No Surrender Cinema: Chinese Dragon aka The Chinese Mechanic
Everybody knows that I love me some good ol’ fashioned classic kung fu, so let’s get back to basics for this edition of No Surrender Cinema! You may recall that back in April I wrote about Mean Streets of Kung Fu, a movie that I randomly selected on Tubi that I ended up enjoying greatly. After being impressed by the film’s star, Barry Chan, I owed it to myself to catch up on his kung fu filmography, and that’s what I’ll be talking about today! When a young man is led astray by the mob and his family is put in danger, he has no choice but to become a Chinese Dragon!
The film opens with a busload of men being attacked in a rather unorthodox fashion; as the bus makes its way down the road, barrels start rolling down a hill and blocking its path. Was Donkey Kong having a bad day? Did the bus somehow warp into the classic Three Stooges short Three Little Beers? For the people on the bus, it was actually much worse…these barrels contained assassins! That’s right, the barrels broke open and the men inside attacked the bus, which forced a young man who was traveling with them to take cover and watch in fear as they were beaten to death! After being rescued by a kind old man (along with a couple other children), the opening credits come up, and when we come back, the man and the kids are gone!
Not GONE gone, but we’re not following them around anymore. When the credits stop, the film jumps ahead to the adventures of Ting Yi (Barry Chan), a young man with a blue collar job who can’t seem to stay out of fights. After coming to the aid of one of his co-workers, Ting ends up in one of those “you’re fired/I quit” situations. Desperate for work, Ting is recruited by “Four Eyes”, the main henchman of mob boss Chin Po, to be an errand boy/muscle for their operation. Even though Chin Po walks around chomping on a cigar and oozes evil, Ting Yi is either dumb, oblivious, or both, and is so eager to get to work that when the time comes for his first mission (to go and bring a man named Chen Piao back to see Mr. Chin) he’s still in his overalls! Chen Piao makes a bet with Ting that if he can defeat him, he’ll surrender himself to Mr. Chin with no fuss. After Ting Yi wins (with a little bit of primping and preening that made Chan come off like a Kung Fu Ken Doll), Chen lives up to his word, and out of respect Ting Yi refuses to let Mr. Chin’s flunkies tie Chen up. This doesn’t sit well with one of the cronies, which will come into play later on.
When Ting returns home, he finds his sister is in the hospital with pneumonia, which is diagnosed in hilarious fashion by the doctor knocking on her chest, complete with a “knock knock” sound effect as if his knuckles were hitting wood. If that’s not bad enough, healthcare in 1970’s kung fu flicks must absolutely suck, because the hospital is requesting a deposit just to help the little girl survive! With his back against the wall, Ting reaches out to the mob for money, and Mr. Chin is all too happy to send his new shining star on another “errand”, this one being a robbery while riding a motorcycle! Ting and co. do not have the finesse of Dominic Toretto and the rest of his Fast and the Furious family, but they succeed in getting the bag of goods they came for…which is promptly switched out by Mr. Chin’s henchman, who points the finger at Ting Yi! Ting rightfully stands up for himself (with the henchman responding that he’ll “god damn say whatever the hell I want to!”) and it’s becoming more clear that things are not on the up and up with Mr. Chin’s operation.
While Ting relaxes back at home and his miraculously recovered sister tries to play matchmaker to Ting and her caregiver, Mr. Chin is busy keeping his gambling operation running steady. After beating up a gambler who crossed Mr. Chin, Ting Yi realizes that another flunky finished the job and delivered the man’s hat to Mr. Chin as a trophy. Ting is appalled that the mob would resort to murder and he doesn’t want any part of it, but then gets suckered into going to a party where he gets drunk and has girls hanging all over him. This whole scene here reminded me of The Big Boss when Bruce Lee’s character is seen as a threat to the villain’s operation, so they bring him to dinner and get him drunk. Instead of ending up in bed with a hooker like Bruce did, Ting winds up driving his motorcycle through a crowd of men who are assaulting a young woman, rescuing her (although she was doing a good job of kicking their asses before he showed up). After about 30 seconds riding on the back of his bike, she gets off and storms away, possibly realizing that being the passenger of a drunk guy who can barely ride his motorcycle sober isn’t the best idea.
The girl in question, who was singlehandedly taking out all of her attackers, is the daughter of Shan Pun, who shows up at Mr. Chin’s casino kicking ass while dressed like a 1980’s pro wrestling referee. Shan Pun has come to find the son of a dead man who had land in his name, and since this is a 1970’s kung fu movie and not one of those too cool for school Netflix shows with 100 twists a minute, I’ll cut to the chase right here and tell you YES, IT’S EXACTLY WHO YOU THINK IT IS. WHO ELSE WOULD IT BE?
