Spiritual Kung Fu (1978)

PG,  despite some crazy language and continued potty humor.  Also, this is about violence that ends up killing people in mildly bloody ways.  When you have to write about the offensiveness of a movie, everything kind of takes a different context.  If I watched this as a kid, it probably wouldn't have raised any red flags, despite the fact that the protagonist is a really creepy dude when it comes to kissing women.  There are a ton of consent issues that probably weren't addressed that often in 1978, so keep that in mind.  

DIRECTOR: Wei Lo

It's funny how these things work out.  I plan to not watch that much stuff so I don't have to write too often and then I basically stack a bunch of movies in the same day.  It's not like I was planning on doing that.  I have this pretty intense regimen when it comes to watching movies while on the treadmill, so that seems out of my control..  (Spoiler: It's not.) Then we took our kids to see Inside Out 2, because of course we're going to see Inside Out 2.  Then my wife says that we should show the older kids Labyrinth and, yeah, we absolutely needed to do that.  (Although, she's watching it to make fun of it and I'm in the camp of "Let's enjoy this unironically."   I'm always going to lose that battle.)   Anyway, there's a lot going on in my life when it comes to this blog and I guess I'm going to write every minute of my vacation and never get around to playing video games ever again.

You know what?  I started Spiritual Kung Fu and I thought, "Now here's a serious movie."  Just cinematography wise, it looks way more professional than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, which is insane because it came out the same year as Half a Loaf of Kung Fu. And in the first ten minutes or so, I got the vibe that this was going to be a serious action comedy.  (Serious action comedy is hard to define.  It looked like it was going to go legit.)  Then Jackie Chan starts peeing on ghosts and farting on people, with the response being "It stinks" and then I was completely lost.  Is it a better movie than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu?  I suppose so.  I don't know.  There's a plot that I can kind of follow.  It seems a lot more focused.  The twist at the end kind of got me.  Okay, it only got me because I was not expecting there to even be a twist.  Some of you are probably saying, "Duh, that's what a twist is."  No, a twist is often a curveball solving a problem.  See, I wasn't invested enough to even know that there was something I was trying to deduct...

...despite the movie constantly telling me that there was a traitor inside of Shaolin Temple.  See, part of that's on me, but the other half of the problem comes from the tone of the film.  There are movies where we're trying to piece together a mystery before it is revealed to us. But tonally, Spiritual Kung Fu is doing some stuff that is more in line with a screwball comedy than it is with a murder mystery, which I just realized this kung fu movie technically is. Part of my brain was often frustrated with the idea that there was something to unpack in this movie because I was focused on the wrong thing altogether.  Despite the fact that there was a mystery of who was murdering the Shaolin monks, I was focused more on the most bananas motivations that I've ever gotten out of characters.

See, the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu because there are a bunch of ghosts (who it took me a while to confirm were ghosts.  I thought that they were aliens based on that comet that hit the temple) who are trying to teach Jackie Chan's Li-Yiang this secret fighting style that is the only fighting style that can defeat another stolen fighting style. The bigger issue is that the movie doesn't really establish that ghosts exist in the universe.  Maybe that is a cultural thing, but the movie starts off a lot more like a traditional kung fu movie.  There's a problem that is somehow linked to kung fu and it takes a lot more kung fu to solve that problem.  Out of nowhere, a comet hits the temple, revealing an ancient manuscript that will give Li-Yiang the ability to beat this other fighter.  The weird part, beyond a comet coming out of nowhere, is that the manuscript is haunted / invested by wacky ghosts.  

Okay, the movie takes a hard right at this moment.  But the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu. I should have been ready for ghost kung fu masters who have wacky hijinks, right?  Yeah, the reaction that people have to these ghosts make not a lick of sense.  The movie, as convoluted and soap-opera-y as the beginning is, at least stays consistent with reactions. When the ghosts show up, character development and choices go right out the window.  The initial monks who discover the ghosts are rightfully scared.  I appreciate that.  Then Li-Yiang goes to investigate the ghosts because he's a skeptic.  The ghosts mess with him...and he's remarkably cool that his entire belief system should have been rocked to the core. No change in him.  He sees ghosts.  They mess with him.  He's fine with that.  Meanwhile, the ghosts move downstairs and mess with the monks down there.  This is where the movie just makes no sense.  

For some reason, in some shots, the monks are terrified of the ghosts.  In some shots, they're just wacky.  One of the elders uses manuscripts to see the ghosts and the lower members think that it's funny to steal these manuscripts and see the ghosts?  I don't know what the motivation behind these choices are.  They were scared of the ghosts moments ago.  When the elder uses the manuscripts to see them, it seems proactive towards getting rid of the ghosts. Instead, we start getting bits.  I hate bits in Jackie Chan movies.  They're there to buff up a thin script and I don't get these sequences.  They're just too wacky for my taste.  Anyway, Li-Yiang, immediately after fighting off ghosts and confronting them, sees the elder fighting the ghosts and thinks that he is drunk.  It's like the filmmakers were just stuffing jokes into every moment, even if the jokes contradicted each other.

But the rest of the movie, shy of the kissing fight sequence, is fine.  I wrote about this earlier.  It's a scene where Li-Yiang, who has never seen a woman, demands a kiss from the first one he meets.  She fights him off.  He escalates with his kung fu.  Even worse, he has the ghosts teach him about better kung fu so he can claim that kiss from this girl, who is definitely not into it and he beats the crap out o her.  Not a great scene.  But if you can ignore this very uncomfortable bit that keeps going on for way too long, the action comedy afterwards is pretty watchable.  Again, I waxed poetic about how Jackie Chan has a lot in common with Gene Kelly when it comes to choreography.  There are some insane sequences in here and a lot of them.  Honestly, and this is me really whining, some of the scenes are so impressive...but they go on too long.  I hated that I was growing disinterested at certain points because I was overwhelmed with long and laboriously choreographed fight sequences.

My biggest complaint, though, was the fact that the two plots were a bit disjointed.  I was really happy when the ghosts got in on the final fight.  It kind of cemented the two disparate plots into a loose singular plot.  See, the ghosts stuff and the hunt for the Seven Deadly Fists didn't make a ton of sense.  I didn't understand why Li-Yiang, who found this long lost manuscript, didn't share it with everyone considering the seriousness of the predicament that they were in.  But he didn't.  If the ghosts didn't show up to fight the bad guy, who was kind of amazing at fighting and was a way bigger threat than the guy who we thought was the Big Bad, then the movie just wouldn't have made any sense whatsoever.  But still, there is a lot of movie where the ghosts don't even play a part in the story and it's just about kung fu.  It's a lot of odd choices.

Maybe my disappointment in this film comes from the idea that it looks so much better than Half a Loaf.  I was earnestly invested in the movie early on and then it just spiraled into some very odd decisions.  It's still pretty fun, but there are just so many weird choices made for this movie.