Tai Chi Master

 When Tian Bao joins a Shaolin temple as a child, his new master (Lau Shun) pairs him up with the younger Jun Bao. Their relationship is established immediately and economically: Their master asks Chin to call Jun his senior, since he's already a student and will mentor him. Tian bristles at this, since he's older and bigger; So he tells Jun he'll only call him senior when there are others around, and when they're alone he'll be the senior. Jun, although leery of disobeying authority, happily goes along with it.

 After watching some of the older kids training kung fu, they quickly enroll and start obsessing over it. Their master cautions them that they should only use it to help others, but the first thing Tian Bao uses it for is to beat up a bully, getting both of the kids into trouble. This dynamic holds until Tian and Jun grow up to be Siu-Ho Chin and Jet Li, respectively; Tian is impulsive, aggressive and ambitious, while Jun is more kind-hearted and happy-go-lucky. Their friendship is fierce, though, and they both always look out for each other.

 Their stay at the temple comes to an end when Tian gets into trouble for over-reacting to another another student cheating in an exam fight; Jun tries to smooth things over, but when Tian attacks a monk only their master's intercession allows them to escape.

 He tells his students that a temple is not the only place to learn and sends them out to the wider world. Worried about Tian, he gifts him with a scroll of Tai Chi teachings to guide him.

 In town they soon bond (by the medium of kicking injustice in the ass) with lovely thief Miss Li (Fennie Yuen) and even lovelier abandoned wife Siu-Lin (Michelle Yeoh) - Miss Li has a fight against soldiers extorting local merchants, and Siu-Lin is attacked by her ex-husband's powerful new bride when she confronts him. Yes, this is the sort of movie where pretty much anyone knows kung-fu.

 The sworn brothers hole up in a restaurant and befriend the owners, who are soon revealed to be connected to the resistance against the evil eunuch (is there any other kind?) Liu Jin (Sun Jian-kui), who rules his lands with an iron fist.

 But Tian is not about to join the peasants in their struggle, and quickly grovels and manipulates his way into joining the eunuch's forces instead; Jun, aghast, refuses to follow, but they part amicably enough.

 Events conspire to reunite them soon afterwards when government forces try to extort the restaurant, and Tian helps the rebels cover up the ensuing soldier massacre. He also gives the rebels some inside information on when they can catch the eunuch Liu Jun unawares.

 Before you can say "it's a trap!", Tian gathers all the rebels in one spot and - in a pretty chilling scene - has most of them massacred; Only Jun and a couple others manage to escape. I should point out that when Tian gets a promotion for wiping out his former friends, his new uniform is appropriately evil-looking, all studded black leather and ridges. That's the sort of over-the-top visual storytelling I can really get behind.

 The betrayal breaks Jun's mind. Siu-Lin and a comic relief character take him back to an estate to try to nurse him back to sanity, which leads to a meandering 'wacky' portion of the film as Jun acts looney tunes crazy. Some of the jokes are pretty funny, but a lot of them aren't, and this section drags a little too long. It also indulges in whiplash inducing tone changes, from maudlin to broad comedy to deadly seriousness as we catch up with what Tian is up to back at the army barracks. But the situation is resolved with a really satisfying callback to a seemingly abandoned plot thread, leading to a very cool tai chi epiphany and a suitably epic confrontation against Tian.

 I actually hadn't seen this one until now! I watched tons of older martial arts movies when I was a kid, but by the mid-90s I foolishly thought I'd outgrown them. I caught up with a few of the more renowned ones later, like the wonderful Iron Monkey, the Swordsmen and the Once Upon a Time In Chinas, but I obviously have a lot of blinds spots left and I'm really (flying) kicking myself for not catching this one earlier.

 Kim Yip's script is uncommonly good, with a really well-handled, classic friends-turned-opponents arc and a series of powerful messages with actual wisdom backing them. The leads are both excellent - Jet Li is a given, but he's upstaged by Chin Siu Ho - his character is so magnetic that all the little steps towards total asshole-dom make sense in context and feel almost... well, never justifiable, but almost understandable. Michelle Yeoh plays backup, unfortunately, but she's as good as she always is, and definitely looks the coolest.

Sorry, Mr. Li. It's not even a contest.

 Of course, this being a movie by Yuen Woo-ping, it's chock-full of amazing fights, immaculately shot and full of inventive moments where the characters express themselves by the medium of kicking ass; There's a fight on an oiled floor where our heroes use the fallen as platforms, a table-breaking fight where one of the combatants ends up using a broken table's legs as stilts, and another one where an army commander literally throws soldiers at his opponent. It's an absolute joy, and had me laughing out loudly in appreciation several times.

 It'd be worth it several times over just for the action, but there's so much more on offer here.

Mr. Vampire

  Mr. Vampire is a classic Hong-Kong martial arts/comedy mashup with supernatural elements that doesn't lean as much on special effects as other, similar films of its style (though it doesn't do without them entirely).
 Instead it fills its runtime with farcical plotlines, very broad, very slapstick humour and some truly great fights and stunts; The humour... I'd say it's above average for this sort of thing but still pretty cringeworthy, but there's no denying the action.

 Master Gau (Ching-Ying Lam) is a Taoist priest with, as you'd expect, a sideline in ghost hunting. He's introduced putting down an octet of Jiangshi that his dumbass apprentices (Ricki Hui and Siu-Ho Chin) managed to free from their bonds.
 It's a brilliant fight, full of good moves and stunts and a couple of laugh-out-loud gags.

 That first scene barely factors into the plot, though, which involves a down-on-his-luck businessman (Ha Huang) who, tricked by a pissed off feng shui expert, needs to rebury his father. He contacts Master Gau, who quickly realizes that Mr. Yam's father is about to become a vampire, so he takes the corpse into custody.

 The script (by Ricky Lau, Cheuk-hon Szeto, and Barry Wong) quickly spirals in many different directions; both of Gau's dipshit students get into trouble - one is scratched by the vampire and starts turning, and the other one falls under the spell of a beautiful ghost (Moon Lee). Meanwhile, Gau himself gets incarcerated. As usual in these movies, the plot doesn't matter much, though - it's an excuse to stage jokes, chases and fights.

 The jokes, as stated before, didn't really work for me - a few made me laugh, and a few others are cute enough. They're mostly tied to the apprentices and their idiot hijinks, and can be pretty grating. The action though is outstanding. Lam Ching Ying is an excellent stuntman with a lot of presence, and one of the apprentices (Sheng) is not too shabby once he joins in on the fun.

 All the fight scenes are immaculately choreographed and shot, full of inventive and cool moves and stunts; There's one burning man bit in particular where we can see the vampire catch on fire, and then someone goes and throws a jar of oil at him, feeding the flames. Outstanding.

 There's all sorts of neat rituals and rules that the film sometimes takes the time to explain as it goes along. Prayer scrolls are affixed to foreheads, glutinous rice (but not long grain!) keeps the vampires away, and specially treated string is used to bind them. Oh, a couple of live animals (a chicken and a snake) are sacrificed on-screen, so if that's not your sort of thing you might want to avoid this.

 You many also want to avoid the sequels, which I remember as a pretty textbook case of diminishing returns, unless you can't get enough of this; In that case I'd throw in a recommendation for Sammo Hung's terrific Encounters of the Spooky kind.

*: Chinese folklore hopping vampires - a sort of undead that's so stiff with rigor mortis and decay it moves around hopping, arms outstretched, looking for victims to eat