BETALEVEL


Wasp & Orchid presents COME DRINK WITH ME

chengpeipeicomedrinkwithme

Sunday, April 7th
Doors at 8pm; movie at 8:30pm
FREE

APRIL is WOMAN WARRIOR MONTH featuring martial arts films with a female lead! Every Sunday at 8pm!

4/7: COME DRINK WITH ME (1966) starring Cheng Pei-pei.
4/14: DANCE OF DEATH aka ETERNAL CONFLICT (1976) starring Angela Mao.
4/21: WING CHUN (1994) starring Michelle Yeoh.
4/28: CHOCOLATE (2008) starring JeeJa Yanin.

Wasp & Orchid’s Woman Warrior month will commence with the classic Shaw Brothers Studio production Come Drink With Me. The film stars Cheng Pei Pei, perhaps best known to contemporary audiences as the assassin Jade Fox from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Only twenty years old when the film was made, Pei Pei, originally trained in ballet, quickly became famous as the “Queen of Swords” for her role as the female knight errant Golden Swallow. She would eventually appear in over 20 Shaw Brothers films during her six years with the production company.

This movie also established director King Hu as an innovative master of the wuxia pian/swordfighting genre, who would later go on to make other esteemed classics such as Dragon Gate Inn (1967) & A Touch of Zen (1971). The action sequences were directed by King Hu himself alongside of Yin-Chieh Han (who also worked on the Bruce Lee films Fists of Fury & the Chinese Connection) and Kin-Kwan Poon (who, many years later, would become the stunt coordinator for the Wong Kar Wai films Days of Being Wild & Fallen Angels).

Read an excellent article about Come Drink With Me, Beijing Opera & King Hu’s martial arts stylization here.

Read an essay on wuxia pian by David Bordwell here.

Read an interview with Cheng Pei Pei here.

Peep the trailer!


The Wasp & Orchid Martial Arts Choreography Film Series explores martial arts choreography in its most innovative and inspirational forms. Each screening highlights a particular martial arts style, action coordinator, or individual actor and actress, featuring cinema from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and beyond.