FIREFIST OF INCREDIBLE DRAGON (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I confess that this sterling review of the featured 1982 South Korean "kung-fu-and-ghosts" flick does a better job of summarizing FIREFIST than I ever could. I flatter myself that I'm usually pretty good at forging my way through nonsense-narratives and gleaning whatever diamonds I can find in the rubbish-- for example, as with my 2023 review of the far superior WOLF DEVIL WOMAN.

FIREFIST OF INCREDIBLE DRAGON-- whose title refers to precisely nothing in the film-- is however not crazy by virtue of its creators' undisciplined energies, but by virtue of laziness. There's very little story in FIREFIST, so what the creators did was just inject lots of sleaze, violence and weird supernatural effects as possible to pad out the running time. 

The A-story is that of Master Liao (Chen Pao-liang). He's some sort of bigwig in his unnamed city, with such enormous wealth and power that he can keep hot and cold running sex-slaves and no one seems to notice. At the start of the film he's already had his minions bury four or five of his latest victims beneath the mountain snows. However, a floating heart emerges from one of the bodies and kills several minions-- and this is the beginning of Liao's many troubles.

The B-story, then, is comprised of two young heroes out to nail Liao for his crimes. Of the two, the female Kun-Kun (Poong Im) is trying to find her twin sister, who may or may not be one of the murdered women. Male hero Ten-Chi (Jae-Young Lee) doesn't really seem to have a motive for his beneficence. I imagine the English cut I saw could have left a lot of motive on the cutting-room floor. But it's just as likely that the filmmakers didn't bother to include any, particularly knowing that one of the producers was Tomas Tang, and one of the other technicians was writer-director Godfrey Ho.These two Hong Kong luminaries have rarely shown any interest in continuity, so yeah, not much reason to blame the dubbing staff.

Amidst all the time-wasting (and boring) sleaze and violence, I found two scenes that justified FIREFIST slightly. In one, the evil Liao dreams that five of his bloody-robed victims spring out of the snow and assail him. The other scene comes at the climax, when Ten-Chi and Kun-Kun have a decent, fairly bloody battle with Master Liao. But supernatural revenge overtakes Liao before the battle's done, and so the heroes are left to pick up the pieces-- assuming their viewers can figure out where all the pieces go.