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Ken Provencher and Mike Dillon (editors), Exploiting East Asian Cinemas: Genre, Circulation, Reception, Bloomsbury, 2018. 234 pgs.
In the early 2000s, unless you lived in a city in the region, you had limited options for East Asian movies. The most obvious solution was a pirated copy available through several media: the good old video cassette or VCD (Video CD), or the newer technologies of DVD and digital files. And you didnโt have to take a back alley deal as pirated media were sold in open markets, whether in any Western cityโs Chinatown or in shopping centres elsewhere.
That changed in the early 2000s when several East Asian films made their marks in the United States, from Hollywood & Beijingโs wuxia collaboration Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Korean revenge thriller Oldboy. Hollywood even produced three action films with strong Japanese flavours: The Last Samurai and the Kill Bill duology.
Kill Bill is a homage to 1970s East Asian action movies that falls into the exploitation film category. It features an attractive and unbeatable protagonist out for bloody revenge. It features brutal and poetic deaths. It features over-the-top antagonists with their quirks and signature weapons.
An exploitation film exploits the current trends, made with a limited budget, and promises sex and violence. Hence itโs almost impossible to find an exploitation romantic comedy or family film. They are designed in the main for heterosexual men, although audiences would widen both in gender and class from the 1990s on.
Academics have even seen exploitation films as a part of the โpara-cinemaโ. Networks will not show them at acceptable hours, but they have become a fixture of midnight television. You donโt want to watch them with your in-laws, but they are fun to watch with your buddies. More importantly, academics believe that beyond exploiting the audience and the actors, exploitation films present the taboo and the marginalised, and have turned respectability and elite taste upside down.
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Exploiting East Asian Cinemas is the third volume of Bloomsburyโs Global Exploitation Cinemas series, which has also looked at vintage pornography, the grindhouse theatre, and European exploitation movies. East Asian cinemas here are represented by films from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China from the 1950s to the 2010s.
Before the kung fu boom of the 1970s, Godzilla was the biggest Asia-Pacific import to American cinema. After Toho failed to produce a Second World War romance set in Indonesia, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka conceived the atomic monster idea during the flight home, inspired by the American monster movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident in March 1954, when fishermen on a boat were contaminated by the fallout of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test.
The first American watchers of Godzilla were Japanese Americans who saw it at community theatres, while a heavily altered version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, was released in 1956 starring Canadian actor Raymond Burr. The franchise picked up in the 1960s, rejuvenated by King Kong vs. Godzilla. No prize here for identifying King Kong with the United States and Godzilla with Japan. By this time, Godzilla (gorira kujira, gorilla whale) had evolved from a threat against Japan into a protector of Japan.
Like superhero movies of the 2010s, Godzilla movies were released annually, got more family-friendly, and included contemporary trends like spies and lost civilisations, and even anti-bullying messages and self-references. It had become too mainstream and banal for the youth, while television programmes easily copied and expanded its formula by the 1970s.
And yet, Godzilla returned once more on both sides of the Pacific in the 21st century, with Toho releasing Godzilla Minus One in late 2023 and Warner Bros set to bring out Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in spring 2024. Until two decades ago, watching Godzilla movies made you either a nerd (the 20th century films) or someone with basic taste (the 1998 Sony film or Tohoโs early 2000s line), but they have now been repackaged for for โrespectableโ audiences.
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In the 1970s, exploitation films in the West had their home in grindhouse theatresโcheap cinemas that showed adult and fringe films. Some Asian movies, mainly Japanese and Hong Kong action films, also had their Western runs there. The coming of home video in the 1980s closed the theatres and started a new golden age of exploitation cinema, since people could watch films in their homes, while the producers could count on more demands from distributors and consumers.
IFD Films and Arts Limited is an example of household name in East Asian exploitation. Joseph Lai and Thomas Tang created Asso Asia Films Limited, and they found an ideal place to produce kung fu films: South Korea. It had plenty of Buddhist temples to serve as sets, lower production costs than Hong Kong, and local actors who could pass as Hongkongers.
Asso saw what kind of exploitation was in and produced it. Bruceploitation exploited the global yearning for more Bruce Lee films, and Asso had both Bruce Lai (Chang Yi-tao) and Dragon Lee (Moon Kyung-seok). Interestingly, in Enter Three Dragons (1978), Dragonโs character name is โBruce Hongโ, while the cover boy of this book, Bruce Lai, plays โDragon Hongโ.
When Hong Kong giants moved on from Bruce Lee to Shaolin and comedy kung fu films, Asso kept up and found its Jackie Chan copy in Bruce Leung, who happened to work with Chan in Magnificent Bodyguards (1978).
Asso didnโt intend to cash in on its movies in Hong Kong, but the West. They dubbed the videos in English, sent them to English-speaking markets, and waited for more orders from video distributors. A business dispute between the co-founders in 1983 resulted in Asso closing down and Lai created IFD. It was an even luckier time for him, as Hollywood had its own martial arts boom, from The Karate Kid to Cannonโs ninja films.
