PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
There's surprisingly little written online about this movie series, which looks as if it was filmed as one long movie and then chopped into three parts. I don't know much about the popularity of Alexander Rei Lo as a kung-fu star in the West, but he's got a fair number of credits to his name, and NINJA DEATH was produced by Joseph Kuo, who has some reputation thanks to his "Shaolin Bronzemen" series. Yet I didn't see references to anything that resembled this three-parter on the Hong Kong Movie Database.
It's my considered opinion that Chinese movie-audiences tend to display a liking for labyrinthine plots. Often, in kung-fu films of about ninety minutes, this leads to a lot of narrative crowding, and so one might think that three 90-minute films would allow for better plotting. Instead, the DEATH series remains just as confusing as a shorter movie.
The dominant trope is here is the "prince of high estate raised as a poor orphan," though for once the apparently Chinese protagonist Tiger (Rei Lo) is half-Japanese. From what I can piece together, before Tiger's birth a Chinese kung-fu master, Yi Chin Yi (I think) migrates to Japan and marries Mariko. It's implied that she's some sort of Japanese royalty and is served by a cadre of ninjas, dominated by plum-colored outfits.
Yi-- usually seen strutting around in a gold lame outfit and occasionally wielding twin hammers-- decides to become the Grand Master of kung fu. For some reason he apparently decides to off his own son, possibly because he has some special destiny. (He does have a plum-shaped birthmark, for what that's worth, which may have something to do with the attire of his mother's ninjas.) Some of Mariko's retainers try to escape with Infant Tiger, but the Grand Master's ninjas overtake the defenders. One of the defenders must be Mariko's brother, since he later claims to be Tiger's uncle, but he gets his eyes gouged out, which doesn't keep him from being able to do kung-fu fighting. Someone-- I'm not bothering to check who-- does escape with the infant and get him to China, so the Grand Master's plan is temporarily foiled.
When next seen, Tiger is the owner of a Chinese brothel (which allows for a hefty amount of female nudity in Part I, but not in the other two sections). The broad implication is that Tiger didn't actually get raised by any kindly benefactor but lived some hardscrabble existence until adulthood, where he somehow acquired his whorehouse. But he also has a kung-fu teacher, usually called in the dub "Tai Master," and the teacher seems to know just who Tiger really is. So maybe he came around later? In the film proper, Mariko's forces infiltrate Tiger's city and start some sort of operation designed to suss out the half-Japanese princeling. At least I think that's what's going on when two of Mariko's agents, a brother-and-sister team named Fujiko and Sakura, actually start a Japanese-themed cathouse in Tiger's neighborhood-- to get his attention, I guess.
(Sidenote, to the best of my knowledge, Fujiko is usually a girl's name. This may have been some obscure joke, since there's some comic business where Fujiko fights Tiger and the latter thinks the former is making a sexual come-on.) One thing leads to another, and while Sakura tries to convince Tiger to sample her "Japanese style" of sex, he gets drunk and has his way with her. (In Part II, just to prove he's not biased in terms of nationality, he also has "accidental sex" with a poor Chinese girl, but she doesn't become a major character.)
The DEATH films all feel like the writers were making things up as they went along, which is odd given that they're theoretically depicting some big dynastic struggle, but with ninjas. Some scenes show Fujiko and Sakura reporting to The Grand Master, so are they double agents or what? Sakura at least seems to be genuinely in love with Tiger, so the double-agent explanation makes the most sense. In Part III Sakura sleeps with Tiger to "charge him up" for his impending battle with the villain. People come and go really quickly: the Tai Master dies after revealing Tiger's heritage to him. Blind Master says he'll take over, but there's an unusual absence of further training sequences. Mariko shows up in Parts II and III and challenges her son to a kung-fu battle without telling him who she is; later Tiger has a big dramatic scene about how he grew up without a mother. There's some guy in a devil-mask who runs around like a maniac. Once Tiger commits to fighting his evil father, he apparently lets the whorehouse run itself, since he never goes back to check on things there. The ending is really confusing, since the dub definitely says the Grand Master is Tiger's dad, but then as Devil Mask dies Mariko mourns him as if he's her husband.
Though as I've shown there's a fair amount of "crazy-fu" here, there's not as much as I would have expected for a film totaling roughly four and a half hours. There aren't even a lot of marvelous phenomena, though there are just enough bizarre ninja-powers and weapons to tilt the movie in that direction. Lo Rei and his paternal opponent get some decent fights but the actresses playing Sakura and Mariko contribute a fair share of femme-fighting.
If I had to evaluate the film based on how many wacky scenes it contains, I'd probably recommend most enthusiasts check out more of the standard hour-and-a-half movies to get those sort of jollies.
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