THE DRAGON'S SHOWDOWN (1980)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Here's yet another chopsocky directed by Geoffrey Ho that isn't significantly more demented than other kung fu films of the time, and which actually has a reasonably linear plot, just like both THE DYNAMITE SHAOLIIN HEROES and GRAND MASTER OF SHAOLIN KUNG FU. 

There's a dollop of sociological myth in the initiating actions of greedy landowner Hu (Martin Chiu) trying to exploit his tenant farmers. But this setup serves solely as a motivation for Hu to slaughter the father and mother of a resisting family, the Lees. Two brothers escape. Chin-Tai the oldest boy, after witnessing his parents' deaths, simply runs away, and when he next re-enters the story as an adult, viewers learn nothing about what happened to him out in the world. Chin-Tung is more fortunate: the family's nanny takes him to a neighboring village to be raised by an unrelated family. As for the Lee's one daughter, Hu capriciously decides to raise her as his own child, unaware of her true parents' fate.

Fast-forward twenty years, and young adult Chin-Tung is first seen having a kung-fu duel with "Shirley" (Cheryl Meng, sometimes billed with the first name Kitty). Chin-Tung's offense is that he referred to Shirley as "sister," which raises her ire because she doesn't think of Chin-Tung as a "brother." The broad implication is that the two may have been raised together, and that, even if they knew they weren't real siblings, Chin-Tung can't really think of Shirley as anything but. In any case, Chin's driving obsession is to gain revenge for his slain parents. The script doesn't say who taught kung fu to the two non-siblings, but Chin-Tung has reached the age that he can no longer shirk his duty to seek vengeance. 

Problem is, Hu didn't hang out in the vicinity, but moved off when he'd made his pile off the backs of the peasants. Chin-Tung initially plans to leave alone, but Shirley tags along in boys' attire. Coincidentally, as word-of-mouth takes the duo ever closer to Hu's current location, Chin-Tai homes in on their mutual nemesis at the same time. 

Meanwhile, over at Hu's new digs, we see that Hu has indeed raised the former Lee girl as his own daughter under the name Chu Cheng, and he's taught her some kung fu as well. This plot-thread suggests that she might end up defending her father against her actual brothers, and indeed there is a minor dust-up between Chu Cheng and her oldest brother Chin-Tai. But her character is quickly sidelined, and she's not present for the climactic battle. For that matter, Chin-Tai is taken out by Hu's henchman Ma. Ma has a weird "magnetic sword" with which he can throw off an opponent's balance by attracting any metal on their outfits, and he does so with Chin-Tai's metal necklace, setting the avenger up for a killing blow. Later Chin-Tung and Shirley come across the dying man and the two brothers become aware of each other's existence just before the older sibling dies.

Though no one seeks out a chopsocky for strong drama, the plot does focus most of all upon the gradual (though completely chaste) romance of Chin-Tung and Shirley. Being away from their common home causes the young man to become more aware of Shirley as a woman, and he even projects his own erotic feelings in the form of fearing that some of Hu's rowdies may rape her. Thus, the hero doesn't really prioritize finding his lost sister as he does hooking up with the woman he's thought of as his sister.

Dragon Lee is one of the better Bruce Lee-imitators, and he projects good charisma in the midst of his fights, particularly the concluding one with "bad father" Hu, wherein Martin Chiu provides a formidable menace. Cheryl Meng executes her fights efficiently enough, but in the acting department she's nowhere near even the middle-level divas like Lily Li. Since Hu is neither a scientist nor a sorcerer, there's no accounting for the provenance of the magnetic sword, or for a kind of badly-explained "strength belt" Hu wears. In the context of other chopsockies with such gimmicks, I tend to think they're meant to be rudimentary extensions of the period's science rather than innovations, and so I judge them as uncanny devices. SHOWDOWN shakes out as a good time-killer with a minor psychological myth at its core.