Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Little Heroes of Shaolin Temple

• Directed by Tong Sing Tai
• Starring
  • Hwa Lun
  • Tong Sing Tai
  • Shing Tien Che
  • Li Su Hwa

The ill effects of the mid-’80s ninja craze are still very much in evidence, thanks to all the kung fu movies given “ninja” titles for video release during the time period (and don’t get me started on the Philip Ko/Thomas Tang re-edited travesties). But it’s rare that I find a kung fu movie re-released with so little respect paid to it.

See, I’m used to boxes which bear little resemblance to their contents. In this case, as you can see in the upper left of this page, the front of the box displays a little white kid, showing off his brand-new-out-of-the-package gi (you can still see the fold creases in the pant leg) on the sidewalk; the back cover has the same kid standing with hands on his hips on the same sidewalk (ooh, I’ve got to snap one more picture of Johnnie in his fighting pajamas, he looks so cute!). It was released by Blue Ribbon Video (who? exactly), and according to the front, is “supported by The Children’s Ninja Club.” I’m guessing that the white kid is a large percentage of the membership of said club. The back cover is where the biggest lies are found. I’m not talking about the plot blurb; that’s fairly accurate, if vague. No, I’m talking about the copyright notice (without date) for Blue Ribbon Video, and the text underneath that reads, in part, “The copyright proprietors have licensed Blue Ribbon Video videocassettes for private home use only…”

“Be honest; does this robe make me look fat?”

Well, if the copyright holders actually licensed this release, I’ll eat my shorts. Because this looks a hell of a lot like a bootleg.

What are my clues? Well, for one thing, when you first put the video in, there’s just a split-second of the FBI warning before that’s abruptly cut off — with those little horizontal rainbow lines that mean that someone stopped and started a VCR. Then we get to the credits; while the director’s name etc. are shown against a background of Chinese tapestries, the title “Little Ninja Heroes” is against a black background. The lettering is done with the cheapest video titler I’ve ever seen; it’s one step up from writing the name on bristleboard with a Magic Marker and aiming the camcorder at it. And the image quality of the rest of the movie tells you that this is simply copied from another VHS cassette. My guess is that someone got ahold of the Ninja Theater release of Little Heroes of Shaolin Temple, edited out the Sho Kosugi introduction, and ran dubs to go in their own boxes. Maybe they were sold as a fundraiser or something (for “The Children’s Ninja Club,” maybe?)

Anyway. Almost 500 words in, and I’m finally ready to stop bitching about the cassette and box and start talking about the movie itself.

The last prince of the Ming Dynasty is being hunted by the now-in-power Chings. We know this, because the mother/nursemaid/whoever of said prince is telling this to the Master of the Shaolin Temple as she pleads for him to hide the prince in the temple. She also yanks off the prince’s show to show bright red mole on the sole of his foot. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

And apparently the Chings suspect that, because an emissary from the emperor arrives, telling them that the monks have all been called to Mount Wu Tai, to join the emperor in basking in the wisdom of the scriptures (i.e., where he can keep an eye on them). The Master deduces that, if he refuses, it will give the Chings an excuse to attack them, so he leaves the fat bald Abbot and all of the juvenile monks (which look to be roughly two hundred boys between nine and seventeen) behind, and out they troop the next day.

Naturally, this is great for the youngsters, because it’s hard for the abbot to be everywhere at once. Immediately, a half-dozen mini-monks sneak into the wine cellar to practice “drunken boxing.” No, really; one kid gets some wine, and proceeds to give an exhibit of prowess for five minutes which looks like a cross between a martial arts routine and ballet. Yes, it gets very old, but not as old as the one kid (like I caught names for any of them) who stutters constantly and gets everyone else in trouble. I don’t know if he was as odious in the original, but as dubbed by somebody who thinks that “Shaggy with a stutter” is wonderful characterization, you just want to put a metal bucket on his head and beat it with a wooden spoon.

In fact, this is as good a place as any for an impassioned aside: WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GET THESE DUBBERS? All of the voices sound like vocal talent wanna-be’s who were rejected by Saturday morning TV for sounding “too cartoony.” Plus, I more than half suspect that there were a total of four or five dubbers, tops, resulting in excessively “characterized” voices for everyone so we can tell them apart. It doesn’t work, thanks to the fact that the dubbers can’t keep any given character’s voice straight from scene to scene. Couple that with the fact that all these shaven-headed Asian youths in identical blue PJ’s look an awful lot alike (and the crummy original film-stock and 2nd-generation dub don’t help), and I had a devil of a time trying to keep any of the kids straight. Except the stutterer. Him, I had no trouble identifying.

The Shaolin kids are the ones in the blue. They’re also the ones getting their asses handed to them.

So then, when the Abbot catches the kids, they all immediately tattle on the stutterer, whose idea it was to do the “authentic” drunken boxing. But for some reason, the Abbot gives everyone else a punishment and lets Stutterer be their taskmaster (I guess he hates snitches or something), said punishments being something along the lines of a Peking Opera exhibition: touching hands and feet to the ground while bending over backwards,, having other youths do handstands on the bent-over-backwards stomachs, etc.

All of this is in good fun, I suppose, though not terribly interesting. And I guess that director Tong felt the same way, because the mood immediately changes as the kids find one of their number floating face-down in the pond. The fun and games are now over.

At bedtime, Stutterer gets into a fight with an older boy about the disposition of the deceased’s possessions; another older boy takes Stutterer’s part, and the two kids start kung fu fighting around the bedchamber — until one of them accidentally unrolls a sleeping mat to discover yet another young corpse.

From that point, the Abbot orders the boys to pair off and patrol the ground, with alarm whistles around their necks. Unfortunately, one of the boys on patrol stops to take off his shoes, and a hidden assassin sees — a red dot on his foot! Slash slash, both boys are added to the casualty pile.

Who is behind all of this? Why, it’s the evil… uh… I know she’s not the Empress or the Queen, so let’s just call her the Ching Princess. The assassin reports back to her that he has killed the Ming prince, but other assassins argue: I drowned him in the pool! No, I killed him in the bedchamber! Yup, they put it together: All of the young monks have red dots on their feet to protect the prince.

Another assassin goes in the next night, but this time the boys capture him, and the Abbot lays some Fat Guy Fu on him until he confesses his mission — only to end up at the receiving end of a thrown dagger from yet another assassin. The Abbot also takes one in the chest, and it’s only the padding of his layers of fat that allows him to survive long enough to call the monks together and pass the Abbotship on to young PuAn (and I only know his name thanks to the back of the box). I’m not sure what PuAn did to be the one selected, but I do know that, now that he’s wearing the orange Abbot robes instead of the blue Kung Fu Cadet uniform, I now have a second character I can identify. Whee.

Ol’ Stinky, our… uh… Hero.

The Ching princess’s envoy meets with the new Abbot, thinking he can push over these little kids. The little kids, however, are well stocked with bows and arrows, and the princess opts for Plan B: To send all of her assassins in at once in a frontal attack.

In other words, it’s time for some Big-Ass Fu Fighting, boys and girls. There are about eight assassins (I never got the chance to count them), including one who uses a tai-chi sword on a bungee cord, and an effeminate one who prefers to kill little boys by biting open their necks. And there’s a lot of said neck-biting, and chest-slicing, and stomach-stabbing, and back-breaking, and all manner of carnage from here on out. The young monks may be pretty good at that whole kung fu jazz (I know that any of them could lay me out on my ass without breaking a sweat — except Stutterer, I refuse to admit that he’d beat me), but these other guys are professionals. I daresay that this scene contains more gory children’s deaths than you’ve ever seen before. It’s a very strange sensation to realize that you’re looking directly into the gulf of cross-cultural differences, and a very visceral example it is. (I had originally picked this up on Yahoo! Auctions with some other movies, and gave it to my kids for Christmas; and yes, this is the point at which I stopped the tape and explained that I didn’t think a six-year-old needed to see so much bloody death all at once. I got no argument from the six-year-old.)

So. After a few dozen adolescent bodies are strewn around, the attack… um… stops. (Union rules? Tea time? I dunno.) Abbot PuAn regroups his boys and decides that two need to go to Mount Wu Tai to let the older monks know what’s going on. His two volunteers race through the woods, encountering traps and the assassins again; one boy sacrifices himself so that the other can get away with the message. (And there might have been some good fu fighting in here, but it was such a murky day-for-night that I couldn’t see much of anything.)

Next morning, another big assassin attack, a whole much more bloody corpses. The Abbot orders a retreat out the back to the mountains, and as the boys retreat through the stone garden at the back of the temple…

[Note: What I'm about to describe may sound like I somehow stopped the tape and accidentally put in an entirely different kung fu movie. My wife was watching this with me, and can attest that the following events did indeed take place in the same movie.]

… The assassin with the bungee sword misses and pokes a hole in a rock. White smoke starts hissing out, and the young Abbot gets some kind of revelatory voice-over that tells him that if he has no plan of attack, he’s doomed to failure. (He could have been remembering something told him by the former Abbot, but it sure looked like an Obi-Wan Kenobi moment to me.) Then the smoke changes to yellow, then to black, and then — well, then the stone explodes and out leaps a zombie monk in a yellow robe, who engages in much wirework and hands the assassins their asses.

