Happy Lunar New Year

Yu So Chow (from Oldflames)


Julie Yeh Feng (from Duriandave)

Best wishes for a happy, healthy,
and prosperous Year of the Tiger!

Hong Kong Cowgirl: Yu So Chow

Here's Yu So Chow, Hong Kong's Queen of Martial Arts, decked out as a cowgirl in Bloodbath at Golden Sand Bay (1952), a Western flavored kung fu film that I'm dying to see. It wasn't the only time that Miss Yu donned a cowboy hat and packed a pair of pistols. Her very fist film, shot in Suzhou in 1949, was called Double Pistol Heroine.


Yu So Chow as the "Double Pistol Heroine"

And while we're on the subject of the lovely Miss Yu, here are some pics I've been meaning to post for quite some time. The first comes from Oldflames: a lovely shot of Yu So Chow looking very much like a pirate queen. Can't you picture her armed with a cutlass in each hand?


Finally, here's a recent photo that SpyMonkey kindly sent me, showing Yu So Chow elegantly, yet funkily, dressed during her trip to Hong Kong last November for the 50th anniversary of the Hong Kong–China Opera Institute, the training school founded by her father Master Yu Jim-yuen. (You might have heard of some of its students ... like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao.)


Anyway, it's pretty remarkable seeing these last two photos side by side. Despite the passage of nearly 60 years, Yu So Chow still has the same cool style. I especially love her matching green nail polish!

Yu So Chow: Just Making a Living

The new issue (2.2MB PDF) of the Hong Kong Film Archive's newsletter features a wonderful oral history interview with martial-arts queen Yu So Chow. An English translation is available as a supplement (95KB PDF), but be sure to check out the cool pictures in the original.

Miss Yu is quite the storyteller. There are some great anecdotes, like the one about when she was filming a fight scene with Sek Kin at 5 o'clock in the morning and was so exhausted that she forgot to move her arm out of the way of his blade. "Blood jetted out, and one could see the tendons splitting apart and bones sticking out... One of my co-stars So Siu-tong came over to dress my wound with some Chinese ointment. Then, I soldiered on until I completed the shoot. It was pitiful..."!

Three Musketeers Hong Kong-Style

This post is a special shout-out to Tars Tarkas, who gave me lots of love on his blog the other day. I was perversely happy to hear him confess that he is driven crazy by my penchant for posting about "some awesome-sounding Chinese film that probably no longer exists". Believe me, I drive myself just as crazy! And I often wonder why I am more excited about some film I will never be able to see than I am about the newly released second part of John Woo's Red Cliff, the "most expensive Chinese-language movie ever". What's wrong with me?!

Well, here's another lost treasures to drive me and Tars crazy (and anyone else who gets excited about such things): a flyer for the 1952 film The Precious Sword and the Magic Bow aka Three Lady Fighters aka Daughters of Musketeer. It's directed by martial-arts movie pioneer Yam Yu-tin and stars Hong Kong action queen Yu So-chow and Yam's daughter Yam Yin.

Click on the image for a larger version.

The Blonde Hair Monster (1962)

Movie ad from the back cover of a romance magazine

In my recent post about Shaw Brothers' Oriole, the Heroine, I mentioned that martial-arts queen Yu So Chow had portrayed the character in eight films, the last of which was The Blonde Hair Monster, starring a young Connie Chan. Well, it just so happens that one of my favorite YouTubers, SHUESIK, has made an awesome 3-minute music video that distills the pulpy essence of this fun little movie.

Yu So-chow: Double Pistol Heroine

This is hands-down one of the crown jewels of my memorabilia collection: some rare original artwork advertising Double Pistol Heroine, a martial-arts Western starring Yu So-chow. I was never able to find out much about this movie, but according to Jean Lukitsh's recently posted profile of Yu So-chow, it happens to be her first film!

The ad (which probably originated from Singapore) also mentions a cofeature: Yu's 1951 movie Hwu San Niang the Heroine (also known as A Girl in Green and A Woman as Sharp as a Blade), based on the character from the classic novel Water Margin.

Sek Kin as a Were-what?!

I'd love to flat out say that Sek Kin was a werewolf in Hound Murder Case (1961), but you know... I'm just not sure. There were no transformation scenes to provide undeniable proof. Also, I was uncertain whether being bit by a seemingly normal German Shepherd could turn one into a lycanthrope. But how do you explain those overgrown canine teeth? Perhaps I'm thinking about this too much. What really matters is the pleasure of seeing "Bad Guy Kin" in what is simultaneously his most frightening and most ridiculous guise.

While I would be criminally insane to recommend Hound Murder Case to the average Hong Kong movie fan — the attempt to create a blood-thirsty, murdering hound from a real German Shepherd and some dodgy-looking propwork provokes too much laughter and not enough terror — the film does offer some unique pleasures not easily found elsewhere. Besides Sek Kin as a werewolf, Hound Murder Case also features martial-arts queen Yu So-chow in a rare contemporary role as a police inspector (alongside Tso Tat-wah as the chief detective). If you ever wanted to see Ms. Yu decked out in evening gown and heels *and* flipping bad guys over her head, then this is the film for you. Lau Kar-leung and Tong Gai also show up as gangsters (and likely served as the film's fight choreographers as well). They have a wonderful scene with Yu involving an, unbeknownst to them, Bond-type lipstick gun.


But in the end, the most compelling reason to see Hound Murder Case is Sek Kin... as a werewolf!


Thanks to Todd at Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! for the disturbing synchronicity that inspired this post and for sowing the seed of coincidence several months ago. The world of pop cinema is indeed strange and wonderful!