Taking Tiger Mountain (1983)

(On Cable TV, November 2021) Well, that’s a weird one. TCM Underground can be pedestrian and repetitive at times, but once every so often it comes up with a genuine curio, and that’s how to best interpret Taking Tiger Mountain. Taking the experimental film clichés (black-and-white grainy film, constant voiceovers, dystopian world, bizarre plotting, and clunky integration of wider concerns over plot) to their fullest extent, it’s a film that loosely tells us about a feminist militant cell’s attempt to brainwash a student (a young Bill Paxton, in his film debut) to kill the minister of prostitution. It’s all grim, with barely understandable material meant to surprise as much as to tell a story. Bizarrely, it’s an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs story named “The Blade Runner,” linking it to that other film in surprising ways. I can’t say that I liked Taking Tiger Mountain — it’s a kind of filmmaking I find intermittently interesting for playing with the grammar of film, but quickly exasperating — but it’s certainly different, and well-worth taking out of mothballs once in a while to expand the usual definition of what a science fiction film was circa 1983.