I've talked here before about a channel where I grew up that played tons of 70s and early 80s martial arts movies on Sunday afternoons as if it was something crazy, only to learn just now that it was common practice in other countries as well. Turns out the lure of cheap programming is truly international.
Anyhow, The Mystery of Chess Boxing was not in that rotation. It's a good one, if a bit derivative; Young me would have loved it.
The Ghost-Faced Killer (Mark Long, GFK from now on) is back in town. He goes around, as you'd imagine, killing other martial artists, and taking real pride and joy in it, too - not five minutes into the movie he kills a man in front of his family, and regales the bereaved wife and son with a mirthless, awkward kung fu villain laugh. Brutal.
Arrayed against him is Ah Pao (Lee Yi Min), another similarly orphaned victim* who's looking for vengeance against GFK. He pops up at a kung fu school unbidden, where the students assholishly decide to have some fun with the Ah Pao who, let's face it, really kind of is a bumbling idiot. This sets up a long, long string of unorthodox training montages and 'comedic' hijinks as he stumbles through a series of kung fu masters until an old xiangqi (Chinese chess) master (Jack Long) subliminally teaches him a style that can counter GFK's five elements technique.
GFK, meanwhile, is intercut into the story in short fight vignettes destroying other masters as he pursues a barely detailed revenge quest of his own, leaving small metal badges (which he's wont to throw like shuriken) as calling cards. Both stories finally intersect when GFK finally tracks down the xiangqi master, resulting in a protracted three-way fight where a xiangqi board is sometimes intercut with the action and the participants call out their strategies as each element beats another, rock-paper-scissors-style. In case you're wondering, that qualifies as awesome.
There's a surprising amount of fairly lame comedy and slapstick here - basically, any time GFK is not in the frame - until you realize that, unlike whatever's up with chess boxing, that mystery is pretty easy to solve: this movie came out in 1979, a year after Yuen Woo Ping and Jackie Chan's classics Snake in The Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master**.
Yi Min lacks Chan's charisma, though, and no one in this production had Chan's perfectionism. So his mugging gets very old very quickly, and none of the pratfalls are executed with the precision of a Jackie Chan movie.
The tonal balance is also out of whack. There's just too much broad comedy, and it sadly subsumes some pretty inventive and cool training sequences. All is forgiven, though, thanks to the frequent and brilliant fights. This is the old-school HK style where blows clearly fail to connect and the fighters wait for each other to take their turn (you can see the performers counting off their moves at points), but the choreographies are complex and the athleticism is undeniable. I was particularly impressed by GFK's standalone fights in the leadup to the finale - a fight against a staff-wielding opponent had me laughing joyfully in a darkened room in the middle of the night like a loon.
And that alone would make it worthwhile; Luckily, for all its flaws, there's a lot more to like, too.
*: Or is it the same kid, grown up? It's unclear
**: I actually thought this movie was a lot older when I watched it, which had me wondering if Jackie Chan was aping a whole tradition of HK martial arts comedies I didn't know anything about. Shows you what I know; I should have never doubted the master.
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