The Bride with White Hair (1993)

Director Ronny Yu's masterwork, The Bride With White Hair is one of the best wuxia films ever as well as one of my personal favorites. Unlike many films of this type, the story flows really well and is not hard to follow. 20 plus years later, The Bride With White Hair still looks amazing with lush visuals, stunning cinematography, as well as great sets, costumes and weaponry. The Bride With White Hair could be described as Romeo And Juliet in a Chinese period fantasy martial arts setting, but it is much more than that in my opinion. This tragic love story with reluctant swordsman Leslie Cheung and wolf girl Brigitte Lin is not a conventional swordsman flick and its tone is darker than most in the genre. I see some similarities to Francis Ford Coppla's Dracula. It has similar visual flair and atmosphere and also is a tragic love story as well. The fights/battle scenes are equally impressive and are choreographed with beautiful and brutal efficiency by Philip Kwok. The violence gets graphic and at times bloody with beheadings, limbs torn off and bodies torn apart. Brigitte Lin is at her best here with her stunning beauty, immense presence and intensity of her frozen death stare, that means certain death if you are her enemy or in her way. The film is in my opinion flawless, top quality and totally unique. The Bride With White Hair has been a favorite for a long time and holds up really well through the years. The Bride With White Hair is a classic and really is in a class of its own.

Back in the 80s, the Hong Kong movie industry was making some of the best action-fantasy movies around and this was maybe its high water mark, combining historical action fantasy with quite a touching central romance. Adapted from the 1954 Chinese novel 'River Lake' and set during one of China's many historical periods of internal unrest, Bride is a lush folk tale about a martial artist who wanders into the woods and encounters the Wolf Girl, a legendary recluse who had been raised by wolves, playing one of those yard-long wooden Chinese flutes. They circle one another playfully at first but eventually their passion can no longer be contained. A love affair crossing their two obviously separate and incompatible worlds proves impossible and hardship, misunderstanding and tragedy follows. The whole production has an operatic quality to it, with haunting music, sweeping camera work, dark magical elements and STUFF blowing around quite often, perhaps symbolic of the swirl of events and political chaos around the principles. Brigitte Lin (39) and Leslie Cheung (37) were quite a bit older than the 20-something characters in the book, but still make an attractive romantic pairing. Recommended.

Colorful Asian fantasy with the emphasis on romance and fanciful action; enjoyable enough in itself but not particularly compelling. The plot and look of the film reminded me of the "Chinese Ghost Story" Trilogy (1987-91), which I watched – and loved – only a few years back, while the gravity-defying stunts looked forward to Ang Lee's (obviously more accomplished) CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000). As is the norm for this sort of film, the characters are all stock types (the nasty Siamese-twin villains being a particular liability) – which means that, for all the pseudo-philosophy which gets spouted (usually by elders) from time to time, the tale follows a rigid, rather simplistic and all-too-familiar path which doesn't allow for much depth or surprise…though "The Bride With White HaIr" herself (when she belatedly appears) is a memorable creation – and I wouldn't mind catching up eventually with this film's sequel (from the same year and director).

This is an insanely entertaining movie, which plays more like an opera. It's a wild fantasy about the normal warring clans in ancient China. It has it all, a great love story, Kung Fu fights out the ass with all the flying acrobatics you could want. And best of all Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia as the high flying wolf girl with magical skills. This is a tour de force of everything us Americans liked about "Crouching Tiger". The ending is fabulous, with a Kung Fu fight right out of the comic books. Even director Vu said the final battle he wanted to resemble a pin ball machine. It does, and it's crazy, and he made a movie that I couldn't recommend any higher. I'm looking forward to watching the first sequel very much.