“Black Storm” Poster
When China’s now ubiquitous web-movie scene first appeared in the mid-2010’s, it would be a hard sell to believe that such productions would eventually lead to a resurgence of the contemporary setting martial arts movie. Back then they mostly consisted of cheap looking wuxia movies and even cheaper monster flicks, however it was arguably 2021’s Fight Against Evil that made fans of HK style action sit up and take notice. The resurgence is popularly attributed to Qin Pengfei, a former wushu practitioner who entered the film industry in 2005 as a stuntman. In 2019 he made the transition to director, and while Fight Against Evil was only his third movie, it proved to be a winning combination. Said combination was the casting of former child actor Xie Miao as a determined cop, and villains involved in the kind of criminal activity that was doing the rounds on the news at the time of release – in this case, an illegal online gambling syndicate.
In 2024 Pengfei would enlist another former child actor known for their kung-fu talents in the form of Ashton Chen, casting him as the lead in the period kung-fu movie The Drunken Prodigy. Things move fast in the web-movie world though, so in the same year it seems Pengfei realised that his sweet spot is in more contemporary surroundings. If the theory is true, then you could say that if Xie Miao got his time to shine in Fight Against Evil (which has since spawned 2 sequels), Chen got his equivalent outing with Black Storm. Same template – he plays a morally Continue reading
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