The Assassin (2015)

Yinniang (Shu Qi) was taken from her home at the age of ten and trained to become a master assassin. Now an adult, she fails to undertake her latest mission when she sees her target cradling his infant son. As penance she is ordered to the distant province of Weibo to kill its chief minister Tang Ji'an (Chang Chen) - a man to whom she was once betrothed.

Every few years a wuxia film breaks out internationally and becomes a critics' darling across Europe and North America. It started with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, which was soon followed by the likes of The House of Flying Daggers, Hero and The Curse of the Golden Flower. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin is the latest such acclaimed film, having been awarded Best Director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It is also the first new feature film from Hou in eight years, which has led to much pent-up demand for new work from one of Taiwan's most beloved directors.

The Assassin is an excellent film but, I suspect, a divisive one. Certainly anybody tempted in its direction by the promise of another Crouching Tiger is going to walk away deeply disappointed. It approaches the wuxia genre on its own terms, and tells its story in its own way.

Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991)

He Ping, the Chinese director best known for his international arthouse hit Red Firecracker Green Firecracker, is also the director of an intriguing trilogy of 'Chinese westerns'. In these films He developed a combination of wuxia-style stories of heroic feudal warriors fighting evil in China's distant past with an aesthetic borrowed liberally from Sergio Leone and other Italian westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a curiously successful blend. I had previously reviewed Sun Valley (1996), the second film of the three, and many years ago I had the opportunity to see the third - Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003) - on the big screen. Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991) is the first of He's thematic trilogy, and it is a starkly told and effective sword-wielding western.

A teenager named Hao Ge (Gao Wei) travels across the western desert region of China to a small walled village known as Double Flag Town. He is there on the dying command of his father, a noted swordsman, to track down a crippled restaurant owner (Jiang Chang) and marry the man's daughter Hao Mei (Zhang Manna). When Hao Mei is almost raped, Hao Ge murders the assailant. When the assailant's brother arrives in town - a notorious and violent swordsman known as One Blow (Sun Haiying) - Hao Ge must stand against him or see the entire village slaughtered.

Monster Hunt (2015)

In the distant past, monsters walk the Earth but have been banished to faraway mountain regions separate from humanity. A runaway monster queen escapes to human territory and bestows her infant child upon an inept village mayor (Jing Boran). He soon teams up with an aspiring monster hunter (Bai Baihe) to protect the baby from both the monsters that have undertaken a coup of their kingdom, as well as the monster hunters who wish to eliminate the monsters once and for all.

Monster Hunt was a massive hit in China last year, where it broke box office records to become the highest-grossing Chinese language film of all time (a record since broken by Stephen Chow's 2016 film Mermaid). Monster Hunt combines computer-generated effects, wuxia action, scatalogical humour and even a few musical numbers, in a sort of 'everything-in-the-pot' approach to popular filmmaking. The result is a sort of amiable yet uneven mess, one too scrappy to really rate as a genre classic but far too goofy and loveable to criticise too harshly.

The Storm Warriors (2009)

The Storm Riders was a 1998 wuxia film directed by Andrew Lau. It was based on the hugely popular Hong Kong comic book Fung Wan by Ma Wing-shing, starred popular movie stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng and made then-ground breaking use of computer graphics to recreate the comic's thrilling fantasy elements. It was a rare Hong Kong film that actually found an international audience, and audiences back home eagerly awaited the arrival of a sequel.

I'm not sure anybody was initially expecting a sequel to take 11 years, but in 2009 a second Fung Wan film did hit the cinemas. It was the work of a different production company, had new directors Danny and Oxide Pang, but did manage to reunite Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng as the overly dramatic super-warriors Cloud and Wind.

A synopsis of the film feels a bit superfluous: it's a story about the evil Japanese general Lord Godless invading China, and Wind and Cloud teaming up with other sword-wielding warriors Ghostly Tiger, Nameless and Second Dream to defeat him. Wind turns evil, forcing Cloud to fight against him for the future of the nation.

