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Kung Fu Cult Master (1993)


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Guest Markgway

Would I be right in assuming that HK Video's French DVD is the best edition of this film?

Supposedly, the Mei Ah remaster comes close, but interlaced.

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Killer Meteor
Would I be right in assuming that HK Video's French DVD is the best edition of this film?

Supposedly, the Mei Ah remaster comes close, but interlaced.

I used to have the UK one. Burnt in subs and a very choppy frame rate.

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Guest Markgway

I believe the UK edition is anamorphic, but comparatively unattractive.

The burnt remastered subs don't bother me (I'll always need them).

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Well the image was jerky instead of smooth.

Can you give times in the movie so I can look. I never noticed this when I last watched.

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Killer Meteor
Sounds nasty. Is that something to do with PAL conversion?

I'm not sure. A lot of those Crash Cinema releases had the same problem - The Sword, Knight of Old Cathay, etc

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I have a question about Jet Li's Kung Fu Cult master film from 1993. I don't know if anyone will be able to answer my question but recently i have gotten back into martial arts films again and have went back and rewatched alot of the movies i liked as a kid. This particular Jet Li film struck me as odd when i rewatched it. The budget seems noticably less then movies released previously in 1992 like Fong Sai Yuk 1 and 2 and Taichi Chi master and of course the once upon a time in China movies. The movie also moved incredibly fast with the subs near impossible to keep up with and the plot made very little sense(to me anyway) it also had cheesy wire work and people were like shooting like energy blast from their hands. I was wondering if this was a particular sub genre of martial arts films or was it just a low budget movie that jet li was just in. It just seemed so different from his other movies from around that time.

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Not low budget. Film stock quality, print has a lot to do with how a movie looks. This was a bit bright, washed out and that makes it look lower budget. Story was pulled from a larger pool of material. Its wu xia. They play better story wise as tv shows as apparently, they are often taken from novels. The wire work and effects fall into the wu xia aspect. They are basically super hero stories.

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Not low budget. Film stock quality, print has a lot to do with how a movie looks. This was a bit bright, washed out and that makes it look lower budget. Story was pulled from a larger pool of material. Its wu xia. They play better story wise as tv shows as apparently, they are often taken from novels. The wire work and effects fall into the wu xia aspect. They are basically super hero stories.
Thanks for the reply man! I understand better now. Im still a little puzzled if im not mistaken wasn't Hero and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Wu Xia? If so were Wu Xia movies different around the time Kung Fu Cult master was made? I know one simularity was they all involved flying but the one with Jet Li from 1993 seemed like everything from the acting and action sequences were played at the speed of light. Were older wu Xia films faster paced?
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masterofoneinchpunch
Thanks for the reply man! I understand better now. Im still a little puzzled if im not mistaken wasn't Hero and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Wu Xia? If so were Wu Xia movies different around the time Kung Fu Cult master was made? I know one simularity was they all involved flying but the one with Jet Li from 1993 seemed like everything from the acting and action sequences were played at the speed of light. Were older wu Xia films faster paced?

But see you are comparing Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee directed films (both who tend to be more artistic driven and have a background in drama and will spend more time making the film then) with Wong Jing who sometimes throws so many different genres, references, jokes, etc... at the speed of light. Jet Li had already worked with Wong Jing in Last Hero in China early that year. But you were seeing wire-work in such films as in the Jet Li/Tsui Hark success Once Upon a Time in China (1991) a few years earlier (but since undercranking has been in fight scenes for a long time it is a little hard to pinpoint exactly when wuxia became faster.)

Wu Xia films have been around for decades so the speed of them is relevant to what time period you are asking about.

thread we have on this topic: What exactly is Wuxia?

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Undercranking was something hugely popular in the new wave martial arts films of the 90s. Even "real" martial arts flicks had their fights sped up to sometimes ridiculous speed. BLADE OF FURY is one example of that, but also classics like IRON MONKEY.

KUNG FU CULT MASTER is certainly an extreme even in that enviroment, but not as extreme as you might think. And for the production values: KFCM has some shoddy fx but apart from that you can see that the budget must've been quite big. You have your stars, you have your huge sets and an entire army of extras for the battle scenes. I guess the movie was much more expensive than the FONG SAI-YUK-films.

