05 January 2009

Super Dragon's Dynamo


Super Dragon’s Dynamo
1974 – Hong Kong
Director – Joseph Chung
Alpha Video Distributors, Inc., 1991, VHS

Because this was released by IFD Films, the name Joseph Lai is featured fairly large on the box art (which looks like the poster), and I’ve learned that an inordinate amount of his films are directed by Godfrey Ho, assuming they’re not the same person.

In this case, a sinister black-gloved hand performs several murders, then later, the same hand leafs through a file of dossiers, crossing out and throwing several away. Some Asian guys gamble around a table to far too exciting, loud 80’s synth music, upping the stakes until one of them, named Champ, calls with a good hand. His Chinese mafia opponent cheats to win the game costing Champ a great deal of his business tycoon father’s money. His father dismisses him from the firm for gambling too much and incurring the wrath of the Syndicate. In his place, his father unknowingly appoints an undercover member of The Syndicate.


In another bar, some other Asians play pool and smoke a lot to a blaring, droning uber-disco beat while some guys beat each other up. In between all these smoky beatings a connection is made between The Syndicate, and the reluctant assassin Black Gloves whom The Syndicate blackmailing into killing their opponents. Gloves girlfriend is Champs pre-teen sister, the innocent female character around which this tragedy of indistinguishable proportions is about to unfold. It’s hard to tell through the cigarette haze of nameless chain-smoking Asian toughs and the kung-fu giallo plot, but this may actually all be the same movie. Spooky.


Champ does not want to wait for it, and wastes no time walking directly from muddily dubbed conspiratorial mutterings into a smoky casino, smashing it up and getting arrested and sent to prison. With Champ out of the way his fathers business empire is fair game and the Syndicate moves in, with guilt wracked Black-Gloves performing the necessary personnel cutbacks right on up to Daddy CEO.

When Champ emerges from the clink years later the mafia follows him to his sister and Black Gloves who are now living underground in domestic bliss. When Champ discovers the shitstorm his gambling problem brought this movie to, he takes it out on the most logical victims, his only surviving family. His sister, now pregnant with Black Gloves child, is his first victim, browbeaten into aborting her fetus. During the verbal assault, her husband gets home and Champ beats him silly driving the point home by inducing his sisters miscarriage on the spot before dropping a car on his brother in law’s chest.
So that's fun, right?


If you can find any information on this film, anywhere, please let me know. At this time as far as I know the video cassette in my possession is totally unique.

1 comment:

Regis said...

I understand that this is what Scorsese based Casino on.