No Surrender Cinema: Mean Streets of Kung Fu
What do you get when you mix nonstop corruption and copious amounts of kung fu? A film full of vintage violence that only No Surrender Cinema can handle! It’s time to hit the streets, or should I say the mean streets, for a look at something of a lost film from the era when Asian martial arts films flooded the market. Let’s visit the Mean Streets of Kung Fu!
Naturally, when you’ve got a movie with a title like Mean Streets of Kung Fu, you waste no time in getting to the action, except that our opening sequence takes place out in a field somewhere. Maybe they should have called this one Fierce Fields of Fury instead of Mean Streets of Kung Fu, but I’m not going to dwell on that. After all, who cares about a title when you can watch freeze frame after freeze frame of flying kicks! Plus, the film already has two alternate titles (Invincible Hero and To Kill A Jaguar, if you’re curious), so let’s not confuse people further.
There’s a quick break in the action via red copyright screen that shows that this English dub of the film was done in 1984 (the film itself was made in 1973), and then the same two men we just saw fighting in the fields are simply sparring partners who are practicing their craft in front of their master. Practice is paused due to the arrival of Chow Chin Chu, a new man in town who is looking to open his own kung fu gym and attempts to gain Master Lam’s favor by bribing him. Lam advises Chow that it’s not that simple and unlike Planet Fitness, they don’t just let anyone waltz into town and open up a gym. Chow insists on seeing the skills of the students firsthand, and when Lam turns down Chow’s challenge for a fight, he puts his star student (Barry Chan) up against him. Chow isn’t happy about being made to look like a fool, and this pushes him to put a very evil plan in motion that starts with him raping and killing a local girl and framing Master Lam and his students for it! Talk about a situation escalating quickly!
Chan and the master can see through Chow’s charade and realize that the school is being set up to take the fall for a crime they didn’t commit, but unfortunately another one of the Lam’s prized students, Chin Tang, falls under the spell of Chow and defects to the dark side. Chow encourages him to go and rape the master’s daughter (who is in love with Chan) telling him that if he wants her that bad, to just go and take her. Luckily, she’s saved by the arrival of Chan and Lam (and lucky for Chin, the master spares his life out of loyalty to his father), and then Chow and his cronies show up to save Chin and officially recruit him to their organization. This is when Chow clues Chin (and the viewers) in on his plan to overthrow the town.
On the flip side of things, we see how loyal Chan is to Master Lam, and the two realize that the threat they find themselves up against must be dealt with. We also see the affection that Chan has for Lam’s daughter, although having them call each other “brother” and “sister” (not in the relative sense) comes off more than a bit awkward when it’s being done as they gaze lovingly at each other. Just when you think that this night would end on a high note, Chan winds up poisoned by Chow’s crew, Master Lam is stabbed, and Chan is framed for his murder! Lam’s daughter rather easily believes that Chan committed the act and runs to the police, while Chan himself is struggling with the hallucinations that the poison has caused and thinks he’s fighting with Chow. Once the effects have worn off, Chan finds himself placed under arrest and being blamed for his masters murder, by the woman he loves, no less!
You would think that being taken into custody would allow Chan the time to clue the authorities in on Chow’s plan and clear his name, but this isn’t Law & Order, it’s Mean Streets of Kung Fu! Captain Liu is receptive to Chan’s proclamations of innocence, but say he needs to investigate further. Meanwhile, as Chan sits in a cell, Chin Tang has set it up so that Lam’s daughter believes anything he says, going so far as to have a few cronies show up at the school and accost her so that he can be her knight in shining armor! Everybody in this town has ulterior motives except for Chan, and he’s the one that’s stuck behind bars!
Chan’s luck goes from bad to worse when Chow’s crew ambushes him (while shackled) and Captain Liu is killed by Chow himself. Chow tries to recruit Chan one last time, but Chan steadfastly refuses, and now becomes the captive of Chow’s gang. Despite a battle inside of a lake while still shackled, Chan can’t defeat his tormentors, and is dragged back to town as the prisoner of Chow’s gang. The bad guys persist, hoping to lure Chan over to their side (because they know that with his skills, he’s a formidable opponent who can ruin their plans), and we get a little more back and forth before Chan is able to gain his freedom and face off with Chow in a kung fu fight to the death that takes place out in the mountains rather than in Chow’s lair or, fittingly, on the mean streets of their town.
I stumbled across Mean Streets of Kung Fu on Tubi the same way I’d discover movies in the video store as a child; I just kept breezing through the martial arts section before the name caught my eye. I have to say, I’m glad that I clicked on it, because this was an enjoyable hour and a half of kung fu action and a shockingly coherent and plausible plot given that it’s a low budget kung fu flick from the early 70’s. Despite the bad guys’ penchant for sexual assault, there’s nothing gratuitous in Mean Streets of Kung Fu as the attacks all happen off screen. Aside from one odd scene towards the end where one of the crooks asks his mistress to whip him (which is rather goofy in its own right) this is the perfect weekend afternoon, Kung Fu Theater type of flick that I would have been glued to as a kid. Barry Chan makes for a great hero, but looking at his IMDb page it appears his kung fu career sputtered out at the turn of the 80’s, though he’s appeared in things as recently as 2015! Maybe it was due to the abundance of films like Mean Streets of Kung Fu that marked him as a “face in the crowd” destined for obscurity, but Chan has a likability factor that I could easily see working in his favor the way it did for superstars like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.
There’s a bare minimum amount of information available on this film (even the IMDB page doesn’t list character names, so I had to go off of the film’s audio track), though I did find out that the film makes liberal use of both the Maniac and Das Boot soundtrack. Small touches like that give the film an added charm, because who doesn’t want to hear a blaring synthesizer track during a fight that’s supposed to be taking place almost 100 years prior? I’m honestly hoping that this review encourages more people to seek this one out. A word of warning for those who come across it on Youtube; I also used that copy during my writeup her, and noticed that it runs several minutes shorter than the Tubi version, so if you want the complete experience, that’s the route you should take. It also looks like the film has appeared on low budget DVD releases (which means I probably own this and never realized it), so for you fans of physical media, it should be easy to come by.
So if you’re looking for a classic kung fu flick with the classic story of a hero going up against the odds and using his skills to gain justice, you could pop on your favorite Bruce Lee flick, or you could give this one a go. Mean Streets of Kung Fu is worthy of a bigger reputation in the martial arts movie community, so let’s give this one the recognition it deserves.
