"Eastern Condors" is a weird Hong Kongese Vietnam War action flick from legendary actor-writer Sammo Hung, and starring the equally legendary martial arts performer Yuen Biao, who was a contemporary of Hung and Jackie Chan at the Peking Opera School.
So what's so "weird" about it? It has scenes that rip off at least three well known war movies, and uses them for reasons I couldn't really discern. For one thing, the movie is a clear copy of "The Dirty Dozen"; the main characters are mostly a group of criminals who have been recruited to perform some dangerous mission. Then there are shades of "Where Eagles Dare" in the details of the mission: going behind enemy lines to destroy a munitions dump. And what do you know, on the way there - in a scene that comes out of nowhere - they are captured by the North Vietnamese Army, kept in a cell mostly underwater, and forced to play... you guessed it... Russian Roulette. What else?
The clichés of course don't stop there, they just become less obvious in their inspiration, eg. what war movie doesn't have a scene where one of the number gets injured, and tells the other guys to "go on... just leave me!"
The film deviates, if not from war movies in general but from most martial arts flicks, in being quite a bit more violent in parts than you might expect. There's a double head-shot scene, somebody losing at Russian Roulette, and a hand being chopped off, but it's not this violent throughout, making these scenes all the more surprising.
Overall, "Eastern Condors" is a weird mish mash of genre and cliché, which is really only worth watching for its final fight between Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung and the legendary (there's that word again) actor and choreographer, Yuen Woo Ping, who did the choreography for "The Matrix" and "Kill Bill" movies. He steals the scene as the preening, giggling villain, using claw hands like something out of a James Bond movie, which his hidden underground lab also reminds one of. So I guess that completes the rip-off stew that is "Eastern Condors" - three parts familiar war movie, two parts kung fu, and one part Bond.
So what's so "weird" about it? It has scenes that rip off at least three well known war movies, and uses them for reasons I couldn't really discern. For one thing, the movie is a clear copy of "The Dirty Dozen"; the main characters are mostly a group of criminals who have been recruited to perform some dangerous mission. Then there are shades of "Where Eagles Dare" in the details of the mission: going behind enemy lines to destroy a munitions dump. And what do you know, on the way there - in a scene that comes out of nowhere - they are captured by the North Vietnamese Army, kept in a cell mostly underwater, and forced to play... you guessed it... Russian Roulette. What else?
The clichés of course don't stop there, they just become less obvious in their inspiration, eg. what war movie doesn't have a scene where one of the number gets injured, and tells the other guys to "go on... just leave me!"
The film deviates, if not from war movies in general but from most martial arts flicks, in being quite a bit more violent in parts than you might expect. There's a double head-shot scene, somebody losing at Russian Roulette, and a hand being chopped off, but it's not this violent throughout, making these scenes all the more surprising.
Overall, "Eastern Condors" is a weird mish mash of genre and cliché, which is really only worth watching for its final fight between Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung and the legendary (there's that word again) actor and choreographer, Yuen Woo Ping, who did the choreography for "The Matrix" and "Kill Bill" movies. He steals the scene as the preening, giggling villain, using claw hands like something out of a James Bond movie, which his hidden underground lab also reminds one of. So I guess that completes the rip-off stew that is "Eastern Condors" - three parts familiar war movie, two parts kung fu, and one part Bond.