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.

★★

Hwanyeo (1971)

... aka: 화녀
... aka: 火女
... aka: Fire Woman
... aka: Hi on'na
... aka: Hwa-nyeo
... aka: La fille de satan (Satan's Daughter)
... aka: Woman of Fire

Directed by:
Kim Ki-yeong (Ki-young Kim)

The camera prowls around a bloody crime scene where a home owner and a housekeeper have both been murdered. Police have an underage young man, who has taken credit for the slayings, and two female witnesses in custody. At a back-and-forth between a reporter and the lead detective (Moo-ryong Choi), the former blames the increase in teenage crime to war, while the latter is quick to blame the media themselves for their sensationalism and negativity. When the cop returns to his office, the burglar confesses yet again and it's taken into record, he can barely get a word out of the older female witness and the younger female, who claims to work in a bar and came from a small village to work in the big city so she can send money back home, gets chastised for her "lewd" line of work. We then go into flashback mode to reveal just what happened.

After suffering rape at the hands of a pair of blacksmiths (one of whom ends up being smashed in the face with a rock), country girls Kyung-hui and Myeong-ja (Yuh-Jung Youn) head to Seoul to start a new life. Kyung-hui dreams of becoming a singer and hopes for a job where she can make money off of men. Myeong-ja decides she'd like to work as a housekeeper for a rich family because she thinks she'd be able to learn a lot observing how the wealthy live. The girls are quickly separated at an employment agency where Kyung-hui jumps at the chance to be a dancer / waitress at a men's club. Myeong-ja has to settle for a job as a housekeeper for Jeong-suk (Gye-hyeon Jeon), who's thrifty, blue collar, hard-working and not quite the obscenely wealthy boss she was hoping to work for. Instead, Jeong-suk mostly operates a large chicken farm while her husband Dong-sik (Namkoong Won) mostly writes songs and plays piano for wannabe singers at an all-girl's school. In lieu of payment, Myeong-ja requests only room, board and for Jeong-suk's assistance in helping her find a husband.

Clumsy, sheepish and more than a little bit odd, Myeong-ja starts her position dropping fish and dishes, and shows a hidden dark side by catching a rat with her bare hands and then stomping on it. Jeong-suk and Dong-sik's two bratty children write her off as a dumb "country bumpkin," fight all of the time and tell their hard-working and always-stressed mother that owning a chicken farm is "embarrassing." However, she's sunk all of her money into building their impressive home and, as a result, has to work extra hard to keep up appearances. Jeong-suk is also paranoid her husband is going to cheat with one of his "feisty" female students. When she has to go out of town, she instructs Myeong-ja to do anything in her power to stop a potential affair... even if that means killing someone!

With the wife away, Dong-sik gets drunk on homemade rice wine just as one of his students, Hye-ok (Yeong-a Oh), shows up to attempt to seduce him. Feeling unfulfilled in life, he decides to take the bait but the housemaid manages to throw Hye-ok out of the home, leading Dong-sik to rape her instead. The attack brings back instant memories of the rape she suffered back in her village. Having now snapped, Myeong-ja finds herself hopelessly in love with Dong-sik. The two squeeze in one more night of sex, this time consensual, before the wife and kids return home from their trip. However, their presence only seems to strengthen Myeong-ja's obsession with her married employer. She keeps slipping him notes, asks if he'll continue to have sex with her from time to time and confesses she's pregnant with his child. Dong-sik is forced to come clean to his wife. She takes Myeong-ja to have an abortion, which is so traumatic for her that she spends countless months locked away in her bedroom. In the interim, Jeong-suk has a baby of her own.

Having now had plenty of time to go completely insane, Myeong-ja decides she's going to take over the families life, starting by killing their new baby by throwing it down the stairs! Because if word gets out about the affair and abortion they'll be ruined, the couple send their children away to live with their grandparents and are then forced to cater to Myeong-ja's every whim, starting with her taking possession of Dong-sik with hopes that he'll impregnate her. After a man from her employment agency attempts to blackmail her with details about her past, Myeong-ja kills him by shattering a vase over his head, which only further implicates the entire family in criminal activity when she pins the crime on Dong-sik (who had passed out the night of the murder) and then the wife claims to have disposed of the body in the chicken meat grinder to cover for him.

This is Kim's "variation" on his 1960 hit THE HOUSEMAID. While it sticks fairly closely to the original's central plot and many of its details, there are some major differences here. For starters, this one's in color and makes sure we damn well know it with lots of vibrant lighting choices. Second, to bring it up to date with the art house-crazed 70s, the director has spliced in a number of still photo / artwork collages during some of the more tense moments. Third, the psycho is given more of a psychological profile / backstory and thus more motivation. Fourth, the entire film is told via flashback. Finally, several new subplots have been added, including the police investigation of the blackmailer's murder and a few scenes keeping us up to date with Myeong-ja's friend, who has been forced into prostitution. While some of these alterations aren't really for the better, this is still a tense, harrowing, visually arresting and well-acted psycho-horror / drama.

Though this went unreleased in most countries, it was one of the most acclaimed films of its year in South Korea and won all kinds of film awards there upon release. At the Blue Dragon Film Awards, considered the most prestigious film award given out in the country, it won for Best Director, Best Leading Actress (Youn), Best Supporting Actress (Jeon) and Best Art Direction (Seok-in Park). It also won several awards at the Daejong (Grand Bell) Film Awards and netted Youn yet another Best Actress trophy at the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival.

Kim even decided to film this tale a THIRD time a decade later with Hwanyeo '82 (Woman of Fire '82). And, in 2010, Hanyo / The Housemaid was remade yet again, this time by Sang-soo Im. That film was critically acclaimed as well and Youn, who'd transitioned over to playing the wife role in this later version, ended up winning most of her home countries Supporting Actress awards.

I'm not sure of any official U.S. release for this title though I do know there was a VHS release in Japan as well as a French release under the title La fille de satan.

★★★