World of the Drunken Master (88 min; 1979)
Produced and Directed by: Joseph Kuo
Starring: Jack Long, Mark Long, Li Yi-Min, Jeanie Chang, (kind of) Simon Yuen

Live Screening - Sunday 12/12 @ 4:15pm
(digital projection, replacing Mystery of Chess Boxing)
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Between appearing as Beggar So in Jackie Chan’s 1978 Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, and dying in January, 1979, Simon Yuen (Yuen Wo-ping’s 66 year old father) played his Beggar So character in no less than 15 movies, and Joseph Kuo made two of them. He first appeared in Kuo’s Mystery of Chess Boxing, although his character disappears halfway through the movie leading some to speculate that he died during its production. Then he appears in some footage shot on a beach at the beginning of this film, which is probably some of the last footage every shot of Yuen. And you know what? That’s okay. Because World of the Drunken Master is one of the finest-looking, most well-made Kuo movies around, and the entire thing is a touching tribute to Beggar So, the kung fu character that Simon Yuen forever made his own.

The movie opens with two Drunken Boxing masters and mortal frenemies, Northern Jug (Jack Long) and Southern Cup (Yu Sung-chao), at the end of their lives, bumping into each other in a roadside bar. They fight but then put their grudge aside when they realize there’s free booze. As they hit that “sweet premium wine” they wax nostalgic and we stagger into an extended flashback showing how they met 30 years ago when they were both stealing the grapes used to make this very same wine. Now played by Jack Long and Li Yi-min in the flashback, the two men demonstrate their PhD level chemistry as two layabout drunks who just want to nap, steal grapes, and get loaded. The head of the distillery, and owner of the grapes, doesn’t think they’re so cute, however, and after capturing them in man-traps he forces them to work off their grape-related debts. However, when a local thug, Tiger Yeh, master of the Eagle Claw, shows up to randomly bully the entire town they try to fight him. He easily cleans their clocks but the distillery owner finds their guts impressive and he rescues them from Tiger’s fearsome Eagle Claw technique, then vows to teach our two future Drunken Masters his Drunken Boxing technique. He trains them with brutal weights and enormous rubber bands until they’re so good they’re drunken boxing in their sleep. This being a Joseph Kuo movie, we know it won’t end until some secret identities are revealed and there’s an epic knockdown, drag-out fight that tears up the turf with windmilling legs and corkscrewing bodies.

Released only 10 months after Simon Yuen’s death and with action by his son, Yuen Cheung-yan, World of the Drunken Master looks fantastic, probably because it’s shot by Chris Chen, who’d go on to film a lot of Jackie Chan’s early movies (Young Master, Dragon Lord), and it seems to have a higher budget than your average Joseph Kuo film. The acrobatic action makes your joints ache and its relentless highlights just keep ramping up the combat. The movie ends by coming back to the present to show why these two elderly Drunken Masters can’t get along (hint: girl problems) and ends on a patented Joseph Kuo note of doom and fatalism when we learn that you can fight all you want, but it means you’ll never settle down and find true happiness. But the journey to that depressing realization delivers some of the slickest and best looking filmmaking of Kuo’s career and it all serves as a fitting tribute to the master himself, Simon Yuen.