Ting Yi is yet to hear anything about Shan Pun or that he is this dead man’s son who stands to inherit land, but that doesn’t stop Four Eyes from sending a pack of goons down to the water to attack him! They try to force Ting Yi into signing paperwork that would relieve him of his inheritance, but he refuses to sign anything and ends up taking a beating until he’s saved by Shan Pun! Shan’s arrival causes Ting to fire up,and the gang of goons get their asses handed to them in a fight that involves a lot of fighting on rocks with bamboo sticks. If these bad guys were ninjas instead of kung fu fodder I might have thought I was watching American Ninja 2 (who are we kidding, I watch that all the time anyways).
After this fight, Chinese Dragon splits off into two directions: the plot point regarding Ting Yi being the young man Shan Pun is searching for opens things up for further explanation. Ting is the boy that Li saved at the beginning of the movie, and Li’s brother/Ting’s father is the man that young Ting was watching get killed as he hid. On the flip side, A-Chen, Ting’s sister’s babysitter who has been exchanging glances with him all movie, is jealous that Ting has befriended Shan Pun’s daughter. A battle between the two women ensues, and every time Ting tries to break it up, it turns into a comic relief segment where one of the women accidentally hits him, or knocks him aside so that she can go after the other girl. To quote Joel from the Mitchell episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, “our hero, ladies and gentlemen!”
Since Ting Yi IS our hero and there’s still a world of shit for him to deal with, things go from slapstick to serious when he finds out that Mr. Chin and Shan Pun have kidnapped his sister! That’s taking things too far, and it’s enough to get this Chinese Dragon to start breathing fire and ready to kick some ass! A one-man raid on Mr. Chin’s home takes place, complete with Ting Yi riding his motorcycle through the gates AND kicking his way through at the same time! Both Mr. Chin and Shan Pun are going to feel the wrath of Ting Yi, not to mention one last little twist that causes the movie to end rather abruptly and awkwardly.
Mean Streets of Kung Fu made me a Barry Chan fan, and it’s safe to say that Chinese Dragon has kept me a Barry Chan fan, even though I have to admit I enjoyed the former much more than the latter. Chinese Dragon is a little too all over the place in tone, bouncing around from fights played for laughs to the soap opera between Ting and the women in his life to the blood feud between Ting Yi and the mob. Having first pulled the movie up on Tubi, I’m glad I found a fully restored widescreen version on Youtube, since that helped make things much easier to follow along. There is a copy out there (on Tubi, Youtube, and the like) which is a cropped transfer that makes it hard to see who is in the scene and everything that might be going on. The only issue with the Youtube copy I watched is that in a few instances it jumps from English dub to it’s native language for a second or two, then back to English again. It only happened twice, but it’s also about as perfect of a copy of this film as there is available right now (to my knowledge).
There was a little bit of experimentation here, with some wacky camera cuts and angles that made some of the fights feel like they’d been plucked out of the Batman 1966 television series, which I’m glad didn’t happen for every fight. Still, it did make the film feel like whoever was behind the camera was trying to do something other than film a fight and yell “cut!”. Barry Chan was good as the affable hero who wound up in over his head, a role that I thought he excelled in in Mean Streets of Kung Fu. It surprises me that at one point this film here was reviewed in a Marvel Comics publication (covered under it’s alternate title of The Chinese Mechanic), yet much like Mean Streets there’s extremely little discussion about it anywhere across the interwebs. From the feedback I gathered after my previous Barry Chan-centric review, he was well liked and well received by the martial arts movie loving crowd, but because he never broke through the way so many after him did, he’s become just a footnote in kung fu film history.
Chinese Dragon is a by the book classic kung fu flick with a hero you want to root for and villains you’re meant to hate. Sure, there are times where you want to scream at Ting Yi for being so gullible, but you know he’s eventually going to redeem himself by kicking ass. The fights in Chinese Dragon are all fairly pedestrian, and in some instances the co-stars outshine our leading man, but they’re all fun in their own way, especially the casino fight when Shan Pun first shows up and the waterfront brawl. Barry Chan delivered once again, and if my past two experiences with his films are any indication, I’m going to end up as the President of the Barry Chan Fan Club before 2023 is over. I have a feeling you’ll be hearing my thoughts about more of his movies in future editions of this column!
Being that it’s a 70’s chopsocky flick that’s likely in the public domain, Chinese Dragon is available pretty much everywhere (Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube), so no one should have trouble finding this one to watch. For the best viewing experience, I suggest watching the widescreen restoration that’s currently available on YouTube so you can see the film as it was meant to be seen.
