In the 1970s, movie theaters one step ahead of demolition covered their crumbling marquees with titles like 18 Fatal Strikes and Shogun Assassin. It was the golden age of the Hong Kong kung fu flick, with its off-kilter dubbing, arm chops that sounded like whiffing golf clubs, and villains sporting shaggy Ron Wood hairdos. Every Saturday and Sunday, Grant Rogers and his little brother Simeon took their buck-fifty to the movies to watch Bruce Lee kick it with that week’s horde of ninjas.
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Kung fu was huge with black audiences, who could relate to the Chinese underdogs battling the Japanese and the Westerners. You had to cheer when Jackie Chan, who’s so poor he has to scrub the floor of the dojo, gets schooled in the snake style of kung fu and beats up the round-eyed devil who stabbed his master. Fans often came to the theater in Chinese slippers, robes, and coolie hats. The day after WGN showed Five Deadly Venoms, half the guys at Kenwood Academy were trying to run up the walls like Kuo Chui, who starred as the Lizard.
A few years ago, Rogers, who studies wing chun at Sheil Park, decided to share his martial arts archive by becoming the Roger Ebert of kung fu, if there’s a black belt big enough for that title. Along with his friend Andre Dorsey, he started the TV show Martial Arts Madness: two guys lounging in front of some movie posters, raving about the most classic, most crucial, awesomest, ultimate moves in the history of Hong Kong cinema.
Andre: “They still are, but they don’t want to acknowledge that. You’d go out with a date then, you took your lady to the kung fu movie back then, it was the bomb.”
Grant: “Cinematic Holy Grail. Something that emancipates, gravitates, other things that just make you want to break down.”
