Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon (1990)
The movie itself actually continues a long series of coorperation between Sammo Hung and Mak Kar (Karl Maka) and also the director Lau Kar Wing, which goes back to the days when they had their own company which was called Gar Bo. Ga for Lau Kar (Gar) Wing and for Mak Kar (Gar) and Bo for Sammo's Chinese name Hung Kam Bo.
Mak Kar is known primarily as a comedic actor but he actually did learn martial arts in his younger days. He spent quite a number of years in New York and actually learnt Wing Chun Kung Fu and I remember I was involved with this movie during the distribution of the picture and went to his offices and he was giving me demonstration of his kung fu skills and showing all the wing chun principles…
This kind of style of mixing and matching action and comedy had an enourmous success earlier with the film called Tiger on the beat (1988) where they (had) Chow Yun Fat as a more comedic cop character with Conan Lee who was then a rising martial arts star. That has been a huge success for Cinema City and they would try to recapture that same kind of success. They didn’t have it with Tiger on the beat 2 (1990) which didn’t have Chow Yun Fat, it had and actor called Danny Lee from The Killer (1989) starring opposite Conan Lee and they would originally begun production of Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon under the title Tiger on the beat 3. And the reason for this was, there was another actor-turned director, Philip Ko, who’d also worked on both of the original Tiger on the beat movies, begun to produce his own fake Tiger on the beat 3. So Cinema City didn’t really want him to bring out his own movie with Conan Lee and call it Tiger on the beat 3, so they actually announced in the … that this movie would be called Tiger on the beat 3 and so that kind of forced the guys over at the company where Philip was working to come up with another title for their movie. Once that’d been accomplished they went back to the originally chosen title Skinny Title Fatty Dragon which kind of plays back to one of the earlier films of the Gar Bo era of the films that were made in partnership between Sammo Hung, Lau Kar Wing and Mak Kar, which was Dirty Tiger Crazy Frog, so it kind of played more to that and certainly more in keeping with the comedic style ’cause this film is more an art kick and comedic even than Tiger on the beat and Tiger on the bet 2 were.
Here’s Sammo Hung, my all-time idol, the greatest all-rounder literally and figuratively of Hong Kong Action Cinema, as an actor, as a choreographer, as a director, as a dramatic actor, as a dancer, this man can do it all. He’s actually known internationally for playing a detective in the CBS TV series Martial Law, but he actually played a cop in relatively few Hong Kong movies I guess it’s a big ask to accept in Hong Kong maybe, that somebody his shape would be a police officer, in America it’s less unusual, I mean, a lot of cops are built more like Sammo, which maybe is why he played a believable detective in the American TV series. He’s only played a cop in a few Hong Kong films, such as Where’s Officer Tuba?, Pantyhose Hero and another film called Don’t Give a Damn and that’s about it. Otherwise he’s been a kung fu hero or varies other characters who kind of inadvertedly get drawn into crimes or other criminal situations and then have to show off their incredible martial arts skills. And it’s kind of a running gags in his films, in his career, that when you first look at him he looks like, as they said in…Martial Law, he looks like a pastry shef but then you see him move and you’re kinda like wow, guy is really extraordinary for his abilities.
For those of you who’re new to the genre, you might want to know that Sammo Hung, Hung Kam Bo, was one of the Seven Little Fortunes, which was a Chinese Opera performance troup that included such players as Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen, and a whole legion of other players who went on to greater fame in the Hong Kong action cinema, but he was actually the Big Brother, he was the Dai Go Dai, the Biggest of Big Brothers of the Seven Little Fortunes of the Peking Opera Academy.
In this movie he is actually playing a character who’s obsessed with Bruce Lee and that’s why he has the Bruce Lee pudding ball haircut, and for those of you who’re fans of Bruce Lee and fans of Sammo Hung, you know that Sammo actually does the best Bruce Lee impersonation of anybody, much better than the old guys, the Bruce Lis and xxx. Originally it was planned that he’d be reading Bruce Lee comic books and magazines, and books, and there was a concern at Cinema City about the rights to the images of Bruce Lee, ’cause xxx rights for the film images are owned by Golden Harvest or Warner Brothers, and the images of Bruce Lee himself were owned by the family. So because of that confusion and the fact that Steven Chow had a film Fist of Fury 1991 and had been sued by Golden Harvest for doing it, there was a concern, so they kind of changed that, even though Sammo was gonna impersonate Bruce Lee he’s reading these comic books.
