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The Royal Tramp Collection
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th December 2023). |
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The Film
 "An epic two-part wuxia-comedy based on the writings of acclaimed Chinese novelist Jin Yong, Royal Tramp and Royal Tramp II star Stephen Chow as a cowardly bard who finds himself part of a real adventure when he is inducted into a sect of revolutionaries." Royal Tramp: Although the young Qing emperor Kangxi (So Close's Deric Wan) is well-loved by the people, folk hero Chen Jinan (Duel to the Death's Damian Lau) of the Heaven and Earth Society is recruiting the disenfranchised to rebel and bring back the Ming Dynasty. Obai (The Grandmaster's Elvis Tsui) is the fiercest among the four regents appointed to advise Kangxi in fighting the rebels; however, the other regents distrust Obai and even Kangxi is starting to believe that he is the only obstacle standing in the way of the older man's ascent to ultimate power. With the help of chief eunuch Hai Defu (Taxi Hunter's Ng Man-Tat), Kangxi arranges to meet with the other regents in secret and in disguise at the Fair Spring Court brothel to plot Obai's overthrow; however, Chen Jinan is also in attendance, and they are all nearly exposed when Obai and his men raid the brothel in search of the rebel. When brothel bard Wei Xiaobiao (From Beijing with Love's Stephen Chow) - who has just been regaling the waiting clients with exaggerated, superhuman accounts of Chen Jinnan's exploits – impulsively leaps to the man's defense during the attack, the brothel keeper (Hapkido's Lee Ka-Ting) and Xiaobiao's "sex expert" sister Wei Chunhua (Vampire vs. Vampire's Sandra Kwan) decide it would be best for business and her brother's safety if he accompanied Chen Jinan back to the Heaven & Earth Society and train under him to return the favor. Xiaobiao discovers that the other recruits of the Heaven & Earth Society are craven cowards when Chen Jinan has to use trickery to make him "volunteer" for a special mission to infiltrate the palace as a servant and retrieve the "Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters" which will reveal the location of gold stolen from the Han by the Qing (with Chen Jinan talking up the material rewards of the rebellion to maintain his hold over his followers). Unfortunately, Xiaobiao uses the wrong entrance and finds himself applying to be a palace eunuch. Hai Defu recognizes Xiaobiao from the brothel and lets him keep his manhood in exchange for spying on the Empress Dowager (God of Gamblers' Sharla Cheung), also in hopes of obtaining the book. When he is caught in the dowager's quarters by Princess Jianning (Naked Killer's Chingmy Yau), he mistakes her for another eunuch along with her brother the emperor. Instead of executing him for insolence, Kangxi keeps Xiaobiao orders him to spy on Hai Defu. Xiaobiao becomes suspicious of the Empress Dowager who demonstrates extraordinary fighting skills when attacked by assassins who also want the Sutra, especially when deceives her son and credits Xiaobiao with saving her, leading to his promotion to a court official (Kangxi getting around charges of Xiaobiao being a "false eunuch" by claiming that he was his own hired spy all along). Xiaobiao has a hard time keeping each of his masters from finding out and remaining loyal to all of them – further complicated when Jianning develops an attraction to him – when Obai decides to make his violent bid for the throne.  Royal Tramp II: After having been exposed as the false Empress Dowager, Lang'er assumes her real form (as Peking Opera Blues' Brigitte Lin) returns to the Dragon Sect where the high priestess (The Bride with White Hair II's Helena Law) reveals that she will not punish her for her failure to claim the Qing throne for Pingxi ruler Wai Sangui (Where's Officer Tuba?'s Paul Chun) who remains loyal to the Ming dynasty. She instead makes Lang'er her successor and transfers all of her energy to her that she might protect the Pingxi prince Wu (Police Story's Ken Tong) on his visit to the emperor. The high priestess suspects that for all of his stupidity and weakness, Xiaobiao's ability to best Lang'er means that he is the "dark star of her fate" and warns her that she must remain a virgin or she will lose eighty-percent of her powers to the man who makes love to her. Lang'er is determined to have her revenge on Xiaobiao, and with her true face, he mistakes her as Wu's bodyguard to be a male when she makes a fool of him in front of Kangxi who prevents a diplomatic incident by promising his sister's hand to Wu. On the way back to Pingxi, Xiaobiao and Wu are kidnapped by the One-Armed Nun (The Fate of Lee Khan's Helen Ma) and her faithful Li Kei (Wicked City's Michelle Reis); whereupon Xiaobiao reveals himself to be a member of the Heaven & Earth Society while Li Kei finds herself falling in love with Wu. With Lang'er's help, Xiaobiao is able to escape with Wu; Jianning reveals that