Tag: 1981

Young Hero (1981) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Young Hero (1981) – A Movie A Day 2021 #55

Young Hero poster

After a brief break, I have rejoined my kung fu marathon. Today’s movie is another of the $1 DVDs I bought over the weekend, and it is titled Young Hero. The movie was distributed by the same company that put out the previous two kung fu movies I’ve written about so I don’t think there’s really a need to discuss the gloriously bad quality of the dubbed VHS they used as their source material. Nor do I really need to say anything about the DVD’s front cover containing images from some movie other than what is actually on the disc. With all of that left unsaid I can get right to the movie itself, and the movie itself is fun for what it is. 

In Young Hero, a group of Japanese fighters are beating up all the local kung fu masters and wrecking their schools. The Japanese fighters think Chinese kung fu is weak, and in the first part of the movie, none of the Chinese fighters have been able to prove otherwise. Master Fok and his family/students take a beating like everyone else, but they’re also determined to train harder so they can get revenge. Master Fok has multiple sons, most of whom are diligent in their training. One of his sons, the “young hero” of the movie, is a troublemaker. He tends to make poor decisions that reflect badly on himself and his family, and he’s really kind of a jerk. Master Fok forbids the troublemaking son from continuing his kung fu practices since he always gets into fights with random people, but as the trouble between Fok and the Japanese fighters worsens, the young hero must grow up and stand up for his family (and really, for Chinese kung fu as a whole). 

Young Hero DVD, not featuring the young hero on the cover.

As with most of these movies, the plot is an excuse to string together multiple fight scenes. It felt like there was an awful lot of fighting in this movie with very little downtime in-between. I’m not complaining though. The fights were mostly quite fun. There were some neat sequences especially towards the end of the movie that I enjoyed a lot. There’s a training sequence with the young hero and a young woman who has been adopted into the Fok family that takes place on a raft, and that’s pretty cool. There were also a good amount of two-on-one fights towards the end of the movie that were some of the best. A lot of the fights early tended to be of groups of people fighting all over that place, and they were fine, but the action was more unique and structured when it was down to just a few people. 

If I have a problem with Young Hero, it’s the young hero himself. He’s a real butt-hole for the first two-thirds of the movie, and even when he started to do the right thing, I still didn’t like him very much. My favorite character was the young woman, but even though it felt like she was being built up for an important role, in the end she was just used for motivation for the young hero and Master Fok. I thought her ending was undeserved, and it bummed me out.

Other than that though, if just for the near-constant action, I enjoyed Young Hero fine. Out of the kung fu movies I’ve watched this week, this one is my least favorite, but I’m sure I’ll watch again sometime.

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Firecracker (1981) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Firecracker (1981) – A Movie A Day 2021 #29

Firecracker poster (which has little to do with what’s in the movie)

For today’s movie, I went back to Tubi to scan through some more movie posters. I was in an action mood, so I started my search browsing through their martial arts movies. I didn’t remember Tubi’s selection of martial arts movies being all that great, especially when compared to their fairly deep B-horror-movie choices, but I guess it’s been a while since I looked. I spent a decent amount of time looking through a nicely sized list of martial arts films from my favorite decades for the genre, the 70s and 80s. Once again I let the cover art speak for itself, I settled on a movie from 1981 titled Firecracker, and I might have found another fun rabbit hole to venture down with some of my upcoming movie choices.

Firecracker stars Jillian Kesner as Susanne Carter, a 6th-degree black belt in karate who travels to the Philippines on a mission. Susanne is searching for her journalist sister, Bonnie, who has gone missing while working on a story. A clue leads Susanne to a man named Chuck, a member of an organized crime group dealing in drugs and underground fights to the death. As Susanne gets closer to Chuck in an attempt to gain information about her sister, she becomes entangled in dangerous plot of drug deals gone bad, back-stabbing, and a fair amount of bloody murder. For Susanne, the only way out may be through a whole bunch of punching and kicking.

I had a lot of fun with Firecracker. It’s my kind of b-movie martial arts action. The plot is simple enough, and there are lots and lots of excuses for fight scenes to break out. And sometimes the movie doesn’t even need an excuse. Fights will sometimes just break out for no reason, and I’m not complaining.

If you’ve seen movies like Kickboxer or Bloodsport (and really, about a hundred other movies with the same formula), you’ll know mostly what to expect here. A foreigner (often American) journeys to an east/south-east Asian country, they get mixed up in some local crime, many fights are had, and it all leads up to a climactic battle with everything on the line. Firecracker even has a scene where the American (Susanne in this case) goes out into the wilderness to be trained by a wise old man. It’s classic stuff, and it’s great.

What I didn’t necessarily expect from Firecracker were some of the more brutal and bizarre scenes. To set the tone in the opening scene, we see Chuck fighting in some sort of underground competition (which we learn all about later). The fight is fun, then it takes a turn for the brutal when Chuck stabs his opponent with a spear, murdering him in a violent and bloody spectacle. Not every fight in the movie ends up that way, but there are a few gore effects throughout the movie that would fit right in with any number of b-level slasher movies.

There are some really bizarre scenes as well. Two in particular stand out to me as being either incongruous with the rest of the movie, or just plain weird considering the context of the situation. I won’t spoil them specifically, but I will give a generic description so you’ll know what I’m talking about if you watch it. The first is a scene that feels 100% like the movie was screened for producers or someone else with money, and they said the movie needed more blood and nudity. The scene happens about halfway through the movie, and it has absolutely nothing to with anything else in the story. It features a few more graphic murders, and it’s clearly an overt effort to titillate the audience with Susanne’s clothing being gradually removed as she fights against two attackers. None of the other fight scenes are like that, and it really stands out in a weird way for that reason. The other bizarre scene is a love scene later in the movie. I won’t talk about what happens, but I was just confused because it happens at a strange time for the characters. Plus, I didn’t think one of the characters felt that way to begin with. Oh yeah, and there are knives and a cat involved (sequentially, not at the same time).

So yeah, there’s some weirdness in Firecracker, but maybe that’s a good thing. It definitely helps the movie stand out, and I can’t say I’ll soon forget it. It also makes me want to check out the director’s other work. The director, Cirio H. Santiago, has directed 100 movies according to his IMDB page, and I’ve already seen that he has a few on Tubi. I might just have to check those out.

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