everybody was kung-fu birthday fighting (though the kids weren't fast as lightning and it wasn't a little bit frightening)

The parade of friends' birthdays continued this week when we caught Kung Fu Fridays at the Royal Theatre.

The chop-socky fun began with a couple of trailers. Hero Among Heroes looked like a hoot fest, complete with actors wearing ridiculously false buck-toothed choppers. The evening's raffle came next. We loudly oohed when the first number was read off, but awwed when nobody came close to winning any prize (the British flick about sumo housewives sounded neat).

The feature was presentation was The Golden Mask, which seems to be easier to find info about on the net under the name Golden Killah (here's a review from Kung Fu Cinema).

The copy shown had the most unintelligble subtitles I've ever seen. Syntax and spelling were clumsy at best. The audience hooted and hollered at the homoerotic subtext running through the titles. They also left many plot points up to the imagination - if you weren't paying close attention, you might have thought it was a tale of the battle for a department store (the old geezer who Golden Mask wanted to kill ran a "store", though it appeared to be either a home or palace). We were spared the "ha, ha, ha...now you die!" school of dubbing. Audience enthusiasm dimmed as the film wore on.