Despite its less than successful release, I include the film Big Trouble In Little China on my list of guilty pleasures: high on my list. It tells the story of Jack Burton, who helps his friend Wang Chi rescue Wang’s green-eyed fiancée from bandits in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They go into the mysterious underworld beneath Chinatown, where they face an ancient sorcerer named David Lo Pan, who requires a woman with green eyes to marry him in order to release him from a centuries-old curse. [Wikipedia]

David Lo Pan is certainly not the first nefarious villain from the mysterious and inscrutable land of ultra-long fingernails and wicked martial arts. You could even include Ming the Merciless in this batch of bad hombres. But isn’t it an easy cliché to engender a fictional villain with unknown magical powers from a distant and unknown country? Remember, Lamont Cranston didn’t learn the secrets to cloud men’s minds of the corner of Flatbush and Avenue J.

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