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If you watch the films of Sammo Hung, many of them are undercranked, probably since the late 70s. They (HK action film makers) just didn't make them cartoon-like fast until maybe the late 80s. That was with all films, not just Wu Xia. Those type of films weren't big during most of the 80s. In fact, period films were not really being made until Jet Li's Once Upon a Time In China. After that, everything 'old' was new again.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was mainland chinese, and artsy, which pretty much shifted the martial arts movie making in the 2000s to where it is today. At least, from what I've seen, most of them are mainland chinese financed and dubbed into mandarin instead of cantonese.

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Kung Fu Cult Master is the most recent classic (if 90s are classic) that I have not seen before. 8th Diagram Pole Fighter is literally that last classic film I've seen. One of my favorites.

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Cognoscente

Wong Jing wanted the rap duo, Softhard (Eric Kot and Jan Lam), to play the Red Cross rapists but they were too busy. The idea that Jing had in mind was that there would have been some spoken word rap every time that their characters spoke.

He also wanted Carina Lau to play the role of Master No Mercy. She didn't want to work for producer Jimmy Heung, but Jing wanted her so badly that he went out of his way to cast a Mainland Chinese lookalike by the name of Sun Meng-Quan. In fact, some people thought that it actually was Carina. People would voice their surprise that she had shaved her head. As amusing as it was to hear the mixed feelings of approval and disapproval, Jing had to put an end to the rumours. Perhaps his effort was in vain, since there are articles and discussions on the Chinese web that raise the question about Carina's appearance.

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Cognoscente
On 9/12/2014 at 11:22 AM, kami said:

Undercranking was something hugely popular in the new wave martial arts films of the 90s. Even "real" martial arts flicks had their fights sped up to sometimes ridiculous speed. BLADE OF FURY is one example of that, but also classics like IRON MONKEY.

KUNG FU CULT MASTER is certainly an extreme even in that enviroment, but not as extreme as you might think. And for the production values: KFCM has some shoddy fx but apart from that you can see that the budget must've been quite big. You have your stars, you have your huge sets and an entire army of extras for the battle scenes. I guess the movie was much more expensive than the FONG SAI-YUK-films.

The budget was H.K.$ 50 million.

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On 5/11/2021 at 4:18 PM, Cognoscente said:

Wong Jing wanted the rap duo, Softhard (Eric Kot and Jan Lam), to play the Red Cross rapists

The Red Cross rapists were Wah Shan swordsmen, Wah Shan being the clan that Jet Li belonged to in Swordsman II. Why Wong Jing thought it would be funny to make fun of the protagonists of the Swordsman films is beyond me.

Edited by DrNgor
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It's weird because in his memoir, Jing talked about Tsui Hark treating him to an advanced screening that was just for Jing's benefit, and Jing was blown away by the opening reel alone.

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Just watched another Sammo movie. Well, more of a Jet Li movie with a few scenes of fatty. Picked up the HD version of Kung Fu Cult Master. Subs seriously need some work in it. A mixture of Chinglish and grammar mistakes, so glad I still have the DVD of it to work from. I suppose this is what happens when you buy Chinese movies from HK/China and not Western bought ones. 

Still, if it was released over here by 88 or Eureka, I'll glady get rid of this blu.

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30 minutes ago, Yggdrasil said:

Kung Fu Cult Master

A very odd film, it was one of the ones my mate owned, I remember being very confused and disappointed by it, it certainly wasn't what I was expecting. The only thing I remember liking from that film was the fight between Jet and Cho Wing.

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On 11/30/2022 at 11:18 PM, J.J. Hayden said:

A very odd film, it was one of the ones my mate owned, I remember being very confused and disappointed by it, it certainly wasn't what I was expecting. The only thing I remember liking from that film was the fight between Jet and Cho Wing.

Films at this point in time were more wire based. According to wiki, the film bombed, in doing so, the planned sequel was canned. 

There is a remake called New Kung fu cult master 1 & 2 with Donnie Yen in it. I download both of them (without subs) but then read the action scene & cgi were crap and Donnie  was more of a guest star, so just deleted the files.

Edited by Yggdrasil
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