fu fighting machine, levitates a scarecrow, laughs in an echo female voice and even makes a body explode! It also shows up in a pretty great nightmare scene where Liao has visions of it resurrecting his past victims, who fly around in the woods and then corner him.

This is yet another instance where one cannot rely on the various titles, VHS and DVD covers and classifications on film sites to tell you just what you're really getting yourself into. While this has been packaged as a standard martial arts action film and is classified as such on nearly every film database, this is just as much of a ghostly revenge tale. While there's a decent amount of kung fu, there's even more supernatural horror to be found here. There's some comedy, too. Unfortunately. And it's all terrible and annoying, especially the bits centered around an idiot Taoist and his equally-dumb nephew (Lung Chin), who flop around seizure dancing, blowing on horns and making goofy faces as they attempt to exorcise the ghosts.

As usual with obscure Asian films, it's very difficult to find accurate information about this online. Hong Kong and Korean movie databases list this as an entirely South Korean production, while IMDb and some other sites have it as a Korean/Hong Kong co-production. However, most of the actors appear to be Taiwanese, so who really knows? For the time being, I am listing it as all three.

What we do know for sure is that much of the confusion stems from Tomas Tang's Filmark International out of Hong Kong, who are responsible for the 71-minute English-language cut. They've not only done their usual horrendous dubbing routine (likely with little regard to the original plot) but also taken it upon themselves to remove over 15 minutes of footage, including nearly the entire opening sequence (no wonder the plot makes little sense!), lots of female nudity (only a few very brief breast shots are left in the cut version) and a few extended torture scenes. Tang also added brand new fake credits ("Starring Maple Lin"), though he took credit as associate producer and "Benny Ho" (Godfrey Ho) is listed as dubbing supervisor. The producer is called "Richard Wong," but apparently acclaimed director Ki-young Kim (THE HOUSEMAID) was the actual producer of the original version!

The French release titled Le sang du dragon ("Blood of the Dragon") is the most complete cut of the film at nearly 88 minutes and is also in widescreen but, unfortunately, it's been dubbed into French and the print is horribly dark. I went ahead and skimmed through this version so I can note the major differences here and provide some images below. Cut scenes include the entire opening sequence of Tin-Chi encountering ghosts, a few human characters we see later on and a blind old woman while traveling alone at night (this runs about 5 minutes), a soft-core sex scene between a goon and a female captive in a barn that's interrupted by Master Liao (2 minutes) and full-frontally naked women in the barn being pushed down, hit and cowering in the corner as well as one with her hands tied above her head getting a pin stuck in her breast (1 minute).

One of the most notable omissions is a 4+ minute scene of Liao's wife taking a bath, opening her window and the heart flying in, hitting her in the stomach and "impregnating" her. Her lover then feels her stomach and recoils. She shrugs, hops back in the bath and notices it's filled with blood. The blood drains out in a time lapse effect and splashes all over the screen. In the cut version there is only brief mention of her thinking she may be pregnant in a later scene, which doesn't really serve any purpose as we just think she's carrying her lover's baby instead of being knocked up by the heart. And, yes, I do indeed feel extremely strange typing out a phrase like "knocked up by the heart."

On IMDb, this is given the English title Revenge of the Shaolin Temple, though I was unable to find any copies of the film with this title. Firefist of Incredible Dragon is the one used for all of the English-language VHS and DVD-R copies I've seen. IMDb also lists a third director called Wang-Yung Ling who is not listed on any of the versions I have run across.

★★

Weekend of Fear (1966)

Directed by:

Joe Danford

Here's another of those super low low low budget independent films shot in California that seemed to have vanished off the face of the Earth after its initial theatrical bookings. As far as I know, this was m.i.a. throughout the entire video era, was thought lost for decades and only resurfaced again just a few years ago. Strangely, the print that turned up on Youtube is VHS-sourced and opens with an FBI Warning screen, which indicates this was at one point a legitimate video release, or at least was planned as such by some company out there. I'm not sure where this mysterious copy came from exactly but I can find no evidence of a legitimate release anywhere. I even browsed through the Sinister Cinema and Something Weird websites looking for this thing, and nada. There are no VHS or DVD boxes to be found and all that exists publicity-wise is a cheap-looking black-and-white flier announcing its world premiere, which occurred in February of 1966 in Los Angeles at The Vagabond Theatre (since re-named The Hayworth Theatre and still in operation). Copyright in the credits in 1965 and it's just 65 minutes long.

I think the reason most people would want to seek this out nowadays is to get another look at Jill Banner. At just 17-years-old, the pretty and talented Banner made an extremely memorable debut as the demented daughter Virginia in Jack Hill's Spider Baby. Unfortunately, that very bizarre and ahead-of-its-time horror comedy wasn't appreciated at all in its day and was held back for release a number of years after completion (it was shot in 1964 and didn't hit theaters until the tail end of 1967). Even then, it generated very little interest and did absolutely nothing to help Banner's fledgling career. It wouldn't be until the 1990s that the film was rediscovered, found an audience and earned critical respectability. Sadly, by that point, Banner had already passed away in a car accident in 1982 and was never able to see the film, nor the performance she gave in it, receive its long-overdue acclaim. Weekend of Fear appears to be Banner's second film appearance, though it's actually a vehicle for another budding young actress / singer.

