LADY WHIRLWIND (1972), THE FURIOUS KILLER (1973)

 

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

This double review started out as a single, after I viewed a streaming copy of an extremely obscure chopsocky, THE FURIOUS KILLER. But in the process of trying to think of something interesting to say about this bit of ephemera, I realized that it bore a broad similarity to an earlier martial arts flick I'd recently re-watched, Angela Mao's LADY WHIRLWIND. (The above lobby card was produced in the U.S. to take some improbable advantage of the contemporaneous adult film DEEP THROAT.) LADY WHIRLWIND and FURIOUS KILLER share a similar trope (if not a direct influence of the former upon the latter): a female martial artist seeks revenge upon a man, or men, who have wronged her, with a touch of conflict about whether her revenge is the correct path. 

WHIRLWIND begins with the backstory of a Mister Ling (Chang Yu), who meets his future wife after thugs beat him and leave him for dead. Ling recovers but nurses the idea of getting revenge on the local thugs. Miss Tien (Mao) comes to town just when Ling is being attacked by the gangsters, and she saves him. But Tien only does this because she wants to use her kung fu to beat Ling to death, rather than allowing anyone else to do so. She allows Ling to recover from his wounds at his house, explaining her motives to the man and his wife. It seems Ling jilted Tien's sister some time back, and the sister killed herself. Tien blames Ling for this occurrence, and swears to kill him when he's able to defend himself.

However, Tien's basic decency is revealed when Ling pleads that she allow him to gain revenge on the gangsters before she kills him. Tien agrees, and after a false start or two Ling learns a new form of kung fu to battle his enemies. However, he's not up to the task alone, and ironically Tien ends up fighting the thugs with Ling in order to keep Ling for her own vengeance. But as a result of her having helped Ling and his wife, Tien finally decides to forgive him and leave the man in peace.

WHIRLWIND was one of the many strong films in Mao's popular seventies cinematic run. But if IMDB is correct, FURIOUS KILLER is the last of almost forty movies for Hung Lee. I recognize none of the other titles on Hung's resume, so for all that I know, KILLER may be the actress's only kung-fu film, or at least the only one of which she was the star.

In contrast to WHIRLWIND's script, the villains of KILLER are almost all completely bad. The gangsters of Boss Shang kill an old man and his granddaughter for some reason, but Tong, the sister of the granddaughter, is away at the time. She trains in kung fu for years to take vengeance. When Tong is ready, she does what most such heroes do, starting not with the head guy, but with his lieutenants, so that she can work up to a climactic duel with the main villain.

Tong fingers Shang's henchmen with ridiculous ease, challenges them and their minions, and eventually defeats all comers, implicitly killing her main targets with her assaults. A minor supporting character tells Tong that she should practice forgiveness, but she doesn't appear to be affected. However, when she goes after a third henchman, he pleads that he's tried to abandon crime and live virtuously with his family since being complicit in the murders. Tong won't listen, so the two of them fight and Tong defeats him. But before she can take fatal vengeance, the guy's wife pleads for him. Tong agrees to forgive the guy, but continues pursuing Shang himself. Shang finds out that she spared one victim and kills the guy, for no clear reason.

After Tong wades through some of Shang's minions, the heroine and the master villain contend, oddly enough, in the vicinity of a cattle pen. This leads to the movie's one modestly original touch: that the villain ends up dying by cattle stampede. The only other indicator that Tong may have modified her desire for vengeance is a line she speaks before fighting Shang, telling him that he can live if he'll go to the police and confess his crimes. But patently KILLER's writer didn't have the strong sense of dramatic progression as the one who wrote WHIRLWIND.

As for the action elements, Mao was at the peak of her form in the early seventies, but she also had the unique ability to really "act out" her feelings of rage or frustration while fighting. Hung does not show this particular ability. She does deliver a whole lotta ass-kickings, but I had the impression that she was new to the practice of fake-fighting; that maybe she had trained with the stunt doubles for a week or two before cameras rolled. 

A final "thrust" re WHIRLWIND: I never saw it in a U.S. theater, but I very much liked the above lobby card. But probably no one who has seen the film will be surprised that neither Angela Mao nor any other female performer shows the slightest bit of cleavage in it, nor is there any sort of arcane "death blow" involved.