she is pregnant with Xiaobiao's child and the two cook up a drastic scheme to get Jianning out of her engagement that also causes Wu Sangui to prematurely declare war against Kangxi against the warnings of his advisor Feng (Once Upon a Time in China's Yen Shi-Kwan). Lang'er discovers that Wu Sangui has also betrayed the Dragon Sect when he poisons her and the only cure is to make love to a man before dawn even if it means losing her powers. Just as Xiaobiao finally picks a side in the coming battle, he finds himself not only working alongside a fierce enemy (who also may have his own designs on the throne) but also possibly betraying Chen Jinan when he enters the fight. An adaptation of the long-running serialized novel "The Deer and the Cauldron" initially printed in daily installments between 1969 and 1972 in the newspaper Ming Pao, Royal Tramp and Royal Tramp II are rather atypical-seeming Wong Jing films, taking his successful run of collaborations with actor Chow a more narratively-grounded scenario in a wuxia period setting with a surprisingly slickness of visual and choreography rivaling that of works of contemporary Tsui Hark. Due to the effort to remain relatively faithful to the book, the film progresses at a more logical and less scattershot manner than the more thrown-together Wong Jing action/comedy films like Hard Boiled 2: The Last Blood or Magic Crystal, and the toilet/genital humor one expects of the director is more restrained but also more deftly deployed so as to seem more organic with various eunuch jokes, nipple-twisting maneuvers, and a special "penis shrinkage" fighting tactic. Despite the abundance of coupling as part of court intrigue, the sex is rather chaste to keep the film more widely accessible compared to its Category III contemporaries like Sex and Zen. Chow's performance of Xiaobiao at first seems quite broadly comic – he is the titular "tramp" in the vagabond sense – as if to compensate for his fighting skills; however, as he continues inexplicably failing upwards, the two films demonstrate his growth from bumbler to schemer, particularly in the ways he deals with fellow court official Du (Wong Jing's regular whipping boy Last Hero in China's Nat Chan) who repeatedly betrays him and then will do anything to prove his loyalty when Xiaobiao gets the upper hand again. He might even have become even less likable with the way he humiliates his latest wife as the "Little Sis" to his other three (with a fourth to come by the end of the second film) had the film not assured the viewer that "Big Sis" is capable of keeping him in check even without her powers. The web of court intrigues that keep the first film compelling wear thin really quick in the second film – and this is where one feels that the burden of trying to squeeze the plot of such a massive literary work (even the highly-abridged English edition is comprised of three volumes) – however, it is around the half-way point where the action picks up and Wong Jing takes even more creative liberties that this entry becomes both hilarious (although no laugh in the film truly compares to the first film's freeze frame finale undercut by product endorsement of two popular soft drink brands) and exhilarating leading up to a climax that is both a stalemate and dramatically-satisfying. 
Video
Royal Tramp and its sequel first turned up in English-friendly form as Hong Kong VHS and laserdiscs in 1993, the latter with dual Cantonese and Mandarion audio tracks and burnt-in English and Chinese subtitles while Tai Seng's 1997 laserdisc of the first film only English subtitles (there was no official U.S. release of the second film). In Hong Kong, Megastar released a non-anamorphic DVD with an English subtitle option while the subsequent three-disc double feature from Joy Sales was able to make use of Fortune Star's anamorphic remaster. In 2008, Weinstein-subsidiary Dragon Dynasty also put out a double feature as https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WMFZKG/ (dropping the bonus disc and including their own commentary and only 5.1 upmixes of the Cantonese and English dubs). The films were not available in the U.K. officially until this year with Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray double feature. Sourced from new 4K restorations – not available at the time of the Hong Kong Blu-rays in 2010 (although we have no idea if they are upscales like a lot of early Hong Kong Blu-rays of Fortune Star titles) – both films look wonderfully bright, sharp, and saturated revealing striking production design, wardrobe, and managing to hide most of the wire work while revealing subtle touches in the interior sets that were lost in NTSC video haze in earlier versions. Lens diffusion and some heavy use of smoke do, however, render some interiors less clearly than one would hope. The films in these new transfers not only look on par with the contemporary works of Tsui Hark but make the viewer ache for transfers of the latter's golden age films that looked this good. 
