Saving Shaolin

IT ALL STARTED WITH A TRAILER FOR FIVE ELEMENT
NINJAS.

A ridiculous 1982 Hong Kong kung fu flick made by the Shaw Brothers
Studio, Five Element Ninjas pits ninjas of “gold, fire, water,
wood, and land” against an army of unwitting Japanese fighters.
Featuring such tasteful moments as one fighter tripping over his own
spilling guts, Five Element Ninjas is a grindhouse classic.

It’s also exactly the sort of film that catches the eye of Dan
Halsted, who started Portland’s Grindhouse Film Festival in 2004. Since
then, Halsted has developed the festival into a monthly showcase of
genre cinema that pits the sordid pulp of films like The Toolbox Murders against the antiseptic blandness of contemporary
multiplexes.

The Grindhouse Film Festival’s screenings are often preceded by
vintage previews—but when the trailer for Five Element
Ninjas played at the Grindhouse Trailer Festival in April, Halsted
made a discovery that might very well change the American grindhouse
scene forever.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

Halsted, used to seeing film that’s battered, faded, and scratched
up, was amazed by the film quality of Five Element Ninjas‘
trailer—but despite inquiries, the man who sold Halsted the
trailer refused to tell him where it came from. Luckily, Halsted found
a movie ticket in the trailer’s canister that led him, via Google, to a
decrepit movie theater on the edge of Chinatown in Vancouver, British
Columbia. The theatre had closed down in 1985, but after sending some
wildly speculative emails to the theater’s wealthy Chinese owners,
Halsted got a quick and unexpected response granting him permission to
go inside. Dazed, he drove to Canada with his girlfriend in early
August, not knowing what to expect.

“Often we’ll find films somewhere in the Midwest in a shed that’s
been sweating in the sun,” says Justin Ishmael of the American Genre
Film Archive (AGFA), a Texas nonprofit established last year to
preserve grindhouse movies. “You hear these myths of, ‘Oh, there’s a
theater this old man used to have with a rich vein of old films
inside.’ But no one finds that kind of stuff. Except Dan got it this
time, and it’s big. It’s priceless.”

“It really is,” Ishmael insists. “It’s not a cliché. There’s
a difference between a print existing, and a print existing. And
Dan has just single-handedly doubled our collection of films.”

THE BREAKDOWN

“Vancouver is a really nice, clean city,” says Halsted. “Except
there is one area that is just awful, and the old theater is right in
the middle of it.”

Halsted parked in the alley behind the theatre, after honking his
horn to encourage three crack-smoking prostitutes to move out of the
way. Later, as Halsted loaded pallets onto a truck in the alley, “This
guy sits down next to us, smokes a rock, pulls up his pant leg, takes
out a pocketknife, and starts slicing the sores off his leg,” Halsted
says.

The theater was recently reopened as a periodic live music venue,
and a janitor pointed Halsted to a door that offered access to the area
beneath the stage.

“The theater just sat there unused since ’85,” says Halsted. “The
film was all stashed under the stage, and it was probably only a matter
of time before it got damaged by somebody spilling a mop bucket or
something.”

The 30-by-10-foot space was full of film in disarray, lying outside
its canisters. But for some reason—perhaps because the film could
“breathe”—it was all in far better condition than one would
expect. Old film often breaks down, thanks to what’s known as “vinegar
syndrome,” in which the film ages, warps, begins to smell of vinegar,
and becomes worthless. But the stash of films Halsted discovered barely
had any vinegar syndrome at all. Stumbling across one or two films like
these in such amazing condition would be a big find—but Halsted
had discovered so much film that it took him and his girlfriend nine
hours to sort through it all.

“It blew my mind,” Halsted says. “I was overwhelmed, because there
was so much. But I was also concerned, because I didn’t know if any of
the films were complete. But these are my favorite movies. They just
don’t exist on film [anymore], and to find them there, to be there and
touch them, and in such great condition—it was unreal.”

A COLLECTOR’S DREAM

There are less than 100 collectors of rare 35mm films in the United
States, says Ishmael, and that’s a figure that includes directors like
Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, who shows off
his archive during the semi-regular QT Film Fest at the world-renowned
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas.

“It’s kind of like this nerdy badge of honor,” says Ishmael. “If
you’re a film collector, it almost means you’re instant friends with
other film collectors.”

Halsted describes his find in Vancouver as something “out of my
dreams.” It’s certainly something that will change how he runs the
Grindhouse Film Festival. Last June, for example, when Halsted screened
a copy of Seven Grandmasters at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre,
the print was purchased from a guy who had dug it out of a dumpster in
the late ’70s. “And it was just one movie,” says Halsted. “But it was
this huge deal.”

At last count, Halsted has collected 140 complete movies from the
Vancouver haul—and, once all the prints have been catalogued by
the AGFA, that number is expected to rise to 200. An independent
auditor valued the combined films at $27,000, and Halsted facilitated
its donation to the Texas nonprofit by the theater owners.
“They were happy to have the tax write-off,” he smiles.

INVINCIBLE POLE FIGHTER

Born and raised in rural Oregon, Halsted seems modest and unassuming
despite being over six feet tall. He wears Adidas, drinks drip coffee,
and smiles only rarely. But he lights up when you ask him about 1984’s
Invincible Pole Fighter, the first of his found movies on loan
from AGFA, which will be screened at the Hollywood on September 19.

“It’s my favorite kung fu movie,” he says. “I’ve had the bootleg of
it forever.”

In Vancouver in the early ’80s, the audience for Invincible Pole
Fighter would probably have been very different from today, Halsted
notes. “I don’t think it would’ve been your typical rowdy grindhouse
experience,” he says. “In that setting, it was probably a serious
movie-watching experience for almost exclusively Chinese
audiences.”

Directed by Lau Kar-Leung, Invincible Pole Fighter stars kung
fu legends Gordon Liu (who Tarantino would later cast in his Kill
Bill movies) and Fu Sheng, who died in a car crash during the
filming.

Invincible Pole Fighter was also shot during an era when many
Hong Kong kung fu movies started to stray into comedy, “which can be
annoying,” notes Halsted. But this film maintains a serious tone
throughout. “I think because of Fu Sheng dying, it cast this dark cloud
over the entire production,” Halsted says, adding that the highlight of
the movie is its final reel.

“It’s Kar-Leung’s masterpiece,” he says, without giving too much
away. “That final scene is incredible. It’s amazing. People are gonna
lose their minds.”

Courtesy of AGFA, Halsted plans to screen many more movies from his
Vancouver haul over the coming months—while searching for the
next big grindhouse goldmine.