Director: Chiang Shen
Writer: Chiang Shen
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
A doctor’s assistant takes on the drug lords running the town.
Our hero is the assistant/adopted son of the town’s doctor who specializes in treating heroin addicts. The number of local addicts has skyrocketed since the Japanese arrived and opened a casino. The hero suspects the Japanese are peddling the heroin, but the doctor tells him not to start fights. Were he to do that, though, there’d be no movie.
In response to all the addicts, the doctor posts ads all over town promising to treat people for free to help them break the habit. This offends the Japanese because they’re selling drugs to the community. They see this as a threat to their business so they start hassling the doctor which leads to the expected results.
What’s interesting about the plot is how convoluted it becomes to push an anti-drug message, which it then basically drops. The hero’s father died of withdrawal and, upon being told of the death, his mother died too. The doctor was there and so adopted the hero and raised him as his own. Only the doctor has his own past with drugs. He used to run his own martial arts school, but had a strict anti-drug policy. A rival school that advocated how fantastic drugs are challenged him, defeated him, and permanently injured his back.
I was rolling on the floor during that flashback sequence, by the way. It’s so random.
The hero faces off against the drug lords several times, wins the fight only to have the drug lords put more pressure on the doctor. The doctor, a classical liberal, prefers order over justice and caves every time.
Finally, the hero is caught in a setup and accused of sleeping with a man’s wife and then killing her. He’s taken by the cops to the drug lord, tied up, and attacked by goons which, admittedly, is one of the more inventive fight scenes. His arms are tied above him but he still manages to fight off all comers using just his legs. The cropping for TV, though, really undermines the visuals.
The drug lords also kidnap the doctor and his daughter, take them to the club where the doctor finds out the chairman that’s been running everything is the man who defeated him all those years back. The doctor and chairman face off, the hero escapes and joins the fight, and, after a few unnecessary twists, the chairman is finally defeated. THE END
Upon reflection, there’s a lot about this movie that’s pretty clever. What seem like random quirky elements sprinkled through the movie for filler actually all come together at the end. Only they feel like filler during the viewing. I’ll admit that I’m writing this up almost two full months after watching so I can’t remember how much I enjoyed it or not. My notes say the dubbing is hilariously bad, which is always a plus, and some of the fight scenes reached levels of extreme WTFery including ears getting cut off, but I also remember that I had to watch it over several nights because I kept falling asleep.
This isn’t a movie that offends the sensibilities, but it does feel like it drags its feet a bit and becomes pretty episodic. However, it appears to be in the public domain so I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. You can see for yourself how much it appeals or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment