Kicks of Death: A Film for Han Yong-cheol Fans

Some heroes drive the action. Others appear to drift. Or so it occurs to me after watching Lee Doo-yong's patriotic action pic Kicks of Death. For leading man Charles Han Yong-cheol gets his ass whooped everywhere he goes, stumbling from bar to backroom to street. Han's character seems absolutely oblivious to the potential motivations he could assume once he finally takes an assertive role. He could redeem his father's name. (Dad collaborated with the Japanese.) He could join the Korean Independence Army and return to his homeland a hero. He could win over the girl — who keeps giving him apples — by rescuing her brother from prison. I suppose, come the movie's end, he's done all those things, more or less. But you don't feel as though he's accomplished any of them with intention. His motivation is basically to give a "thank you" to that apple-distributor for her constant kindnesses.

This laisez faire attitude is honestly what makes every Han Yong-cheol martial arts pic so damned fascinating. Standing at six-feet tall, pretty-boy Han foots the faces and fists the ribs of his opponents with a graceful athleticism that never looks strenuous or aggressive. Watching him execute his taekwondo moves in a black top and pants, I thought more about the dancing Audrey Hepburn of Funny Face than the determined Bruce Lee of Enter the Dragon. Speaking of Dragons, I wish there were an easy way to watch all the other movies Han made, like I did with Dragon Lee. I've seen Manchurian Tiger, Returned Single-Legged Man, and The Korean Connection, and I am now a bona fide Han fan. Much like Lee, despite his penchant for having the actor whipped, flogged, branded, and attacked by a hook.

A Note on Names: This movie is listed at IMDb as Bridge of Death while showing a poster reflecting its Italian title, Billy Chang. As for the film's lead actor Charles Han Yong-cheol, he also went by Charles Han, Ian Han, Hon Long-chit, Han Yong-chul, and Han Long-zhe.

The Hut: Ferocity, Thy Name Is Woman

Life in the small town of Suri is pretty wretched for the womenfolk at the end of the Chosun dynasty. At least, it is if director Lee Doo-yong's supernatural flick The Hut is to be believed. On the one end, there's rape; on the other, an enforced chastity so maddening that widows are driven to self-flagellate, take hot irons to their flesh, and drive a knife savagely into the nether regions then let the wounds fester. Sex positive, Suri is not. And yet, rather than call for a feminist revolution, all the townspeople are obsessed with that one male heir (Choi Seong-ho) who's been in a coma and may be possessed by a local spirit who's holding a justifiably major grudge.

And so they — ironically — call in a female shaman named (Yu Ji-in) who, in order to perform the necessary exorcism to free the town's heir presumptive, needs to play detective and findout who this infuriated phantom might be. Waving a shaking stick will only take a spirit-purging process so far! So... Is it the late Sam-dol (Won Namkoong), a local halfwit who lived in a ramshackle cabin that once served as a holding place for bodies in transition from this life to the next? Or is it the young woman to whom Sam-dol was pimped out because the family matriarch (Hwang Jung-seun) mistakenly thought her charge was about to die, sexually unfulfilled? Whoever the ghost is has every right to be pissed because they've spent a generation captured in a piece of paper trapped inside a bottle that was sealed inside another airtight vessel and then buried underground.

Mulberry: She Gets Around

In an effort to spur online viewership (I suppose), the curators at the Korean Film Archive have resorted to creating new categories for their YouTube channel: Chuseok Comedies, Summer Scenery, and E.R.O.T.I.C. among them. Are the all caps in that new subsection intended to draw the eye or to evade the censorship filters? Whatever the reason, I ended up picking a movie from that playlist — Mulberry, the story of a woman who resorts to sex as a form of commerce after being abandoned by her gambling husband. Be forewarned: Lee Doo-yong sex-driven drama is neither titilating nor tawdry.

Lee Mi-sook's rustic sex worker feels like a pragmatic hustler then demeaned communal property. Her main problem doesn't end up being the men with whom she's swapping "favors" or the husband (Lee Dae-kun) whom she's deceiving or even the gossipy, catfighting wives. It's the dimwitted, lecherous, peeping tom (Lee Mu-jeong) of a farmhand who can't fathom why she won't put out for him too. Why do the men go crazy for her? As one woman at the laundry hole puts it: "Some women are born with a honey bush and some with a thorn bush."

Mulberry isn't arousing, unless you find the sight of a woman's behind while she's taking a pee a turn-on or the sound and sight of rushing water in a mill — in lieu of actual intercourse — hot, hot, hot. The actual sex scenes go from short to comic to depressing. According to IMDb, the original negative got damaged so a few scenes are missing. Whether they've been restored here or not doesn't matter much. It is what it is and it's kind of strange.

Returned Single-Legged Man: Slap the Mustache Off That Face

Taekwondo virtuoso Tiger (Han Yong-cheol) has fallen on hard times. He's given up wearing those Western ties and pinstriped suits for lazy open shirts and bellbottom pants. His boyband haircut may not have changed much but he's sporting a mustache now because he's drinking too much to shave. Will he ever get his reputation and self-respect back? Or is falling out of favor with his adopted gangster-father (Kim Wang-guk) destined to be a tragedy from which he'll never recover? Before we learn those answers, we're going to need to take an extended flashback to a career-defining heist gone wrong. Our down-on-his-luck drunk a.k.a. our lovelorn clotheshorse will find this between-time to be especially sorrowful. A promising engagement is dooomed; a Japanese enemy is made; and endless shots of sojou are imbibed. And that's just the first third of the movie!

Director Lee Doo-yong's madcap martial arts movie is packed with as much plot as punches. But if it's fighting you want, Returned Single-Legged Man has plenty of that, too. Indeed, the Foley artist scored as much of RS-LM as did the super-'70s composer. (A scene highlighting the sound of wooden sandals going down a dirt road is particularly comical.) As for the costuming of a trio of thugs in hot pursuit of this movie's sinewy star, the accoutrements are faultless: a high femme, spotted rope scarf, an ebony walking cane sword, and a snakeskin jacket complimented by an orange neckerchief and a metalic shirt. Who needs character traits when you have outfits like these?

Take Note: Lead actor Han Yong-cheol went by many names in his career including Han Yong-chul, Hon Long-chit, Han Long-zhe, Han Ian, and Han Charles (not to mention Westernized variations in which the surname is placed last).

Take Note 2: A dubbed version, entitled The Korean Connection, though still fun, made less sense with its dumber dialogue.