Martial arts films

When I saw my first martial arts films I remember being blown away by the seemingly super human abilities of the guys involved. Who were these human monkey men who could bounce off walls and knock apples off people’s bonces. I’m not sure which movies came first but i vividly remember the impression made upon my young and jelly like brain.

I think Kung-fu with David Carradine (may he rest in peace) was an early influence and then it must have been Brucey with Enter the Dragon. It was a little longer before of I saw his other films but I and Fist of Fury on video at about fourteen years old. I love the scene where he’s at the park and the sign says “No dogs or Chinese” and then a moped drives by in the background – very period.

I then graduated into a slightly more extreme martial arts films that were more violent but at the same time more cartoonish and had poor imitation Bruce Lee actors - Bruce Li, Lo, Ly, Lu, La la etc. Now they were sticking their fingers into people’s hearts and making them stop beating – very gruesome!

One of my favorite all time cheesy movies was “Kill and Kill again” which has a Steve Ryan and a bunch of his martial artist friends going up against some drooling maddies putting together a army of evil fighters! There’s a great scene on You tube with a slow-mo bullet which needs to be checked out!

Thankfully, modern movies and martial arts choreography has become incredibly sophisticated thanks to the wire work and vision in films such as “The Matrix” one of my “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. “The Bourne Identity” has a superb hand to hand combat scene as Matt Damon is attacked in his French apartment, although an earlier example of a scene which scores points for realism is with John Cusack fighting another assassin in the school corridor in “Grosse Point Blank”.

As a fan I have a much higher expectation now of the type of fight scenes I will accept as decent and believable due to films like these, anything less just will not do. We have exchanged cartoonishness for grittiness but it is still a stretch to call them realistic in the true sense. For instance how many movie scenes can you remember where the fighters end up on the floor? Not many.