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Martial Arts Double Feature: Hapkido / Lady Whirlwind
On June 17, 2014, Shout! Factory will be releasing The Angela Mao Ying Collection, a three-DVD set that includes When Taekwondo Strikes, Stoner, A Queen's Ransom, The Tournament, Broken Oath, and The Himalayan. In addition, on April 22, Shout! are bringing out two other Angela Mao films, Hapkido and Lady Whirlwind, on a separate DVD.
This release is thankfully more robust than Shout!'s bare-bones Bruce Lee double feature DVDs, with both Mandarin and English soundtracks included, along with a decent selection of extras. The menu screens follow the same design template from Shout!'s Jackie Chan double feature releases, and are nice to look at and easy to naviagte.
Extras on Hapkido include the film's Chinese trailer and US TV commercial, English-language title sequence, and interviews with Angela Mao, Carter Wong, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao. Sammo and Carter's interviews are in English, while Angela and Biao's are in Chinese with non-removable English subtitles. These are general interviews, and so do not go into the films on the disc in any great detail (for instance, Carter talks about working with Sylvester Stallone on Rambo) but it is still nice to see this kind of extra on a US DVD. Unfortunately, the video and audio quality on these are not very good; they appear to have been re-used from a 1995 "video magazine" edition of Eastern Heroes and there has been nothing done in terms of remastering.
On Lady Whirlwind, besides an English-language title sequence, we have a collection of trailers: the Chinese and English (under the alternate title Deep Thrust) versions for the film, as well as the original English-language ones for various Shout! kung fu releases, including The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, Police Story, Police Story, Police Story 2, The Protector, and Crime Story. Most of these have a fun grindhouse vibe to them and are worth checking out, even if the audio and video isn't the greatest (the Bruce Lee trailers being the exception, since they were remastered for Shout!'s The Legacy Collection box set).
Both films use source materials from Fortune Star and are presented in 2.35:1. Hapkido is the better looking of the two, with a fairly solid and clean-looking picture for the most part, while Lady Whirlwind has a good amount of wear and tear present. It doesn't make the film unwatchable, but it's obvious that there was not great pains taken to clean up the picture. Audiowise, there are Dolby 2.0 Mandarin and English soundtracks on both movies. The Mandarin tracks sound fine, but the English dubs suffer from a lot of hiss. English subtitles are provided that are easy to read and free of grammatical errors for the most part; they are not dubtitles.
Reviews and screen captures for each film are below. The screen captures were obtained with VLC Media Player and have not been altered.
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Hapkido
Reminiscent of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury, the story here pits a hapikdo school run by Angela Mao, Sammo Hung, and Carter Wong running afoul of a Japanese school. The plot was already somewhat tired by this point (Chinese good, Japanese bad, someone gets killed, let's get revenge) and is absolutely dated by now. Where Hapkido shines, as you might imagine, are the fight sequences. This was one of Sammo Hung's earliest attempts at working as a solo action director on a film, and it's obvious he wanted to pull out all the stops. There is a wonderful sense of fludity and kinetic energy to the fight scenes that will remind fans of the oldschool genre exactly why they love these sorts of movies so much.
RATING: 7.5 |
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Lady Whirlwind
The second film on the DVD, Lady Whirlwind, is also a revenge-centered plot, but it takes a bit of a different path, as Angela Mao here plays a woman out for vengeance who has a change of heart after she meets her intended target and gives him a temporary reprieve so that he can get his own dose of martial justice first. Director Wong Fung can't quite keep everything together -- the film veers off at points into the pointless talky exposition scenes that were are downfall of many oldschool releases, which leaves the audience bored and a bit confused as to exactly what is going on and who is killing who. Thankfully, again the fights save the day. Also coordinated by Sammo Hung (who has a small role as a villain) the fights here have a bit more violence and hard edge to them, bringing a nice exclamation point to Angela's smooth movements.
RATING: 7 |
