Dis­cov­er this Tai­wanese epic that brought kung fu to the art-house

King Hu’s A Touch of Zen and Antho­ny DiBlasi’s Last Shift might seem lit­er­al­ly worlds apart in terms of their prove­nance, peri­od, dura­tion and genre. After all, the for­mer is an epic wux­ia from Tai­wan released in 1971 with a dura­tion of well over three hours, while the lat­ter is a con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cop-shop chiller from 2014 that comes in at a brisk 84 min­utes. Yet what these two oth­er­wise dis­parate titles have in com­mon is that ghosts – or at least the mer­est appari­tion of ghosts – haunt them to their gener­ic core.

Hu’s film begins as a sort of back­woods mas­quer­ade, as Gu (Shih Jun), qui­etist scribe and por­trait artist in a remote vil­lage, comes to realise that the local blind for­tune teller Shi (Bai Ying), the weaver woman Yang (Hsu Feng) and the herbal­ist Lu (Hsieh Han) are not who they claim to be, but fugi­tives in hid­ing from the cor­rupt and vicious eunuch Wei of East Cham­ber. It also begins very much as a ghost sto­ry, with Gu and his moth­er squat­ting next door to a creepy, aban­doned fort from which strange nois­es issue at night.

Once Gu has deter­mined that it is in fact Yang liv­ing in the fort, he falls in love and promis­es to help her against her ene­mies. Though no fight­er (indeed there is pre­cious lit­tle fight­ing in the film’s first half), Gu sud­den­ly reveals that he has his own hid­den tal­ents as a mil­i­tary strate­gist, and plots out a sub­terfuge that involves trans­form­ing the fort into a would-be haunt­ed house with its own lethal boo­by traps – and so, as Gu sur­veys the work­ings of his dead­ly illu­sion­ism, we are also see­ing the film’s own archi­tec­ture as a ghost sto­ry decon­struct­ed before our eyes. Yet the film’s super­nat­ur­al machin­ery evap­o­rates only to be replaced with a mag­i­cal kind of Bud­dhist spir­i­tu­al­ism (the tit­u­lar ​‘touch of Zen’) that recon­fig­ures every­thing that has pre­ced­ed into reli­gio-philo­soph­i­cal allegory.

In Tai­wan, A Touch of Zen was orig­i­nal­ly released in two parts. When put togeth­er (as here), they are overex­tend­ed and too long by half, with many a dull stretch before the famous wire­work action sequences final­ly kick in – although per­haps this will not prove too much of a chal­lenge for the mod­ern view­er who is a fan of, say, 2015’s The Hate­ful Eight (with its sim­i­lar­ly pro­tract­ed pace and dura­tion). Cer­tain­ly in its day Hu’s film ele­vat­ed kung fu to the art-house, win­ning a spe­cial award at Cannes for its tech­ni­cal excel­lence in 1975, and get­ting nom­i­nat­ed for the Palme d’Or – and its influ­ence can be felt in Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Drag­on, Zhang Yimou’s House of Fly­ing Dag­gers and even Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins.

It is too ear­ly to say whether Last Shift will com­mand a sim­i­lar influ­ence over oth­er films, but it is easy enough to see the influ­ences with which it has itself been haunt­ed. As rook­ie offi­cer Jess Loren (Juliana Harkavy) spends her very first night on duty babysit­ting an emp­ty police sta­tion that is offi­cial­ly to be closed down the fol­low­ing morn­ing, and finds her­self under siege (whether from with­out or with­in), direc­tor DiBlasi and his co-writer Scott Poi­ley do not hide their debt to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 – itself a rad­i­cal reimag­in­ing of Howard Hawks’ 1959 oater, Rio Bravo.

If Carpenter’s stripped-down police siege flick has over the years become a cult film, DiBlasi incor­po­rates an actu­al cult into his own iter­a­tion. For the old San­ford Police Sta­tion where Jess is keep­ing her vig­il paid host briefly in the pre­vi­ous year to the demon­ic John Michael Pay­mon (Joshua Mikel) and two female mem­bers of his Man­son-like fam­i­ly. Arrest­ed for rit­u­al­is­ti­cal­ly slaugh­ter­ing young abductees and also killing cops (includ­ing Jess’ own father), the trio hanged them­selves that night, but not before vow­ing revenge – and now Jess, alone and uncer­tain, must face some very unwel­come visitors.

Last Shift is pure genre, but that is not to say that its genre is pure, giv­en how deft­ly it ambiguates itself between being a sto­ry of ghost­ly vengeance and a tale of psy­cho­log­i­cal break­down, while leav­ing the dis­ori­ent­ed view­er to call the dif­fer­ence. Once again, as with his pre­vi­ous fea­tures Dread, Cas­sada­ga and Mis­sion­ary, DiBlasi proves him­self an expert at craft­ing unease and horror.

A Touch of Zen is released on Blu-ray & DVD in a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion 3‑Disc Set by Eure­ka! as part of the Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma Series on 25 Jan­u­ary;
Last Shift is released on DVD by Fusion Media Sales on 18 January.