36 Deadly Styles (93 min; 1979)
BRAND NEW 2K Restoration! With English subtitles!
Written, Directed, and Produced by: Joseph Kuo
Starring: Nick Cheung, Jeanie Chang, Hwang Jang-Lee, Jack Long, Bolo Yeung

Friday, December 10 @ 7pm
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Few Joseph Kuo movies Kuo quite as hard as 36 Deadly Styles. A nutso opening half-hour that feels all over the place? Check — this one starts in the middle of a fight with Wah Jee (Nick Cheung) and his uncle being chased by some bad guys for unclear reasons. Flashbacks that come out of nowhere? Check — these vignettes quickly fill in the backstory, informing us that the guys doing the chasing are part of a rival clan out to take revenge for the killing one of their clan brothers years ago. Revenge? Check — see above. People with secret identities? Check — Wah Jee and his uncle stumble into a monastery for help, where Huang (Tse Lin-yang) is also hiding from the rival clan as an unordained Senior monk.

That’s when things settle down and Kuo unleashes the beast. After uncle gets murdered, not-monk Huang trains Wah Jee to take revenge, and he also meets up with the local purveyor of non-dairy milk substitutes, played by Jeanie Chang. Huang tells Wah Jee “Don’t make any trouble inside the temple,” and he really tries but then the bad guys show up wearing wigs that make them look like sad poodles at the beauty parlor. Enter the Dragon’s mountain of muscle, Bolo Yeung, sports a tragic red Raggedy Ann wig, while Hwang Jang-Lee, the Korean super-kicker and big bad guy in Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, wears one that makes him look like a geriatric metalhead from Central Pennsylvania.

But it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and on the inside these killers are simmering towers of hate-fu, leading to a major mid-movie melee and Jeanie Chang, who has zero chill, gets involved because the bad guys are working her last nerve with their rudeness. That causes her dad (played by Sammo Hung regular, Fan Mei-sheng) to get involved and in true Kuo fashion this brawl becomes infinite, with fighters tagging in their alternates who can take over mid-mayhem while their partners hydrate. People dish out everything from Two Snakes Depart from the Grave stance, to Seal-handed Buddha strike, and even Sticky Style, a kind of twin-fu.

Everything in this flick is a dare, a contest, or a gamble, and there are plenty of cross-dressing jokes, comedy fights, people eating upside down, sad trombones, and cheapskate assassins who don’t give to charity, but it’s all building to another patented Kuo final field fight where people hit each other until they can’t stand up anymore and their guts explode, everything ending with secret identities being revealed, and quests for revenge sputtering out into a barren landscape littered with motionless bodies as haystack fires leave black smudges of smoke across an uncaring blue sky.