Movie Details
| Title: | Eastern Condors | |
| Director: | Sammo Hung | |
| Year: | 1987 | |
| Genre: | War | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.28.11 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- The Victim
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.28.11 | Secret | A friend lent me his completely officially available region 3 dvd of this and I watched it at home. It's pretty interesting. I heard from somewhere that prints of this movie are shown very rarely because of rights issues and the last time it was shown, the Hong Kong government had to intervene somehow in order to get it on the screen. So chances are i won't get any chance to see this on the big screen with a great crowd and a font of information introducing it any time soon, so I watched it... on my own. I'd never really heard of this before my friend told me about it, but I'm very glad they did. Sammo Hung directs and stars a sort of Dirty Dozen knock-off where a band of Asian criminals are recruited to carry out a suicide mission of going back into Vietnam and destroying a missile dump left un-exploded by American troops when they pulled out. They quickly ally with a few Vietnamese rebels to do a solid 80 minutes of shooting, kicking, leaping, bleeding, and killing. Seriously, when people aren't getting riddled with bullets or flying through the air with grenade bursts, they're getting slow-motion kicked in the face with a boot. And you see that boot connect. There are some absolutely BRUTAL moves on display here, and the action is structured and shot so well... Very impressive. Just crazy stuff. Awesome. I loved it. I also heard that the guy who looks completely like Chow Yun Fat in fact was a last-minute replacement for Chow Yun Fat himself because he dropped out at the last minute after finding some success with A Better Tomorrow. And I heard how Sammo Hung went to the same Opera school in Hong Kong as Jackie Chan and a few other guys in this movie (the skinny evil dude and the main young badass dude) and that their childhoods were completely horrific and abusive and messed them up completely. Like how Sammo will order the entire menu at resaurants because of growing up so hungry, or how lots of these guys end up big gamblers and womanizers all because of their torturous upbringing. And when people ask why action has gone downhill it's because Hong Kong now has laws to curb the child abuse once so prevalent. Crazy huh? |
