Note: With no decent Dynasty images to be found on the web, I have rebelled… and made my selection into a joke. The video image on the disc looks decent, trust me.
Here’s something Different: the intrepid artistes of the 3-D Film Archive have applied their special talents to a 3-D attraction with a weird pedigree, a straight-up chopsocky Kung-fu fighting programmer. English-language online information on this one is so scarce, I don’t know if it was filmed in Hong Kong or Taiwan. I don’t know if the movie’s main actor-performer-dervishes are big stars, but several have plenty of IMDB credits; on U.S. posters an actor named Bobby Ming gets special billing … but I can’t nail down who he plays. Is ‘Bobby Ming’ an Americanization of Tao-Ling Tan, identified as the main character on the IMDB? Asian martial arts experts have permission to scoff… I’ll just do my best here.
Thanks to the lack of special reviewer insight, this notice isn’t going to get you any closer to terrific info on the film’s production or personnel. I can say that Dynasty 3-D is solid combat from one end to the other of its 92-minute running time, and that the 3-D is certainly effective. Do you miss the old days when the Three Stooges missed no opportunity to jab something at the screen? Your dream has been answered. These martial arts masters throw everything at the camera except the horses they ride. The show wins the Lucio Fulci Award for virtual eye trauma.
I didn’t find Dynasty particularly rewarding for fine storytelling details. The bare-bones scenario moves smoothly from one Kung-fu combat to the next. Please forgive the errors I’m almost certain to make here. It’s the Ming Dynasty, folks, and the nasty usurper Eunuch Chao (Ying Bai? Pai Ling?) seeks to wipe out the royal Prince Chu (?) as part of a violent power grab. Chao is referred to as one of several Eunuchs supporting the Emperor. His invincible army of assassins (read: nicely trained and uniformed pawns) tracks Prince Chu to his hiding place in a monastery. The monks fool Chao’s troops and generals by making the building seem deserted, but Chao himself enters, wipes out a squadron of monk combatants, and fulfills his mission. The balance of the tale sees Chao further defending his crooked plan against two main rivals. Young student and mysterious sword and chopsocky master Tan Hsiao-chien (Tao-Liang Tan? Bobby Ming?) is out to exact revenge on Chao, for the death of his father and relatives and Kung-fu master and his haberdasher and his stockbroker and his favorite Corgi… The murder of Tan Hsiao-chen’s father is depicted with a still-frame montage.
In addition to his near-supernatural fighting skills, Eunuch Chao apparently will become immortal unless Tan Hsiao-chien kills him within seven days (?). Chao sets his generals Tsao Tsang-Wen and Kwei (Kang Chin?) against this Robin Hood of the East. The wild card in the equation is a rogue adventurer, the talented killer-diller Lang Si-yu (David Wei Tang?), who offers his services to Chao but eventually plays his own game, not unlike Clint Eastwood’s Joe in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. The clever Lang Si-yu uses his brains to manipulate others. Chao admires the way he gets what he wants without violence. With Chao’s generals all defeated (not to mention innumerable foot soldiers) the arrogant Lang Si-yu finally chooses his course of action. It isn’t easy to reason with a zealot like Tan Hsiao-chien, but they end up joining forces against the Evil Chao.
Did I follow Dynasty fully? I’m not sure — I definitely didn’t understand the magic associated with Chao, as by the final battle we learn that he can only be killed by a blow to the head… he continues fighting with a sword going right through his body. In this genre any capable fighter can leap 30 feet and land on the roof of a house, not to mention various other fancy martial arts tricks (all through editing tricks, of course) worthy of a supernatural being.
Let me continue to demonstrate my relative ignorance of the Kung Fu – chopsocky genre. Tan Hsiao-chien does a lot of fighting with an extremely durable trick umbrella. The combat rages with swords, spears, pikes and for one memorable set-to, flying grabber-claws on chains, that when thrown out and yanked back, decapitate the intended victim. It’s a pretty slick trick, and like most everything we see, relatively bloodless and gore-free. The beheading trick is similar to but not as good as the insanely entertaining mayhem of Master of the Flying Guillotine (a show that sent my kids to their feet laughing and clapping).
Eunuch Chao and Tan Hsiao-chien toss handfuls of shiny coins (?), each fling of which invariably strikes several victims squarely in their foreheads, a death blow. As this is 3-D EVERYTHING gets projected into the foreground space: coins, darts, sword points, spears, pikes, the flying guillotine claws, the works. When a monk rings a giant bell, the ringer pole also swings right into our 3-D faces. Never just once, of course — every one of these ‘duck you sucker’ moments is repeated at least twice.
Chao has this (magic?) tunic made of chain-mail ‘coins;’ at one point he pulls it off, it stiffens into a sheet and he throws it like a boomerang. It slices off tree branches, etc…. it’s hard to know what to make of the gag. One general fights for a couple minutes after having both of his hands chopped off, as in a Fairy Tale or a Monty Python movie.
The four or so leading characters are distinctive. The rough-looking Tan Hsiao-chien is your silent Steve McQueen type, and the handsome Lang Si-yu lays on the equivalent of cosmopolitan charm. The nasty Eunuch Chao sports his large chin birthmark and shows distrust and malice toward all. Interrogation scenes (old man, captured soldier) repeatedly end with a casual decapitation. The players are just interesting enough to make us want to see who will survive, and what will be left of them.
The moves, sword ducks and spins tell me that I’m watching ‘Peking Opera’ training; when push comes to stab, what we are seeing is as much a form of dance as it is a fantasy martial arts demonstration. There must be a special asylum for the sound editors of these pictures: somebody had to cut in at least four thousand fist and sword whooshes, and innumerable knuckle, chop and spear impacts, often at the rate of more than one a second. Creative, echoey sound effects often cover odd continuity cuts between slow motion and normal fight action.
The leads are always asking who is a better fighter than whom. Lang Si-yu holds off fighting one exhausted opponent because he wants a fair fight, but elsewhere he is prepared to be as ruthless as the villain. At least that’s my excuse for just enjoying the merry mayhem and tuning out finer points of dramaturgy.
I saw no female characters with close-ups or dialogue, just random peasants and a couple of court maidens. Yet I don’t think Chao being called a Eunuch has anything to do with sex. We see several impressive towns and grand houses, and some scenes use a couple-hundred extras and many well-trained and drilled horsemen. Spacious interiors are always suitable for murderous sword battles. I was amused by the bearded, mostly bald monks that turn out to be martial arts fighters as well. All have arrangements of big dots painted on their bald heads, like dominoes. In the final battle Chao keeps fighting with that sword sticking through him, and at one point manages to stab an opponent with the pointy end.
Did I forget to mention that there’s quite a bit of fighting in this movie?
Director Mei Chung Chang keeps everything moving, to say the least. In terms of 3-D the show delivers the goods. The depth illusion is aided by shooting through bars, screens, trees, and anything else that can enliven the foreground.
The actors certainly take their roles seriously. I realize it might be disrespectful to not get the stars properly lined up with their parts in the film … who exactly is Bobby Ming, anyway? I throw myself on the mercy of the court. The fantastic 3-D martial arts action — that part I understood.
