“One of the most entertaining ever made”: the movie Quentin Tarantino called “as fun as cinema gets”
Cinema has the potential to run audiences through the entire emotional spectrum, but the most important thing is to be entertained. Thanks to his encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium, Quentin Tarantino is confident that one movie delivers nonstop fun and excitement better than any other.
Film can leave you weeping gently in your seat, wiping away tears of laughter, picking your jaw up off the floor after a shocking twist, or recoiling in terror at a no-holds-barred horror flick, but those moments don’t matter unless they’re happening in something entertaining, because everyone knows a single standout scene isn’t enough to paper over the cracks of an otherwise mediocre motion picture.
Sometimes, all people want to do is turn their brains to the ‘off’ position, sit back, relax, and watch something ludicrous for 90 minutes or so. Not every movie has to be a feast for the eyes, ears, and brain, and as far as Tarantino is concerned, an obscure martial arts flick from 1976 provides the ultimate thrill ride that’ll keep those synapses firing from beginning to end without any deep thinking required.
This being one of the industry’s most avid cinephiles, it’s probably one not many people have seen outside of a hardy band of hardcore martial arts aficionados, but his recommendation might be enough to convince those who take his recommendations at their word that Lee Tso-nam’s The Hot, the Cool, & the Vicious is worth checking out.
“It’s one of the most entertaining movies ever,” he said on the Pure Cinema podcast. “One of the great martial arts directors, Lee Tso-nam, his nickname was the ‘Master Blaster’. I think this is his best movie. That final fight in Hot, Cool, Vicious, when they fight Tommy Lee, is just amazing. It’s as fun as cinema gets.”
Obviously, he’s not referring to the Mötley Crüe drummer, but the actor born Ming Chin, who was ubiquitous in Asian action cinema throughout the 1970s. In this particular role as Mr Lung, Tarantino even called him “the Klaus Kinski of the martial arts,” and he certainly looks the part with his garish wig and wild-eyed performance.
Like almost every other film of its ilk, The Hot, The Cool, & the Vicious ends with a balls-to-the-wall climactic brawl, and the two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker doesn’t think there’s anyone who mastered the art of the final third-act showdown better than Tso-nam, who he could always rely on to deliver the goods, no matter the quality of the film that preceded it.
“He’s the one that you can count on the final fight being a crowd pleaser,” he said. “It’s just money in the bank. Even if you didn’t really respond to the movie for the whole first act, he catches you in the middle, and by the end, he’s going to be bringing home the bacon. I mean, there’s nobody who makes climactic fights the way Lee Tso-nam does.”
That’s a lofty claim, especially from someone like Tarantino, who was raised on a steady diet of action-packed exploitation fare, and that endorsement should be enough to pique any genre fan’s interest in The Hot, The Cool, & the Vicious.
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