The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom (2014)

Baifa Monu Zhuan, variously translated as Biography of the White-Haired Succuba or Romance of the White-Haired Maiden, is a serialised Chinese novel by Liang Yusheng. It was enormously popular when originally published in 1957. Within two years it had already been adapted into a Hong Kong wuxia film, Story of White-Haired Demon Girl. A television adaptation appeared in 1978, another film in 1980, and another TV serial in 1986. In 1993 the novel received its most famous and still most widely acclaimed adaptation, Ronny Yu's phenomenally successful The Bride with White Hair. His film stripped out the majority of the novel's plot - the political machinations, the civil war, the rival clans of nobles and bandits - to concentrate primarily on its central tragic love story. He also cast Hong Kong film legends Brigitte Lin and Leslie Cheung, which never hurts.

Last year the novel got yet another adaptation - its 10th including film and television - in the form of Jacob Cheung's lavish CGI-filled epic The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom. The film stars Huang Xiaoming as the dashing warrior Zhuo Yihang and Fan Bingbing as the bandit queen Lian Nishang, destined to become the white-haired witch of the title.

New Dragon Gate Inn (1992)

King Hu's 1966 wuxia film Dragon Inn was a ground-breaking and hugely popular film, so it's not surprising that eventually somebody had the idea of remaking it. The task fell to the hugely successful Hong Kong film producer Tsui Hark. While Tsui was an accomplished director in his own, he handed directorial duties to Raymond Lee (The Last Conflict). Lee and Tsui assembled an all-star cast for the remake, including Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen. The resulting production, New Dragon Gate Inn, was a massive commercial hit and remains a popular cult film today.

The storyline is essentially the same as the original film. Tsao Siu-yan (Donnie Yen) is a powerful eunuch in control of China's Eastern Depot security agency. He has a rival general killed, and uses the general's children as bait to lure in the general's allies. Those allies successfully rescue the children, but are forced to take shelter at the isolated Dragon Gate Inn before they can escape across the border, When the Eastern Depot forces arrive, a complicated game of deception begins between the two forces.

Dragon Inn (1967)

At the height of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor's eunuch Tsao (Pai Ying) has executed his political rival General Yu, and exiled Yu's children from China. He then has second thoughts and, fearing a future reprisal from the children, sends a large contingent of his secret police to assassinate them. Tsao's men wait at the isolated Dragon Gate Inn, where their arrival coincides with that of three itinerant master warriors.

Dragon Inn is a 1967 Taiwanese wuxia film directed by King Hu. It remains quite a difficult film to find on home video, although Eureka Video in the UK is thankfully releasing a bluray edition this September. For many viewers it's sadly less well known than its two remakes: New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011). This is a deep shame, as Dragon Inn is not only a satisfying wuxia picture in its own right but also one of the most influential films ever made in the genre. If you have ever seen a Chinese period film with a master swordswoman, a fight in a roadside tea house, or a powerful and manipulative eunuch villain, then you pretty much have Dragon Inn to thank for it.

Golden Swallow (1968)

Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei), a talented martial artist who wields a pair of daggers, is badly injured when defending a farm from bandits. She is nursed back to health by Golden Whip (Lo Leih), and a romance begins to blossom between them. That romance is disrupted when it becomes apparent that someone is murdering thieves and gangsters across the province and framing Golden Swallow for the killings. That person is Silver Roc (Jimmy Wang), a former boyfriend of Golden Swallow's from her time in martial arts training - and the murders purely exist to attract her attention so they can be reunited.

Let's start with the enormously weird bit of that synopsis: a brooding ex-boyfriend trying to get his one true love's attention by murdering literally dozens of people to make her notice him. That's a romantic gesture that goes well beyond creepy and into fully-blown criminal insanity. While Silver Roc's behaviour is not condoned by Golden Swallow, neither she nor the film in general really treat the man's actions with the slack-jawed nervous horror that they deserve.

