Hi!
Welcome to the Silver Spleen. My name is Snowy White,
and this is my review of ICEMAN COMETH.
You'd never expect a Hong Kong version of a Eugene O'Neill play, would you?
Well don't expect it now either! Three centuries ago,
a royal guard played by Yuen Biao must apprehend Yuen Wah,
who's been raping and killing women. They have a big sword fight
in the snow and they fall down a cliff. That opening scene was actually filmed
in Korea.
It was nice to see a different kind of setting in a local film.
300 years later, a team of Chinese scientists,
led by Elvis Tsui, unearth the two frozen men.
The scientists decide to take their find overseas,
but transit in Hong Kong for the express purpose of going to the Volvo Club,
one of the leading hostess clubs of that time. A gay joke or two later, the two Yuens
are in Hong Kong, where they get defrosted, electrified,
and resurrected. Cue lots of action and fighting and comedy,
all of which is pretty damned entertaining. Yuen Biao's character meets
a hooker,
played by Maggie Cheung, and he slowly learns about life in 1989.
And we get to see things like big huge mobile phones and pagers.
Big pagers! Maggie Cheung is quite easy to watch and very funny,
playing a coarse, pushy chicken who may feel something for Yuen Biao
other than just contempt. There's a typically funny Wong Jing cameo too.
This movie is classic in a lot of ways, and it's a great example of what once
made Hong Kong movies so special.
The pace of the film is pretty brisk, but that's part of what I like about movies
from this period: they never stop moving.
At times it seems maybe a bit frantic, but it's a lot of fun too.
The action and martial arts are top-notch, which of course they should be,
considering who's doing it. Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah were Jackie Chan's classmates in
a Beijing Opera school,
so not only are they trained martial artists, they're trained acrobats,
and in 1989 they were still young enough to do some amazing stunt work,
including a stunt by Yuen Wah that defies description.
I almost sh*t myself when I saw it. As was the fashion back then, the really good
stunts get shown three times. Three times. Three times.
from each different camera angle.
and usually in slow motion. Now, when these guys fight, I know it's not real fighting,
but the physicality, the physical ability of these people, is still pretty
impressive, and
I just love watching them do that stuff. There was no CGI back then and so the
stunts
are very obviously real; your eye can tell the difference.
The stuntmen and the stars get thrown, dropped, and
otherwise knocked around, and you can see that quite often
there's no padding, they just land on the floor or against a wall. Another tradition
back then was to make the bad guy
really bad, and Yuen Wah is really bad.
At times it almost seems excessive. The idea is that by making him that terrible,
when he finally gets his comeuppance, it makes you feel that much better.
The film was made in 1989 and so there's use of the pejorative term 'A Chan'
to refer to mainlanders. There's also discussions among the Chinese scientists
about students and repressive generals and tanks.
I'm sure the new version won't have any mention of those things,
and not just because the story isn't set in 1989 any more.
If there's any mention of tanks, they'll be Japanese. The visual effects in ICEMAN COMETH
are kinda dated, but I like the way they look.
It's hard to explain, but the aesthetic of them has a certain kind of charm,
and I just really enjoy looking at them. If somebody says
"Oh, well, they're not realistic," let me just ask you:
how do you know what it looks like when you put the Black Jade Buddha into the
Reincarnation Wheel???
There's one more thing that marks this movie as a classic, but you have to guess what it is.
I really enjoyed this movie and I'm pretty sure that you will too.
Obviously, I want you to watch this movie, but I want you to do it by buying a disc.
In the description, there's a link where you can do just that.
That would be lovely. Don't watch this on YouTube, it stinks. If you enjoyed this
review, please leave me a comment.
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