Lai and his director Godfrey Ho found a devious and efficient recipe for IFD videos: Take footage from Filipino and Taiwanese films, mix them with some white actors and voiceovers, and youโve got a couple of incoherent ninja films ready for American market. Donโt Trust a Stranger, a Taiwanese gangster film, became Mission Thunderbolt. Just like a child might turn a doll house into a drug lord mansion, a melodramatic Taiwanese office scene becomes a ninja money laundry operation in Ninja the Protector (1986).
Just as the VCR killed the grindhouse, a Hong Kong-loving Hollywood in the 1990s killed IFD. Like Godzilla, Hong Kong movies became mainstream during the decade, with Jackie Chan and John Woo no longer fringe names in the West. Renting a disjointed Van Damme/RoboCop knockoff was no longer fun when you could hire a video of Van Dammeโs blockbuster Hard Target, directed by John Woo, for the same price.
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The evolution from the videotape to the DVD was another boon for exploitation filmsโ producers and distributors. Distributors of science fiction and cult film videos in the West released their โAsia Extremeโ labels, built upon four pillars: Hollywoodโs ongoing taste for Asia, a growing middle-class consumer base, the versality of DVDs that allowed multiple language tracks, subtitles, and extra contents, and the boom of Japanese horror and action at the turn of the millennium.
For Western fans, these movies pushed boundaries unseen in American blockbusters and B-movies.ย For Westerners of Asian descent, these movies were part of their personal identities, from Ring (1998) to Battle Royale (2000). And coincidentally, the early 2000s became the Asia years in film.
Spirited Away and Oldboy featured at the Academy Awards and Cannes, and while Hollywood had a โJapan Year 2003โ with The Last Samurai, Lost in Translation, and Kill Bill Vol. 1, Japan had a โSamurai Year 2003โ with The Twilight Samurai, Azumi, and Zatoichiโthat were also exported the West in the form of DVDs.
While The Last Samurai was better-received in Japan than in the West, Western journalists questioned the ethics of Asia Extreme popularity. Was it Orientalism? Should Cannes audiences have applauded the misogyny of Korean auteurs? Is the term โAsia Extremeโ a few steps away from โYellow Perilโ?
Metro-Tartan, a British distributor which distributed many such films with its Asia Extreme label, said that some people might like sentimental Italian romances, but more consumers bought Asian horror and action. Hence, while I was delighted to buy Korean political thrillers, anime, and Wong Kar-wai classics at HMV at that time, I was perplexed by the fact that there were never Jeon Ji-hyun romcoms or any of Juri Uenoโs teen comediesโthere was not enough demand for feminine movies.
Indeed, this Asia Extreme boom ended with the Great Recession in 2008, as East Asia no longer produced horror and action films noticeable in the West, the myth of โExtreme Asiaโ had worn off, and it was no longer extreme to watch an Asian DVD.
I would argue that horror had become a female-oriented genre in the West at this time, just like these Japanese horrors of the late 1990s were actually produced for teenage girlsโwhich is why they rely on atmospheric anxiety instead of gore, to keep the age classification low. Just like romcom, modern horror has become a feminine genre, and so leaves the exploitation family.
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This academic collection of essays demands its readers to be familiar not just with films and East Asia, but also critical theory, especially Michel Foucault, particularly in the latter chapters on arts and politics. And yet, it has more interesting stories than this review can share. The triumph of Fan Bingbing, before her disappearance at the time of publication. The duologies of Stephen Fung and Takeshi Kitano. The nihilism of Koreaโs New Cinema besides international blockbuster Train to Busan and Parasite, another Cannes and Oscar conqueror released one year after publication.
Exploitation films are beyond cheap and scandalous. At times they exploit the actors (Richard Harrison thought he only did a couple of movies in Asia, but IFD kept reusing his scenes to at least 24 different movies), working class audiences, and other filmmakers, but they also exploit elite audiences, who favour East Asian exploitation films above the rest at Cannes.
The directors often challenged their own societies, like the infamous Kim Ki-duk, who was accused of sexual assaults in 2018 before his death from COVID-19 two years later. The academics writing these chapters also argue that exploitation films expose the taboos and the outcasts of East Asian societies and have elevated the status of East Asian cinemas worldwide.
A future book might discuss the fine line of exploitation and exposition of Asian American cinema, with dark comedies such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Beef making their marks at the awards recently; and if the mainstream success of Asian American cinema will halt one cycle of exploitation trend before setting another cycle in motion.
How to cite:ย Rustan, Mario. โExtreme AsiaโA Review of Exploiting East Asian Cinemas: Genre, Circulation, Reception.โย Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 17 Jan. 2024,ย chajournal.blog/2024/01/17/east-asian-cinemas.
Mario Rustanย is a writer and reviewer living in Bandung, Indonesia. [All contributions by Mario Rustan.]