Face To Face
WRITTEN BY JULES GRINDER FOR VHS WASTELAND
Calling ‘Face to Face’ a documentary is insulting to the worst of documentary films and the most inept of documentarians. Made quickly, cheaply, and with little perspective to offer to the viewer, this is merely a collection of scenes from two or three Jackie Chan movies, and a couple of Bruce Lee movies. This straight to video waste of time does very little to explain the backgrounds of either performer, nor does it offer much information about their careers, or even any real historical perspective.
It can be summarized like this; isn’t Jackie Chan great, watch this fight. Hey, wasn’t Bruce Lee awesome, check out this fight scene. That’s it; it’s a lousy excuse for a documentary, and generally speaking a waste of time, video tape, and narration.
I have watched my fair share of bad documentaries, especially ones devoted to Asian action cinema, but this makes cheap stuff like Top Fighter look like a brilliant work of art, or at least high class when compared to this dreck. This was obviously made for one reason and one reason alone. It was made for a quick buck and I bet it succeeded at that.
Ordinarily, I find these kinds of compilation tapes quite enjoyable, but not this one. The shoddy quality of this particular presentation is exceptionally poor and not particularly fun to watch. The pleasure of watching a kung fu compilation is the fun of viewing just the fights and not having to spend any time trying to follow a discernible storyline. The best of those kinds of movies are things like ‘the Deadliest Art’, which offered the cream of the crop when it came to martial arts fight scenes, and had the distinction of a fairly lively narration from none other than John Saxon. Such a thing cannot be said about ‘Face to Face’.
The direction (or lack of it) is credited to Curtis Chan; a filmmaker that has enjoyed so much success that he doesn’t even appear to have an IMDB page. The narrator is Marc Andrews, I did find someone with the same name on IMDB, and considering the fact that the listing was for someone with one credit to their name, and that credit was for the narration of a shock-u-mentary in the vein of Mondo-Cane, Faces of Death, and Traces of Death, I consider it a relatively safe assumption that this narrator, and that narrator are one, and the same. Oddly enough, no proof of the existence of ‘Face to Face’ can be found anywhere on IMDB, but they can’t hide it forever, because the proof just sullied my VCR.
Among the footage used are scenes from Young Master, Twin Dragons, and Fist of Fury (AKA the Chinese Connection). Most of the footage is grainy, washed out, and looks several generations removed from an original commercial VHS release. Which is odd, because it shouldn’t have been too hard at the time to obtain decent looking copies of the scenes that are presented here, but the producers were probably looking to spend as little as possible to make this film, perhaps they even attempted to make this for a total budget of a mere few cents.
Also featured is a brief moment from the 1971 interview with Bruce Lee from the Pierre Berton Show, which is interesting, but seek out the video of the entire interview which can be purchased on VHS under the title of ‘Bruce Lee: the Lost Interview’, and is well worth checking out. Another oddity that appears in this sorry excuse for a documentary is the behind the scenes footage from ‘the 36 Crazy Fists’, something that Jackie Chan probably never intended for public display, because he has a cigarette dangling from his lips the entire time he is on camera, and this certainly wouldn’t have helped his squeaky clean and family friendly image that he was mastering at the time.
The packaging leads one to believe that this is going to be some sort of fight fest featuring Jackie Chan versus Bruce Lee, but it is not. Although, a truly smart filmmaker would have made use of the multiple examples of footage that utilized then stuntman Jackie Chan as a cinematic punching bag for Bruce Lee.
Made in 1993, when Hong Kong cinema was just starting to become popular in America, this was as exploitative as could be, and marketed to the gullible. What does it say about me that I actually bought this? That it was really dirt cheap at the thrift store and I’m just that much of a glutton for punishment. Or, perhaps I’m just that much of a sucker for anything related to Asian action movies.
Check it out if you feel the need to do so, but consider yourself properly warned. Not the worst experience known to man, but still a painful one. |
