Looniness on VHS

Yesterday for some strange reason I felt compelled to rummage through my piles of old VHS tapes. Yes, VHS! Remember that? The great conqueror of Betamax and the conveyer of 'video nasties' into the homes of the British Public. The good old days. After the interest in grainy-horror tapes started to fade, fanboys moved on to everything they could get that was coming from Hong Kong. Bootleg VHS copies of Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun Fat movies exchanged hands at HK cinema triple bills, all-nighters, and in car parks throughout the land. This underground popularity then broke through to the mainstream as labels like Made In Hong Kong produced a wide range of high quality releases.

Amongst my dusty tape mountain I found a couple of early '90s Stephen Chow Sing Chi films. The first Stephen Chow movie I saw was God Of Cookery in Melbourne's Chinatown. It was Chow's inspired comic kung fu looniness that then led me to buy Curry and Pepper (1990) and The Flirting Scholar(1993) on VHS.

I picked up The Flirting Scholar to watch again last night. Chow plays the Scholar of the title, a great artist and poet. He has 8 beautiful, but shallow, money gambling wives and he is not happy. Until that is he spies the lovely Gong Li, who he attempts to woo, initially disguised as a beggar and then as a servant in her employer's household. It's a truly bonkers movie right from the start when artist Chow picks up his large calligraphy brush and dips it in ink. Only it's not ink, it's soy sauce, and he's not going to paint exquisite Chinese characters, he's going to baste a row of roast chickens on a spit. What follows is a story filled with romance, slapstick mayhem, amazing wire-fu and swordplay. There are not many tales set in Ancient China where characters rap and strike boy band poses!

Films like this made Stephen Chow the biggest star in Hong Kong. It's great to see that today he's appreciated across the globe due to his success with Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. One of the great film comedians.