Huh?

Exactly. He’s a growling, snarling, tangle-haired old monk in a yellow robe who looks pretty dead to me, and he does flying leaps and fights the assassins until they leave. Then he positions himself cross-legged on the front walk of the temple to guard the gate.

And our charming Wood Nymph. She looks about as confused as I was by this point.

And while you’re still trying to wrap your mind around that one, the surviving messenger boy on his way to Wu Tai is found in the foods by a wandering wood nymph. Or something. She’s a girl maybe on the cusp of puberty, dressed like she should be hanging out with Boy and Cheetah, and she patches his wounds with a mudpie and accompanies him on his way. (I gotta stop watching these movies late at night. By the next morning, I can’t tell what was in the movie and what was a movie-inspired dream. But this part was right there in my notes, so it must have been in the movie.)

Next day, the assassins show up with the envoy to discover the the yellow monk is now nothing more than a cross-legged skeleton (with beard and eyebrows comically stuck to the skull). So in they come to attack again, expecting another rout…

… Only to discover that PuAn has put his Obi-Wan wisdom to good use. The boys aren’t just prepared; they’re choreographed! The next ten minutes are an advertisement for the inclusion of Synchronized Fu as an Olympic sport, as the kids wipe the floor with the assassins (dispatching a couple quite gorily in the process).

But no, it’s not the end of the movie yet. Because the Ching princess still has one trick up her sleeve: The “Japanese unit” they’ve been maintaining for, you know, special occasions. Japanese unit? But that would mean — ninjas! Ninjas in a movie with “Ninja” in the title! What’ll they think of next? (Of course, these ninjas aren’t little, nor are they heroes, but what the hey.) Said ninjas appear before the princess in the requisite fashions — backflipping, springing out of the water, appearing in a puff of smoke — and get their marching orders.

And yes, these ninjas proceed to use all of those reality-defying tricks we’ve come to expect (but not forgive) as they attack the temple that night. More smoke poofs, plus grappling hooks and other ninja goodies, and they manage to knock the temple contingent down to about twenty kids.

9.5, 9.6, 9.5 — ooh, and an impressive 9.8 from the Russian judge.

In the morning, the princess herself comes with her retinue and the ninjas to accept the temple’s surrender. The Abbot’s plan, instead, is to walk out to her with his waist wrapped with — dynamite! (No, not dynamite; that would be an anachronism. Plus, these tubes are tan, and everyone knows that dynamite in movies has to be in red tubes, right? And the Chinese were masters of gunpowder and fireworks, so we’ll just say that these are really really explosive Roman Candles.) But Stutterer insists that they can’t lose another Abbot — so he grabs a stick of dyna– er, a Roman Candle from the Abbot’s belt, lights it on a handy torch, and runs out and grabs ahold of a ninja. BOOM. Yup, Stutterer finally did something worthwhile. I’m not sure that it compensates for his continual presence as Odious Comic Relief through the rest of the movie, but it’s something.

And then another monk grabs two sticks and runs out and takes out two more ninjas. And three more suicide runs follow. And suddenly there are no ninjas left — and the princess is their prisoner.

The Princess’s brother shows up to storm the temple for her release then, but who should come at just that very moment? Why, all the older Shaolin monks, led by the messenger and the wood nymph. And while the Ching prince was fine with taking out the few remaining children, he’s not got the balls to take on the fully-grown monks. So the old Master negotiates a peace for the princess’s release, and everything ends copacetic. (And here’s the kicker: The Ming prince wasn’t even on the premises! He left the same time that the monks went to Wu Tai! Ha!)

Well.

Probably the biggest surprise to be found here is the realization that, no, the Western unwritten rule of not killing children on-screen holds no sway here. That’s really not a complete surprise if you’ve seen other Hong Kong films like The Heroic Trio, but that movie made it a necessary part of the story, and a supremely sad occurence. Whereas we’re used to seeing bodies fly left and right in a chop-socky fu flick; we’re just not used to them being too young to shave.

The second biggest surprise is, of course, the zombie monk. Remember I made mention earlier of the director possibly being bored when he changed the mood of the picture? That goes a zillion times for Ol’ Stinky. While it’s not exactly a storyline change on the level of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, it certainly does seem like an attempt to keep the crew interested. Not that I’m complaining; by that point of the movie, I was grateful for something to jar me to full awareness.

I still haven’t quite figured out the wood nymph, but you know what? I’m not going to overtax my neurons on that one, if it’s okay with you.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 59 (of whom at least 80% were children)
• breasts: 0
• penises: 1 (Stutterer had some trouble keeping his pants up when the ninjas attacked, see, and…)
• explosions: 13
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0