Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book (21 page)

Sammo didn’t let the scar stop him. He didn’t let anything stop him. He got his first kung fu choreographer job at the age of twenty, for
The Fast Sword
(1970), then worked both behind and in front of the camera for several King Hu
films, including
A Touch of Zen
,
The Fate of Lee Khan
(1972), and
The Valiant Ones
(1974). He was twenty-three when he started working with Bruce Lee
and only a few years older when he got his most prestigious assignment.

“My first major movie as star and director was called
Shaolin Monk
(1977), and the funny thing was I wasn’t originally supposed to be in the movie. I wanted Jackie Chan
to do it. He was nothing at that time, but I wanted him. But the producers say no. They decide that I’m not too bad, so they say ‘Go, you do it.’”

That led to more directing assignments, from
Warriors Two
(1978) to his charming satire of a Bruce-fixated pig farmer,
Enter the Fat Dragon
(1978). All this new-found work necessitated that he finalize his own loyal team of collaborators. The three at the team’s core were Yuen Baio
, Lam Ching-ying
, and Chan Wui-ngai
— an eclectic trio culled from Sammo’s life at the China Drama Academy, other Peking Opera
School alums, and friends made on movie sets. Baio, born in 1957 (making him seven years younger than Sammo and three years younger than Jackie) grew up with his new boss. Ching-ying used to pal around with Sammo when they were both in different schools, and Wu-ngai was an old school sort, who had learned his craft from Han Ying-chieh
. Between the three, Sammo got the best of all perspectives.

“From the very beginning I like to do things different,” Sammo explained to me. “I like to combine comedy, tragedy, and a lot of action. I like unusual heroes. The audience has more sympathy toward them. Later on, I found out it was better to concentrate on comedy. The audience likes to laugh more than they like to cry, but still the hero has to go through changes.”

So Sammo put himself, as well as Jackie Chan
, through changes. “Jackie and I worked together often, but I didn’t want to be compared with him, just as he didn’t want to be compared to Bruce Lee
all the time. Everybody has a different idea and approach to filming kung fu. For Jackie the camera hardly moves … Jackie moves! I like to use the camera to get, and keep, the audience’s attention. Same with the editing. Some other directors think that editing is not their job, but I do.”

And it showed. Sammo established himself as one of the finest fight scene makers ever in what many consider his finest film:
The Prodigal Son
(1981). A beautiful, brilliant, powerful film about a young man who’s fooled into thinking he is a great fighter, an asthmatic Peking Opera
performer who teaches him wing chun
, and another young man whose rich father kills his kung fu opponents, it cemented Sammo’s team of co-stars and co-choreographers.

Yuen Baio
, the youngest of the Seven Little Fortunes, was Sammo’s go-to star and collaborator, while Lam Ching-ying
, who worked closely with Bruce Lee
on
The Big Boss
and
Enter the Dragon
, became a star in his own right via his performance as the asthmatic “wu dan
” (Peking Opera
female fighting star) in this film. Sammo’s team also utilized such other Little Fortunes as Yuen Wah
and Corey Yuen Kwai
— both of whom would also go on to become acting and choreography mainstays.

At the same time Sammo conceived
The Prodigal Son
, he also came up with the brainstorm of H.A.M. (Horror Action Movies). “Since I was a small boy I heard all kinds of ghost stories from my mother and my master in the Peking Opera
School. All the old people told me all these great stories of the supernatural until I became afraid of the dark. I still am!” So Sammo created
Encounters of the Spooky Kind
(aka
Spooky Encounters
, 1980), as well as
The
Dead and the Deadly
(1982), and, most notably, the
Mr. Vampire
series (1985-1992) — starring the personable Lam Ching-ying
as the “one-eye-browed priest,” and featuring the fascinating Chinese hopping dead known as the “gyonshi
.”

By then, a Sammo Hung
fight scene was as recognizable as a medicine ball on a golf course. In his own movies, Jackie Chan
would toss an opponent off screen. In a Sammo Hung
movie, he’d beat and kick them insensible — even plant a machete in their heads (as in
Heart of Dragon
). Sammo himself, despite spotlighting wing chun
in
Warriors Two
and
Prodigal Son
, leaned toward the more externally powerful-looking hung gar
to bounce his opponents all over the set.

Things proceeded smoothly, and profitably, through the landmark “Three Brothers” movies until, after
Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars
, Jackie didn’t want to play anymore. Sammo responded by plunging into a plethora of productions as producer, choreographer, and director through his production companies Gar Bo, Bojou, and Bo Ho. It was at that moment that the Shaw Brothers
closed its film units, and suddenly dozens of Hung’s associates were out of work. Although he maintains that had nothing to do with it, suddenly Sammo mounted two of his most expensive, expansive movies ever, which called for a large cast of experienced kung fu talent.

Millionaire’s Express
(aka
Shanghai Express
, 1986) was a catch-as-catch-can action comedy with hunks of spaghetti Western thrown in, featuring an entire western-style town that the studio built in the middle of nowhere, filled with more than three dozen action and comedy stars (including Yuen Baio
, Shih Kien
, Jimmy Wang Yu
, Dick Tei Wei
, Eric Tsang
, Cynthia Rothrock
, Richard Norton
, Johnny Wang Lung-wei
, Hsaio Ho
, Philip Kao Fei
, and Liu Chia-yung
). Although it featured a full-scale kung fu free-for-all finale with the entire cast, the rest was an exercise in time-filling.