So what the hell are we talking about here? This is Golden Swallow, a 1968 sequel to the legendary Hong Kong wuxia movie Come Drink With Me. Martial arts star Cheng Pei-Pei reprises her role of Golden Swallow, this time finding herself at the centre of a violent love triangle. It's a Shaw Brothers production: basically if you close your eyes and imagine the most iconic and archetypal old-fashioned Hong Kong action movie that you can, you're probably right on the money.

The Storm Riders (1998)

Andrew Lau’s The Storm Riders burst onto Hong Kong screens in 1998, riding an unparalleled wave of audience anticipation and studio hype. The film came from a popular director, thanks to his hugely successful Young & Dangerous films, and featured an all-star cast of Hong Kong’s most popular actors and pop singers. What’s more, it was adapted from the city’s most popular comic book (or ‘manhua’), Ma Wing-shing’s Fung Wan, and utilised computer-generated visual effects the likes of which had never been seen before in a Hong Kong production.

The film begins when the all-powerful Lord Conquerer (Sonny Chiba) receives a prophecy that he will have good fortune if he trains two children, Wind and Cloud, to be master martial artists and swordsmen like himself. When Wind and Cloud grow to adulthood (played by Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok respectively) a second prophecy reveals that they may become his downfall. That is about as simple as the storyline can be made, since in the execution it is a long and fairly muddled affair, hampered by too large a cast of characters and too great a reliance on the audience knowing who is who and what is actually going on. For the target crowd of excited Hong Kong teenagers, this strategy likely worked perfectly well. To the uninitiated, the film is often an exercise in head-scratching befuddlement. Most scenes appear to be a duel, or a lead-up to a duel, or an ominous conversation regarding the inevitability of a duel. It’s all taken remarkably seriously with little room for humour.

The Blade of the Rose (2004)

Released in English language markets as The Twins Effect 2, Blade of the Rose seems an odd sequel in that - cast aside - it has no relation to the original film whatsoever. The original was produced to cash in on the popularity of singers Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung, who performed as "The Twins". The Twins Effect was a fairly mediocre sort of action comedy involving vampires. The Blade of the Rose is instead a fairly mediocre sort of action comedy involving the creaky old cliché of an female empire where men are enslaved.

It’s a messy film. For the most part it acts like a sort of gregarious high school production – everyone has this sort of amiable “let’s put on the show ourselves” vibe to them. It feels less like a Hong Kong fantasy film so much as a student film made by fans of Hong Kong fantasy. Amateurish to be certain, but also very high on charm and enthusiasm. It’s deliberately silly and over-the-top, as Hong Kong comedies are often wont to be. The costumes and sets are colourful enough to potentially induce seizures.

Ashes of Time: 20 years on

20 years ago today Hong Kong moviegoers were presented with Ashes of Time, a long-gestating martial arts fantasy written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. At the time it was the most expensive Hong Kong film production ever staged. It had taken an inordinately long time to shoot, with Wong as good as holding his high profile cast captive in the Gobi Desert. The shoot was so long that the cast simultaneously used its sets and costumes to make a feature-length parody, The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, with another director, Jeffrey Lau. Post-production was so lengthy and difficult that halfway through Wong wrote, shot, edited and released an entirely unrelated film, Chungking Express.

When it was released 20 years ago, local critics were baffled by its obtuse plot and weird photography. Audiences, who had expected a crowd-pleasing adaptation of wuxia novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes, famously queued around the block demanding refunds. It ultimately lost its distributor HK$30 million dollars.

Ashes of Time almost killed Wong's career just when he was developing serious critical acclaim. Two decades later, however, and partly thanks to a 2006 re-edit by Wong, it is widely regarded as a Hong Kong classic: odd, mournful, near-impenetrable, and for many utterly unforgettable.

