If you hear a sucking sound, it’s probably coming from this load of rubbish. BLOOD OF THE DRAGON PERIL is an uninspired independent flick featuring some decent kung fu that gets buried up to its chin in bad editing, worse dialogue and a pathetically regurgitated plot.
Those wacky Japanese are up to their crazy tricks again, oppressing the Chinese in 1980… 1980? Yep. World War II may have ended in 1945, but don’t tell producer Tomas Tang. Bell-bottomed goons run amok throughout this film and they aren’t sailors. Lazy costuming aside, the film’s era doesn’t really matter. Heck, the plot shouldn’t matter much either. Straight up, old school kung fu is about kicking back with some wicked action and your choice of bad subtitles or bad dubbing. Well, we have the bad dubbing, but the quality of the action isn’t up to par.
The premise is that a masked wild man with the contradictory name of Dull Bright Mask is causing the local Japanese military all sorts of trouble. A Chinese fellow who works for the Japanese by the name of Shao Lu is given the task of taking this guy down, but he’s doing a lousy job. A Japanese martial arts expert is sent in. He suspects Shao Lu himself is the Dull Bright Mask and attempts to flush him out by killing his mother. (I’ve just skipped about 30 minutes of nondescript filler by the way.) Now here comes the spoiler. Shao Lu isn’t the masked guy. No, it’s his brother who we see at the beginning of the film pretending to be retarded. I know. I was as shocked and surprised as Shao Lu was after he blows him away with a pistol. That’s right. No extended fight to the finish between siblings. With his mother and brother dead, Shao Lu puts in his two weeks notice as the town’s official traitor, dons the Dull Bright Mask, beats the snot out of the Japanese commander, and wanders off into the sunset vowing to wear the mask forever and a day.
If I have to watch a film like this (and when you run a martial arts film site, its a certainty) then I want it to be unintentionally hilarious or sporting some crazy action. The kung fu is severely under-cranked, although there is some good legwork by a number of the actors. Poorly done trick editing gets out of control when our masked hero decides to leap up into the trees, about twenty times. At this point the camera guy starts thrusting the camera back and forth in order to cause a dramatic sense of nausea.
The bad dialogue offered a few chuckles for the shear stupidity of it. Example; “I vow on my death…,” says the Japanese martial arts expert in reference to tracking down the masked dude. Personally, I wouldn’t trust this guy. He was definitely alive when he made the vow. Later, when he was killed, did he capture the masked dude? Nope, he just laid there.
This same guy is clearly dumber than a box of hammers. Here is his great plan to catch the masked hero in his own words. “I’ve heard that Dull Bright Mask is a top martial arts man with a stone fist. Right then. We’ll have to check every man in the area for a fist of stone.”
Of course, he never catches Dull Bright Mask this way, but he does manage to incarcerate one confused elderly man with boney knuckles! No joke.
But enough of this nonsense! BLOOD OF THE DRAGON PERIL in a word is craptastic. It’s not in the Oxford Dictionary yet, but it describes this film perfectly. It’s a film that no one should feel compelled to watch, but someone like me will do so anyway and manage to squeeze at least a smidgeon of entertainment value out of it. And trust me, it takes plenty of squeezing.
by Mark PollardRelated Topics:
REVIEW: 'Blood of the Dragon Peril' (1980)
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