“It took three months to prepare and five months to shoot,” Sammo recalled. “It was a lot of work, but it wasn’t difficult.” But it was expensive and didn’t exactly set box office records. Then came
Eastern Condors
(1986), which many Westerners consider Sammo’s masterpiece (being just about the only film where Sammo’s weight is never even mentioned), but others consider a camp classic. Combining
The Dirty Dozen
and
The Deer Hunter
(1978) with a James Bondian climax, it featured another large cast crammed with renowned kung fu stars, as well as Oscar-winner Haing S. Ngor
, directors Yuen Wo-ping
and Corey Yuen Kwai
, and Yuen Wah
in a career-making performance as a supremely creepy, cunning, and capable Vietcong villain. It also showcased Sammo’s future wife: the statuesque green-eyed ex-Miss Hong Kong, Joyce Mina Godenzi
(aka Kao Lai-hung).

“Pre-production started in July 1987,” Sammo explained. “We started shooting in November 1987 in Canada. We shoot for a month, then go to Hong Kong to film a basketball scene. That took a month, and we wound up editing it out! Then we went to Bangkok for a month. In January 1988, we all go to the Philippines and spend five months there. Finally, we come back to Hong Kong and spend another month there. We finished in June, 1988. All together, almost a year.” Although it had plenty of entertainment value, Sammo’s Asian audience, and studio, began to think he was taking advantage of them.

The final straw was
Lucky Stars Go Places
(1986), a flick co-written, co-starring, and co-produced by Sammo, that combined two of the colony’s most popular action-comedy film series —
Aces Go Places
and
The Lucky Stars
— into one sloppy, condescending, mess. Suddenly the masses turned on Sammo, giving everything he threw at them, including
Dragons Forever
, the cold shoulder. After that, Sammo tried to get back into the industry’s good graces by playing his own Peking Opera
school teacher in the lyrical, heart-felt
Painted Faces
(1988) — the story of the Seven Little Fortunes’ school days — but it seemed too little too late.

So began Sammo’s “Look Back in Anger” era — full of his greatest fight scenes, but also his most outrageous bouts of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Whenever anyone wonders why Sammo is not vaunted alongside his more popular peers, some explain that it is because Hung is overweight and facially scarred. Part of the whole truth, however, is evident in the title of one of his last personal films:
Don’t Give a Damn
(1994). Although largely responsible for some of the greatest action movies, the most influential horror films, and simply the best individual kung-fu fights of all time, Sammo is consistently undermined by his own seething apathy — a bad attitude that sinks too many of his movies under the weight of scenes that go way beyond political incorrectness.

A perfect, and painful, example is in the aforementioned
Don’t Give a Damn
, when two Chinese cops vie for the opportunity to blacken their faces and put on “nappy” wigs (to unconvincingly impersonate the African-American villain’s brother), while detailing how the black man has ruined society. The following scene, where the ridiculously disguised Chinese actor pretends to be black, makes
Amos and Andy
(1928-1966) look like
Roots
(1977). It was embarrassing and shameful, but despite the protestations of the actors, Sammo went ahead with it anyway.

The closest thing anyone could get to an explanation was that he was paying back Westerners for years of similar racism toward Asians. That explanation, while possible, doesn’t make up for his misjudgments that have kept him from the pantheon of movie success. It certainly hasn’t crimped his output, however. Having been involved with at least eighty movies by the time of
Dragons Forever
, he went on to appear in, produce, and direct at least fifty more — ranging from his award-winning performance in
Eight Taels of Gold
(1989) to an even worse “Lucky Stars” film, the awful
Ghost Punting
(1992).

Thankfully, there was the Shaw Studio-flavored
Pedicab Driver
(1989), which even featured a show-stopping fight scene with Liu Chia-liang
. Maintaining that aura, Sammo eventually produced
Operation Scorpio
(1994), starring Chin Kar-lok
as an aspiring comic book artist who runs afoul of a Scorpion-style killer, but is saved by the “Wok-fu” taught to him by a chef played by Liang. Then came
Encounters of the Spooky Kind
II
(1989), an honorable sequel to Hung’s groundbreaking H.A.M. of 1980. He then tried to recapture the pre-
Lucky Stars Go Places
magic of 1978’s
Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog
with
Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon
(1990), which featured the same co-star — comic actor Karl Maka
— while borrowing the plot of the 1986 Billy Crystal
vehicle
Running Scared
… but it wasn’t exactly welcomed (not helping matters were scenes of Maka beating up girls)
.

Sammo reacted to that rejection by really sticking it to the audience with
Pantyhose Hero
(1990), a variation on the unfortunate Ryan O’Neal
/John Hurt
movie,
Partners
(1982), in which a cop has to pretend he’s gay to find a serial killer of homosexuals. Seemingly daring the viewer to call him on his outrageous stereotypes, Sammo filled the film with some of his most savage fights and unbelievable stunts (such as actually being hit by a car in slow motion).

“My fighting got more savage in these because I was in an increasingly worse mood,” he explained. “Everything was the same in these movies. I was getting in a rut. So I got more serious and savage in my fighting.”