Judy (Micki Malone) is having a difficult time balancing her singing career and her love life. Because she's often at rehearsal and preparing for a nightclub opening, her annoyingly co-dependent fiancé Tom Swanson (Tory Alburn) starts feeling left out. "You don't have time for me anymore! I wonder if you still love me as much as you love your career!?," he whines. Judy and Tom's latest bicker-fest, of which there have apparently been many, ends with Tom storming out the door. So I need to stop right here and point out this argument, shot at a far distance and through a window, is one of the few instances of actual character dialogue in the film and has clearly been dubbed in later. Like a lot of other very low budget films from this time (most especially sexploitation films), this doesn't appear to have been shot with sound. Instead, the leading lady has to narrate most of the entire rest of the movie. We also get to hear the "thoughts" of at least two other characters whenever it's convenient.

Pouting on the couch ("Tom was right. I have been awfully irritable!"), Judy decides to call him and patch things up. After all, they're set to be married in a month. When he doesn't answer, she flashes back to better days when she was being all Suzy Homemaker in her sailor dress and cute little pineapple oven mitts making him a home-cooked meal instead of betraying her gender attempting to have a career. She then flashes back to another time she had the audacity to put on a new rock-n-roll record and "... things just got out of hand" when she, Tom and their friends Connie (Dianne Danford) and Jack (James Vaneck) started vigorously fruging on the patio during a cookout, causing them to burn their hot dogs. That naughty little minx!

The next day, Tom still isn't answering his phone. That's when Judy notices a strange man lurking around outside of her apartment. The copy/pasted plot outline used on most websites refers to this stalker as "a handicapped imbecile," but he's merely deaf-mute and the actor playing him (Kenneth Washman) is a handsome guy not the drooling ugly moron one may expect from the description. On her way to boyfriend's apartment, Judy realizes the man is trailing her ("Am I imagining it, or is that car following me?") but she manages to lose him at a red light. Tom's not home but she receives a telegram later informing her that his father had a heart attack and he had to leave town. Judy immediately packs a bag, calls a cab, goes to the bus stop and then hops a Greyhound.

Upon arriving in her fiancé's tiny hometown, Judy soon realizes that all of the townsfolk are gone: They've chartered a bus and went to San Diego for the weekend-long "Western Days Festival." No one's at Tom's parents place either. Assuming they're all at the hospital, she finds a key, lets herself in and waits for them to arrive. That's when the man who was stalking her in the city shows up... and he's brought along a switchblade! A switchblade that he never even uses! Judy hides behind the couch as the man enters the home, looks around and then rips out the phone. Though he occasionally pops in and out, he mostly sits outside in his car waiting for her to show up. Judy stays hidden until the following morning and then plots her escape.

I would say this is very student film-esque due to the amateurism, except that student films usually are far more adventurous, experimental and showoff-y with the camerawork and editing than this one, which is filled with tons of long, static, unbroken shots of the characters doing the most humdrum things imaginable. (Scene: Judy picks up telegram. Voice-over: "A telegram!") This does try to generate some honest-to-goodness suspense in a few scenes, and does an OK job with a couple of bits, but that's not nearly enough to sustain an entire feature. And don't even get me started on all the plot holes and loose ends that never get resolved. This also has a laughably preposterous finale, which finds Judy randomly going to the home of Marie Harris (Ruth Trent); Tom's older, widowed lady friend whom she'd met only once before, instead of the police and just happening to overhear her discussing a murder-for-hire plot with Tom's ex-girlfriend, Carol. Carol is Jill Banner's role and she doesn't appear in the film until the last few minutes and is thoroughly wasted here, though she does manage to out-act the entire rest of the cast during her one brief close-up shot. The final "shock" at the end is a clear rip of Psycho.

While the leading lady does have a soothing husky voice which is kinda nice to listen to (she also contributed a song called "The Night Will Never Come Again" to the film), that doesn't save most of the narration from being hilariously mundane. During the boring scenes she's hiding out in the home, she ponders obvious things, like where her fiancé is and whether or not he's hired this guy to kill her due to their argument, but then obsesses over dumb shit like whether or not she can have a cigarette without being detected and if she should grab some grub from the kitchen: "This might be a long wait. Maybe I should look for something to eat. Food is the furthest thing from my mind but if I get hungry later on I won't be able to turn on any lights and I can't go groping around in the dark!" Or, ya know, seeing how someone's right outside waiting to kill you, you could just lay low for a few hours instead. So what does this chick end up doing? She actually risks her life for a single fuckin' slice of plain white bread!

It's very easy to see why this bland, extremely tame, padded and utterly forgettable film disappeared for as long as it did... the opening credits and dance sequence are clearly the best parts! Not surprisingly, most of the people who worked on this didn't move on to any other film projects in Hollywood. Dianne Danford was apparently a Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1961, but is given no dialogue here and is only seen briefly; conservatively-dressed even. Seeing how she shares a last name with the writer / director / producer / editor, I assume the two were either related or married. Dianne also received an "assistant to the producer" credit.

★1/2