Audio
Both films include the original Cantonese mono tracks (post-dubbed by some of the original actors) in lossless LPCM 2.0 along with English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks (presumably no export versions were created for the films and the English dubs were created in the early 2000s by Fortune Star as they appeared on the Dragon Dynasty discs). The Cantonese track is the way to go as the English dubs sound too broadly comic – the dub ruins one joke by referring to the Fair Spring Court as a brothel before it is revealed as such in the next scene – and not really that dynamic in terms of sound design to better the mono mix; however, even the optional English subtitles have some anachronisms that may have been part of Wong Jing's approach with the translators attempting to convey it to English viewers with lines like "Blow me!" 
Extras
Royal Tramp is accompanied by a pair of commentary tracks. On the audio commentary by Asian film experts Mike Leeder & Arne Venema, the pair provide some context for the still-existing Heaven & Earth Society and its modern day Triad associations in different territories, as well as the Triad links to the film's production company and the place of eunuchs in palace life. They also discuss the ways that the film got around a Category III rating, while also noting some cuts to the Hong Kong domestic version that subsequently restored (causing the VHS and laserdisc to be given a more restrictive rating than the theatrical version), as well as Wong Jing's brand of crude humor. On the audio commentary by Asian film experts Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto, they reveal that the pageantry of the opening sequence was a direct homage to a Hong Kong Marlboro commercial from the time, express surprise at how well shot the film is for a Wong Jing movie, the other various adaptations of the film's literary source, and suggest that the respect paid to the source is the reason for his relative restraint. The disc also includes the first part of an interview with director Wong Jing (9:17) who notes that the source novel was more accessible for most than history books and unequivocally describes the Heaven & Earth Society as a terrorist group rather than an opposition party. The disc also includes the Hong Kong theatrical trailer (4:40).  Royal Tramp II is also accompanied by a pair of commentary tracks with the same participants as the first. On the audio commentary by Asian film experts Mike Leeder & Arne Venema reveal that the back-to-back productions were released theatrically only eight days apart from the end of the first and the premiere of the second and that both were box office hits (while also emphasizing that such big films were not Chinese New Year releases despite the large amount of cameos). They point out another commercial campaign homage for a bank this time around as well as go into more detail about the collaborations of Wong Jing and Stephen Chow, as well as pointing out that the film is less violent than the first and ponder if this is an immediate response to the first film (noting how drastically a cut of film could change between the Saturday preview and the regular run). On the audio commentary by Asian film experts Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto, they reveal that the second film attempted to encompass the last three books of the series and omit a lot of material while also adding things like the transference of magic powers through the loss of virginity. The disc includes the second part of the interview with director Wong Jing (10:50) in which he concedes that the first film was more faithful to the source while the second allowed him to get more creative with more wuxia action. Also included is an interview with actress Helena Law (14:24) who discusses her long career – noting that she has worked so much that she actually does not recall a lot of the earlier films the interviewer cites – including appearances in the long-running Wong Fei-hung series of features, joining TVB in 1971, and a short contract with Shaw Brothers (one hopes there is more interview footage with her since she is still working and her resume keeps getting longer). The disc also includes the film's Hong Kong theatrical trailer (3:50). 
Packaging
The first pressing of two thousand copies come with a limited edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling and collector's booklet featuring new writing on the films (the latter not provided for review).
Overall
The Royal Tramp Collection may look like atypical Wong Jing, but it is certainly peak Wong Jing/Stephen Chow.
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