the survivors wrap in plastic and add one-by-one to a growing ma­ cabre carousel in the meat locker. Hired on a Saturday and


forced to start working on Mon­ day morning, Bava lavishes this cardboard quickie with deliber­ ate carelessness and contempt, condensing his usually well-mea­ sured style with reckless zooms and short-circuiting any suspense inherent in the material by pre­ senting every murder as a fait accompli, every corpse as a thing to be found underfoot. Neverthe­ less, the film (which never re­ ceived theatrical distribution in the CIS) is intermittently distin­ guished by the eerie epiphanies that mark all of Bava’s work, and the ingenuity of certain images (eg., the fist-fight—transformed into a mosaic by positioning the camera behind a grating—that overturns an objet d art made of crystal balls, causing a screen full of cubes to explode into a torrent of spheres... which roll into a bloody bathroom where a char­ acter has committed suicide) is nothing short of masterful. At first listen, the light-hearted score by Piero Umiliani (who wrote the # 1 novelty hit “Mah-nah Mah-nah” for the mondo movie SWEDEN: HEAVEN AND HELL around the same time) may seem grotesquely out-of- step with the story and its im­ ages, but on its own terms, it’s one of the most inventive scores Bava ever had, and it adds tre­ mendously to the entertainment value of repeat screenings. (The soundtrack was briefly available on vinyl in Italy, with these lyrics added to the catchy instrumen­ tal main theme: “One, two! One, two, three, four, five—die!") Redemption’s PAL format


tape offers an accurate 1.75:1 framing, and the sharp transfer emphasizes some subtle nudity that wasn’t as apparent in the French SECAM release (.L'ile


14


d’Epouuante), its domestic bootlegs, or earlier English-lan­ guage bootlegs.The color is paler than the French release, de­ emphasizing some of Bava’s color motifs (Pascal Martinet once de­ scribed this film as “a veritable symphony of blue”), but the print is complete—including the full exit music, which continues for some time past the end titles. —TL


FLIRTING SCHOLAR


1993, Mei Ah Laser Disc Co. #ML 864/ML 865 (Hong Kong), LD/D/ MA/LB, approx. $190, 101m 34s


KING OF BEGGARS


1992, Mei Ah Laser Disc Co. #ML 5029/ML 5030 (Hong Kong), LD/ D/S/SS/MA/LB, approx. $190, 99m 20s


Despite being Hong Kong’s


reigning box office king, dramatic actor-turned-comedian Stephen Chiau Sing-chi has yet to develop a substantial following among English-speaking HK movie devotées. The reason is simple: much of his humor cannot be translated. With its six tones, Cantonese is a language rife with comedic possibilities, and Chiau’s trademark mo lei tau nonsense humor, with its breakneck word­ play (often sounding like a kind of Canto rap), usually doesn’t sur­ vive the reduction to monotonal English and can even lose much of its effectiveness in quadratonal Mandarin. Yet Chiau is an adept physical comedian with moder­ ate Martial Arts skills, and there’s no denying the universal appeal of his trademark character: the acid-tongued libertine who runs rampant over his stuffy peers, although he is a frustrated ro­ mantic at heart. While contemporary vehicles


like the FIGHT BACK TO SCHOOL series generally rely too much on HK societal trends and morés for th e ir comedy to cross over,


Chiau’s period farces have much to offer with their glossy produc­ tion values, all-star casts and colorful action sequences, which are rich in Chinese fantasy ele­ ments. These two entries (which finished at #2 and #3 respec­ tively on the 1993 HK Box Office Chart after JURASSIC PARK!) rank with Wong Jing’s spirited BACK TO THE FUTURE knockoff GOD OF GAMBLERS PART III: BACK TO SHANGHAI (1991) as Chiau’s most enjoyable ventures in this sub-genre to date. Chiau has the title role in Ri­chard Lee Lik-chi’s FLIRTING SCHOLAR as Tong Pak-fu, a cel­ ebrated painter and poet whose eight wives would rather gamble from dusk to dawn than pay him any attention. His wandering eye soon fixes upon Chou-heung (Gong Li, speaking with a dubbed voice in the Cantonese version), the beautiful head maid of Madam Wah (60’s Kung Fu queen Cheng Pei-pei). In order to woo Chou- heung and circumvent the long standing hatred that exists be­ tween the Tong and Wah fami­ lies, he sells himself to the Wah household as a slave. Tong’s ver­ bal and Martial skills come in handy when his mistress’ palace is invaded by The Evil Scholar (former Shaw Brothers star Gor­don Lau Kar-fai), a Martial Arts master responsible for the un­ timely death of Tong’s father (played by Chiau in an amusing flashback). While the humor in a pivotal


sequence where Tong uses his masterful vocabulary to defeat a pompous opponent is all but lost in the awkwardly translated sub­ titles, most of the comedic and action setpieces manage to hit home. Among the best: Tong’s impromptu use of his weaselly brother (played by Chiau’s ha­ bitual comic foil Chan Pak-cheung) as a human paintbrush; Madame Wah and The Evil

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