An Empress and the Warriors (2008)

An Empress and the Warriors, directed by Ching Siu-Tung and starring Kelly Chen, Donnie Yen, and Leon Lai, is a romantic action epic set in ancient China. A princess named Yen Feier (Chen) inherits a kingdom when her father is murdered. When an attempt is made on her life she is rescued by a handsome monk (Lai), and recuperates with him deep in the forest. They fall in love, Yen abdicates her crown, and then she is forced to return when politics back home spill into a bloody civil war.

Ching Siu-Tung is best known as the director of the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy. He shoots a very pretty film here. The forest vistas are gorgeous, and the film draws a lot of mileage from the Chinese countryside. Coupled with this is some fantastic costume design – much of the armour in particular is beautifully elaborate. The actors are all good, and generally do what they're best at - Donnie Yen in particular is impressive, and gets a wonderful fight scene towards the film’s climax. Ultimately, however, there’s nothing here to make me want to recommend it too heavily. It’s one of those films that is just there. It does nothing wrong, but doesn't do enough that is exceptionally right.

The Bride with White Hair (1993)

Cho Yi-Hang (Leslie Cheung) waits on a mountain peak for a majestic flower to bloom. It does so once every decade, and its petals can cure any illness. Through flashbacks we learn why he’s waiting there, who the cure is for, and what led his life along the course it took. It is a course populated with bloodshed, conflict, love and sex, witchcraft and sorcery.

The Bride with White Hair was one of my formative viewing experiences, viewed late at night on Australian TV channel SBS and met by my slack-jawed amazement and immense admiration. The film was produced in 1993, and presented a massive and overwhelming contrast to the sorts of action films that I (and, I suspect, other English-speaking viewers) was watching at the time.

The film was my first encounter with ‘wuxia’, a particularly Chinese genre of novel, comic book, television drama and film. The term literally means ‘martial hero’, and denotes a particular brand of martial arts-based period adventure. Wuxia stories present intensely noble and honour-bound martial artists and swordspeople fighting evil and injustice as they travel the land. They exist in a mythologised ideal vision of medieval China – the level of mythology varies from text to text – roughly analogous to European tales of chivalry, Japanese samurai drama or even the American western.

The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)

This is probably one of the strangest movies I am likely to ever see. It’s origins are strange, the film itself is strange – if there is an element of its production to be discussed, it is likely to turn out seeming strange.

In the early 1990s director Wong Kar-Wai was one of the big rising stars of the Hong Kong film industry. While his first two films – As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild – had not been commercial successes, they had gathered significant critical acclaim. There was a sense that, given the right material and some time, Wong could produce a big box office hit. That hit was supposed to be The Eagle Shooting Heroes, an adaptation of the popular wuxia novel by Louis Cha. Wong, perversely, had other ideas. His adaptation took out almost everything that was in the novel except for its characters, and re-set them into a new prequel story that bore little relation to the source material. He shot it, with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, in an experimental and fairly avant-garde fashion. He edited the film in an unusual way that made it difficult for audiences to understand what was going on. He didn’t even keep the title, calling his film Ashes of Time.

Wong also took a long time to shoot the film. What was supposed to be a quick location shoot of a few weeks stretched into an intolerable stretch of months. The budget spiralled out of control. It spiralled so far, in fact, that to hide the growing cost of his film Wong produced a second film simultaneously, using the same actors and locations, to cover up the additional cost of Ashes of Time by claiming the costs for two productions instead of one. The end result is The Eagle Shooting Heroes.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)

In 2000, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon exploded across international movie screens like a firecracker, winning numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim, and earning US$213 million in the process. For many viewers it was their first (and in most cases I suspect only) glimpse of wuxia cinema, that specifically Chinese genre combining historical fiction, fantasy, martial arts and super-heroic swordplay.

It's been almost 15 years since its release, and the film impresses just as much as it did the first time around. This isn’t simply a great film, and it isn’t even just the most creatively successful wuxia film of all time – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is one of the all-time best films in the history of world cinema.

The film focuses on two separated couples: in one case they are separated by class and distance, in another by an overwhelming fear of rejection.