Netflix Nexus
A while back I rented The Bride with White Hair and The Bride with White Hair II from netflix.
Back in the day, I used to have a Jetfire transformer toy. What does this have to do with the movie in question? More than you might think, at least to me. To start with, I always loved cartoons. In the fall of 1985, I discovered Japanese animation, specifically Robotech. Today, I still love the show, though I am far more likely to view the original Macross (recently beautifully remastered and also available on netflix). I remember trying to keep my toy in the same “mode” as the valkyrie fighter on the screen. I also remember being excited and confused by Minmei's cousin Kyle. Even back then, I could fathom the name reversal, but the concept of a super charged martial arts fighting machine who didn't want to fight was beyond the mind of a small (and often picked on) second grade boy. He was a mystery to me, and something of an inspiration (too bad about his eventual alcoholism, but if the whole planet got destroyed I might have been a little messed up too).
One minor sub plot in Macross involves Kyle Lynn staring in a Dragonball style martial arts thriller where he fights off whole armies, including a giant with the power of his kung fu. In fact, he even hurls a blast of spirit energy which levels a small mountain! This has some minor significance in the plot of the show, but had a huge effect on my growing little brain. I started being interested in all things Japanese (not having yet made the connection that Minmei and Kyle are Chinese of course), my two hour study of the encyclopedia leading me inexorably to samurai.
Now to a seven year old boy, samurai are just like jedi knights with really cool swords instead of lightsabers. To make up for it they get armor and horses, which is pretty fair if you think about it. Armed with my new curvy stick katanna, I started watching samurai Sunday shows. To my great surprise, samurai movies had little to no kung fu in them! On the bright side, Hong Kong cinema was shown at least every other week on the samurai sunday show, so I eventually got what I was looking for to begin with. I also got further confused, but that is what being young is all about right?
So that brings me to why I rented (and liked) The Bride with White Hair. I refer to it in the singular, because it is really one long movie billed as two short ones. Taken together, it has everything. There are warring houses, multiple wuxia plot lines, a girl in boy's clothing, a grey-haired unstoppable killing machine, Chinese demons, a love story [i]and[/i] a tragic romance (different plot lines actually), duty, honor, betrayal of just about all of the above, and hours of cheap special effects. Oh, and a brief tribal dance scene with boobs. Sure wish this was about when I was 7! Honestly, I am not trying to say this is a romance on the level of Doctor Zhivago, or a wuxia story on par with Crouching Tiger, but I did enjoy it a lot. Heck, towards the end there a bunch of them used a flying stance that might as well have been “balance on the sky.” Yea, I just used “flying stance” in a sentence and meant it.
So over all, I would recommend The Bride with White hair to anyone who enjoys martial arts movies on general merit; to others, I would say it is still not a complete waste of time.