Hong Kong gangsters with narrow ties scatter as a man-baby with a bowl cut crashes through the window on his pedicab, smashing their gambling table. His men form a loose circle as the casino owner - slicked hair, cigarette holder, aging but still hard as a boulder - steps forward to teach the pudgy intruder a painful lesson. But this isn’t any ordinary pedicab driver, it’s Sammo Hung, who’s built like Eric Cartman but moves like an eel. He whips out his first kick, following with a flurry of punches, the casino owner grappling each away before knocking the pedicab driver back into a pool table. Time to bring pool cues into this brawl...
This is Pedicab Driver, one of the movies in this year’s Old School Kung Fest. “The pool table fight,” Grady Hendrix, co-founder of Subway Cinema and a programmer of the Old School Kung Fu Fest, said, as if recalling a cherished memory. “It’s the master of the old school kung fu movie from Shaw bros., Lau Kar-leung, vs Sammo Hung, who’s the master of the new school of these movies.”
The scene is one of the more masterful fights in a movie loaded with showstoppers, like a union hall brawl with fluorescent tubes wielded like lightsabers or the rain-soaked home invasion that rips apart a tiny Hong Kong apartment with knives.
“I have seen Pedicab Driver an infinite number of times, but never with an audience and I am dying to see it with an audience, to watch them go bananas at those moments you know are coming,” Hendrix said.
Hung is unlike any of his contemporaries, tackling Jackie Chan caliber stunts with a goofy grace worthy of Oliver Hardy. After appearing in early 70s films like Enter the Dragon and The Man From Hong Kong (both screening at this year’s fest) as ‘that big guy who gets his ass kicked by our hero’ Hung went on to direct and star in his own action-comedy masterpieces.
sees post about wow fat people can't fight and someone drops a gif of Sammo Hung aw yeah
— .L (@elleoser) April 5, 2016
“It’s so funny to watch people who have never seen Sammo in a movie before because you watch them watching one of these movies as this fat guy walks on screen,” Hendrix said, “but there’s always a moment in the first action scene where you watch their jaws drop, he moves like nobody.”
Hendrix and his Subway Cinema co-founder Goran Topalovic have been organizing the New York Asian Film Festival for 15 years and the Old School Kung Fu Festival for six, curating hundreds of screenings drawing people together to celebrate the incredible versatility of the human body and the many, many ways it can be punched, smashed and pulped.
This year’s Old School Kung Fu Fest will be held at the Metrograph theater (the first new arthouse theater to open in Manhattan in decades) Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. The festival will celebrate the films of Golden Harvest, a legendary Hong Kong film studio founded in 1970. Golden Harvest came to dominate the martial arts scene through the 80s, co-producing Enter the Dragon with Warner Bros. and bringing to international prominence stars like Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung and Jimmy Wang Yu.
But even if you can’t make it to Ludlow Street for the festival, this year’s fest inaugurates a huge development for Hong Kong cinema fans. One of the festival sponsors, Warner Archive, has finally made its Golden Harvest collection available through their manufacture on demand service.
“This chunk of the Golden harvest library, for over a decade, has been really inaccessible,” Hendrix said.
“They launched the first titles earlier this year,” Topalovic said. Huge movies like the fantasy epic A Terra-Cotta Warrior and Sammo Hung classics like Prodigal Son and Pedicab Driver can now blow away a whole new generation of kung fu fans.
Still, new DVDs can’t compare to seeing these on the big screen. “When we started doing Old School Kung Fu Fest we realized that Hong Kong filmmakers are geniuses at making movies for audiences,” Hendrix said. Plus, all but one title in the Old School Kung Fu Fest will be ultra rare 35mm screenings.
The festival is loaded with highlights, including Benny Chan’s Big Bullet, with it’s “huge number of gunfights and explosions and cars blowing up out in the middle of Hong Kong.”
“The climactic showdown of The Blade is incredible,” Topalovic said. “The first time we screened this film at the Anthology Film Archives in 2001, there’s a reel change in the middle of that fight scene and the projectionist was so into it he forgot to change the reel.”
But both programmers agreed that if you can only make one movie, don’t miss A Terra-Cotta Warrior. “It is enormous,” Hendrix said, “This is a director (Siu-Tung Ching, action choreographer for Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and producer (Tsui Hark, director of Once Upon a Time in China and Time and Tide) who know how to bring value to the screen, working with so many special effects shots to present this lavish and lush version of history. There are these humongous action scenes, like all these ancient Chinese swordsman on horseback taking on these gangsters on horseback while these bomber planes are taking off around them. It is not like anything else we’re showing.”
The Old School Kung Fu Fest begins this Friday, April 8, at the Metrograph theater at 7 Ludlow Street (buy tickets here). Here’s the complete schedule:
Friday, April 8th
5:40 p.m. – BIG BULLET (92 min.)
7:50 p.m. – PEDICAB DRIVER (93 min.)
10:15 p.m. – THE BLADE (104 min.)
Saturday, April 9th
1:00 p.m. – RUMBLE IN THE BRONX (103 min.)
3:15 p.m. – ENTER THE DRAGON (110 min.)
5:40 p.m. – THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (103 min.)
8:45 p.m. – A TERRA-COTTA WARRIOR (97 min.)
11:00 p.m. – PEDICAB DRIVER (93 min.)
Sunday, April 10th
1:00 p.m. – THE BLADE (104 min.)
3:15 p.m. – THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (103 min.)
5:30 p.m. – RUMBLE IN THE BRONX (103 min.)
7:45 p.m. – THE PRODIGAL SON (100 min.)
10:00 p.m. – BIG BULLET (92 min.)
