Fuck Oppenheimer, go watch real movies, such as:
The Iron Dragon Strikes Back aka The Gold Connection (1979)
OK, I think I have a new favorite low budget Hong Kong movie. My boy Bruce Li, the only legitimately charismatic actor to come out of the deluge of brucesploitation movies in the 70s, stars in a movie that's its own thing. It's frustrating how this movie is *almost* technically competent, as it still has many directing oddities that you don't see in places where the language of cinema is already mastered, like cuts between scenes being too fast and confusing giving you little time to situate yourself on the story they're trying to tell. This wouldn't pass in the west as a good movie, BUT it's still miles better than a lot of its contemporary HK low budget movies, for sure. Aside from these directorial quirks, I'd say the movie is objectively good.
Four guys find vietnamese gold dumped in their favorite diving/fishing spot, but Bruce Li pours water into his friends' beers explaining that it's probably from a gold smuggling operation, which might not be worth touching because it will cost their lives. They dump back the gold, and naturally, the bald bus driver of the group goes back later on his own to grab all the gold for himself. Oh well, at least they're not in danger, right? Baldy tries to sell the vietnamese minted gold and the bad guys quickly trace it back to him and his friends, leading to a failed ambush and a kidnapping, and finally an exchange for their friend's life in an abandoned quarry.
Right away there's a decent and intriguing plot to follow along, and once the plot kicks off it seems that the movie never lets go, culminating in the quarry fight which is a great sequence. But unfortunately after that, the movie kills off the action pacing for no apparent reason whatsoever, and the
HK plot logic starts to surface a bit. Later when the plot kicks off again it becomes clear that the director wanted to transition into a suspenseful mood but the pace change is too abrupt. But this somehow works in its own janky way and you still want to know what will happen next as the paranoid friends get harassed by the bad guys and picked off one by one, including a somewhat brutal scene where one of the character's sister gets a flaming towel thrown into her face by surprise, making her fall and squirm on the floor for a couple of uncomfortable seconds (I hope the double got paid well for that).
The director at least tried for real with this movie and you get some great action sequences, as expected, but some surprisingly well directed scenes too, like in one chase scene where the guy who tried to cash in the gold bars for baldy flees from the bad guys and you see their sillouettes against the sky in some very dark alleyways, with nice camera angles to accentuate the action. The end fight where Li has to fight one of the hired assassins on his apartment is probably one of the greatest fight scenes in a cramped space ever made, and I'm not exaggerating. Another inventive shot is at the very end where the assassin kills the light and in pitch black darkness, Li starts firing off his camera and the last few seconds of the fight are overexposed intentionally with constant sounds of his camera shutter, and in slow motion, culminating in him decapitating the bad guy with a leg hold (!). Of course the scene doesn't make sense if you think about it logically (how can Li be flashing the camera AND fighting the guy at the same time?) but it's still a great scene.
This movie is legitimately entertaining but what really pushes it to legendary status among its peers is the bleak atmosphere the movie has, accentuated with its depressing ending
Highly recommended! Just don't watch the dumb ass VHS to youtube uploads these movies tend to have as the poor transfer quality really hurts these low budget movies to the point of becoming unwatchable (for me at least). There's an unnoficial bootleg 2k transfer of a theatrical print which has great image quality, but the bluray they released this in is a bit hard to buy, I'd buy that or wait for someone to dump it into the Internet Archive or something.