So Sammo, making a decesion to return to his great shtick of impersonating Bruce Lee. To his credit, even though he does it so well, he’s
done it only rarely and I think that’s what makes it all the more special. The first film he really came into his own as an impersonator of Bruce Lee was a movie called Enter the Fat Dragon, which was a hugely entertaining movie that he made quite early in his career. He had of course worked with Bruce Lee on Enter the Dragon, he’s the guy that Bruce Lee fights at the very beginning of the film, and then later he actually was meant to be in Game of Death, but because Bruce’s untimely passing prevented that from happening. Then had a slight physical resemblance, he’s like Bruce Lee if Bruce Lee put his mouth to a helium injector and got pumped up, then he’ll become little Sammo.
I think there’s noone with the power onscreen that Sammo depicts. Somebody was actually criticizing some fights in this movie saying, "well, it’s always the same kind of sequence", but I feel with Sammo, he sells power so well, for me I like to see one at the time these guys coming in and he hits them, because you absolutely believe it would not take three four five hits, for him to actually knock somebody down, because he does look so powerful. On the other hand, someone like Yuen Biao his former opera school classmate, when you see Yuen Biao in a movie, because Yuen Biao is so skinny, he kinda has to use all those tricky moves to defeat somebody, because he doesn’t look strong in the way that Sammo does. So Sammo actually impersonating Bruce Lee in Enter the Fat Dragon and later very briefly in the film Shanghai Express in his fight with Cynthia
Rothrock, and it was well worth checking out.
For director Lau Kar Wing it was an unusual choice to direct a film with quite this much comedy, so Mak Kar had a lot of involvement and also Sammo in terms of how the comedic scenes were gonna be structured. And Lau Kar Wing’s real area of strength is the action sequences and of course he plays a strong role in the movie as well.
This enteriour that we’re seeing here is at Eddie Maher’s gym. Eddie Maher was a guy who’d actually worked on films as an actor, you can see him in things like, he fights with Sammo Hung in the wonderful Pedicab Driver and he’s been in a bunch of movies as well, but he’s actually running a gym in Engergy Plaza in Tsim Sha Tsui, and Sammo was actually a partner in the gym, so that meant they got access to the gym to shoot this sequence. So this even though meant to be like a women’s health spa, it’s the enteriour of a gym. I actually train there myself, and as I remember the geography of it, this is actually the men’s changing room they’re shooting in but they redressed it to be the women’s changing room, so they can have this comedic sequence. That gym was kind of famous for the fact that if you went there only a given day all of the Hong Kong action guys and girls would be there training: Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, Joyce Godenzi of course, who later became Mrs. Sammo Hung, Dick Wei, and so you’d always see people up there.
And here’s our man going to action. I think if a martial arts director in America were shooting this it’d be way too dark, but Sammo totally
knows how to light the action so that you can clearly see what’s going on. The other thing I noticed about Sammo’s action sequences, and it might sounds a bit strange, [is the distability(?) of the camera] compared to what you see in American movies. I remember getting in trouble a few years ago for suggesting that the action directors of Lethal Weapon and Batman were really inferior to Sammo, and the guy who was doing the action complained that I was being unfair to him, but I feel that it’s been born out the fact that now most movie producers, directors in Hollywood, if they can get a Hong Kong action guy, they will, so Sammo’s style really has come into its own. I remember looking at this and thinking, if you look at the finale of Batman, it was shot in a very dark environment. You really couldn’t see what was happening, and here you actually have this quite gloomy environment, everything is absolutely clear ’cause Sammo knows how to light, how to shoot, how to edit and he totally knows what he’s good at doing.
