Come Drink with Me

Rating NR Formats DVD Genre foreign Starring Chen Hung-Lieh, Yueh Hua Directed by King Hu Publisher The Weinstein Company

While movies such as Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have lit up our silver screens in recent years, they had their roots.  The 1966 kung-fu classic Come Drink With Me is a film ahead of its time with moment of true ambition, but it comes with the price of several unintentional hilarious moments.  

Come Drink With Me stars beautiful martial arts veteran Pei-Pei Chang as the Golden Swallow, an agent on a quest to free her brother from a ruthless gang of bandits.  While falling on her face during the first showdown, she finds herself getting help from the alcoholic martial arts prodigy Drunk Cat (Hua Yueh) to discover what she’s missing.  The story itself is a combination of an American action flick and a Chinese philosophical opera.  Together, they create a formula that works on reflecting on the nature of humanity, yet knows when to kick it in with some brawling.  For 1966, this stuff was revolutionary.

Beside being a different story, this film definitely wasn’t afraid to show blood and wounds.  With sprays of red everywhere, I was reminded of Bonnie and Clyde’s graphic death scene.  Writer/Director King Hu wasn’t even afraid to have a child killed at the hands of a ruthless bandit leader.  Although the acting was slightly hokey, that particular scene of the young one being poisoned and stabbed was highly disturbing, but worked to establish the ruthlessness of the villains.

While the overall ahead-of-its-time formula is this film’s greatest strength, it’s weaknesses lie in unintentional laugh-out-loud moments.  At times, the acting can be painfully bad.  Every single actor has only one projection, leaving no room for variation depending on the situation.  Golden Swallow’s quiet coldness paired up with Drunk Cat’s sloshed singing works on the levels of an Abbott and Costello sketch.  The acting is even worse every time a fighter dies.  It’s as if everybody is attempting to die in slow-motion while the camera is running at normal speed, while emitting the sound of an angry goat while screaming in anguish. 

The martial arts battles also had moments that were worth groaning at, but only when compared to today’s films.  Some of the fighting proved ambitious as our single heroine would engage about twenty fighters using melee weapons and poison darts.  Some moments look halfway decent, but the camera tricks are what killed the flow of some sequences.  When a dagger was thrown, the reel would jump-cut to it being impaled in someone’s chest in order to create the illusion of speed.  With all these skips, people tend to disappear and reappear in various places and creating confusion.  The other unnecessary camera trick was filming at a different film speed so the fighting would appear faster.  The result was dangerously close to slapstick.  Camera tricks can’t substitute for well-choreographed action.

I was amazed at how many kung-fu movies stole moments from Come Drink With Me.  Flying across rooftops in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a lone female warrior clashing blades with hoards of henchmen in Kill Bill, and the less recent The Drunken Master doesn’t even need an explanation.  Now I have to really think just how much is owed to the King Hu’s work from other films that I’ve seen.

The DVD extras don’t have too much as far as behind-the-scenes documentaries, but the interviews with the actors is like time captured in a bottle. Even more amazing is the fact that there is feature commentary with Pei-Pei Chang, a real treat for fans of her films.

Overall, a must-have for any kung-fu fan, but isn’t likely to appeal to the average moviegoer.  Come Drink With Me is a classic that inspired so many films that wanted to improve on the unique storytelling concoction.