Movie Details
| Title: | Dreadnaught | |
| Director: | Woo-ping Yuen | |
| Year: | 1981 | |
| Genre: | Kung-Fu | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.25.11 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.25.11 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2011 The first Hong Kong feature. I guess the reason why they don't announce the titles is because the American Genre Film Archive (or whatever Justin and Tim are calling their print library) just got a major load of Hong Kong films and may not... well, whatever. They're awesome surprises. The first one is Dreadnaught, an early Yuen Woo-ping kung-fu flick starring a very old.. I don't know his name. I've seen him a lot though and he's awesome. So... this is still a kung-fu film. Too long, too plodding, and eventually the fight scenes bore me as much as the lame story. That said, there are moments in this film that are downright awesome: -The dragon fight scene. There are two teams of dudes who have these Chinese dragons. they do super complicated dances with them, two guys controlling their dragon costume to mimic animal behavior while balancing precariously or showing incredible feats of strenght, then collide in a fight between the two dragons. As they try to nip and tear at eachothers' costumes, the dudes underneath are also fighting. It's this bizarre mix of fight choreography (which is really a sort of dancing in itself), actual dancing, and animal puppetry that is pretty mindblowing. -I like how a lot of the fight scenes, especially involving the old guy who I can't remember, revolve around non-fight subject matter. There's two scenes, one where he's trying to heal an angry fighter and another where a tailor is trying to assassinate him, that are expertly choreographed and performed but also clever and out of the ordinary. -the main bad guy pulls the head off a chicken for no reason. I'm not really a fan of animal cruelty but this was SO arbitrary that I had to laugh. Plus you don't actually see him pull the head off, it just cuts to him holding the head in one hand and the body in the other. So.. I guess the next two titles will be total sleaze grindhouse fare, then Wednesday's movie will be a big action movie that I may have heard of but guaranteed to never have seen in a theater. Although I got kind of drowsy during the slower bits of this, I'll be at the rest. |