This is the stick on film. I always meantion this in relation to Shanghai Express, which is another movie Sammo uses the stick. There’s actually a very good stick fighting martial artist guy called Cass Magda, who’s like a martial arts instructor, he’s done a few films and he was doing a movie called Hawk’s Vengeance with Gary Daniels and he was doing an interview, I think it was in Impact where he said: you know, this movie, if you know about stick fighting, you gonna see the real stickfight, you’d be impressed,you’d be amazed. OK, fine, I looked at the film and it probably was classically accurate stick fighting but it totally had no power. Now what you see here, this is the stick on film. We’re not hiring martial artists to give demonstration to [xxxxx] greatly though I respect those two arts, we’re hiring them to be dramatic, to be entertaining, and my God, Sammo does that.
So everywhere in the world I go people ask me "What’s happened to Sammo Hung?" because he is as dearly loved by the Hong Kong
martial arts movie community as he is adored by me in terms of his work. I had the pleasure of working with him on the movie The Medallion and since then he’s been doing various things in China, working on television series. The last Hong Kong movie that I know him being in, he had a very brief cameo in Men Suddenly in Black, it’ like a five second cameo, before that he was int he movie Hidden Enforces, he’s also got a cameo in Around the World in 80 Days, the big cut of star studded Jackie Chan epic that’s gonna come out sometime next year, so he worked on that as an actor. But he is more interested in directing, and looking for a great project to do behind the scenes… He has had some health trouble, he was working on Steven Chow Sing Chi’s movie Kung Fu Hustle and he left the production for reasons that had never really been explained, [partly due] with some of the health problems he’s had, but he’s in fine form. On the set of Medallion he was showing Jackie some of the moves and was really amazing to see, in some shots he looked a bit even better than Jackie. I’ve always felt... as a martial artist Sammo was better, that his weapon skills were more versatile, that his Southern Fist was stronger, but he doesn’t have the look that neccessarily the broad market on the world would look for for and action hero, so he hasn’t really enjoyed that level of acclaim that somebody like Jackie or Jet Li has done, but in talent I look at him as being way above the rest of the pack. So I hope he finds other vehicles to highlight his talent as both an actor and a director before his eventual retirement. He’s also championing his sons, he has several sons working in the industry, and they’re all actors, one son is a singer in the band called Tension in Taiwan and I know he’s enormously proud of the success of his children in different fields.
[Sammo’s] grandmother, Chin Tsi-ang, was the great grand dame of Hong Kong action cinema, the first great female action lead of Hong Kong movies. His grandfather was the director Hung Chung Ho. I don’t know why in interviews he’s very slow to acknowledge his antecedents, the fact that his grandparents were actively involved in the industry. But anyway, that was his background, Hung Chung Ho was his grandfather and that was one of the reasons that he got put into the Chinese Opera School and got to work in the industry was the fact that he had family connections... Sammo joined the opera school of Sifu Yu Jim Yuen in 1960 when he was aged 9. That scar on his lip that you see in all his films now is a real scar, and it’s actually from a fight, a real street fight, in which he got hit in the face with a coke bottle, you can actually see it’s the same shape as a coke bottle’d be if you broke the neck of the coke bottle and like drove it into somebody’s lip, which is what happened to him, and it goes into his lip and through his nose.
Noone looking as powerful as Sammo, I just really believe, when you see him hit somebody, you believe that they gonna feel it and that
they gonna go down. Some of the other pretty boy leading men who’d worked on Hong Kong film, you don’t have that kind of commitment to them and to what they’re doing, and they try to shoot the same kind of sequence and it just doesn’t work. But with Sammo, he completely sells technique. Here he is with his nunchakus, which he kind of self-taught, taught himself to use the nunchakus, the weapon of choice of Bruce Lee... [Sammo] kind of really figured out lots of moves that he could do with the nunchaku.
Hard to believe having all we’ve just seen that this movie was not even nominated for best action choreography at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Instead that year nominations went to A Chinese Ghost Story 2, Terracotta Warrior, Dragon From Russia and Tsing Siu Tung actually won for Swordsman. Swordsman was a great movie but in terms of flat out martial arts choreography I think Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon had it all over those films and should at least have been nominated.