REVENGE OF THE IRON-FIST MAIDEN (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Often I don't review purely isophenomenal kung-fu movies. However, this one does feature a minor kung-fu diva unknown to me, and that touches on my interest in femmes formidables. Also, this flick has zero external reviews on IMDB, and it's not a bad enough film to deserve that fate.

It is, however, a simple revenge film, even though the plot wanders all over the place. Mountain girl Chi (Chia Lin Sun) finds her father dying, and with his last breath he names his killer as a bandit named Yuan. After a brief confab with an old monk-- implied to have been the person who taught Chi kung fu-- the iron-fist maiden goes looking for Yuan. She finds a bunch of his goons in some town and fights them. I note in passing that the film's fight-director eschews the old chestnut where a gang of thugs considerately make individual attacks on a single opponent. Instead, Chi, despite giving a good account of herself, is quickly hit from behind while dispatching another opponent. However, another kung-fu fighter comes to her rescue and they escape the minions of Yuan. However, the two of them must not talk very long, because the film then starts to follow the male fighter Lu (Pin Chiang) for a while, letting Chi go off to do whatever.

As it happens, Lu is also a target of Boss Yuan, because he has half of a treasure map, and Yuan stole the other half from Chi's father. But nobody makes any attacks on Lu, although he picks up a female servant, Shao (Chin-Feng Wang) after defending her against a nasty fellow who apparently bought Shao from her parents. Lu doesn't want a servant, but Shao follows him to his home, and apparently ingratiates herself with him sexually. No sex scenes are shown, but later on Shao will reveal that Lu made her pregnant.

Shao also has a darker secret: she's the daughter of Boss Yuan, and he specifically sent her to enter Lu's service so that she could spy on him and find the map. Of course during that association Shao falls in love with Lu and doesn't want to betray him, earning her a slap or two from Dad before he finds out she's pregnant. (This is one of the few memorable drama-scenes in the flick, in that the fellow playing Yuan is almost comic in his consternation at learning his daughter is pregnant by his enemy.) There's a confusing scene in which a woman in a face-mask saves Lu from some of Yuan's thugs. Presumably it's Shao, since Chi isn't around at the time, but she never evinces martial skills anywhere else.

Lu goes into hiding, possibly to hone his kung fu skills, and though Yuan's men search for him and his treasure-map, they fail to find him for the next nine months, during which time Shao gives birth. Maybe Chi does a lot of training too, for the film's next big action-scene shows her being ambushed at some construction camp, she manages to hold her own much better against a gang of male bandits than she did in her previous solo fight. Again, she's overcome, but Lu pops up and they drive off the thugs. This paves the way for Lu and Chi to square off respectively with Yuan and with his Number Two minion. To the film's credit, the setting of the construction camp makes a nice change, as Lu and Yuan take their fight atop a jam of cut logs floating in a river. Shao shows up to show Lu what she just brought out of the oven, but she dies when she's caught in one of her father's attacks. The film ends with Lu, Chi, and the motherless infant giving the complete map to the Cantonese government, just because.

Though I like dazzling kung fu choreography as much as anyone, I give REVENGE an extra star for depicting most of the fights by showing the opponents reletntlessly surging into one another's spaces-- that is, like real fights-- rather than staging things for greater visual effect. Chi does have one "superlative" feat, when she grabs Lu, tucks him under her arm and runs up a ladder to make their escape, but it's the only such deviation from reality, and I judge that it doesn't move the film into the uncanny domain.