Saturday night’s all right for fightin’ as Jimmy Wang Yu plays a one-armed warrior with a problem (again!)…
Staying in tonight? Nothing on telly? Get the beers and takeaway in and invite the mates round, cos this is entertainment all the way…
Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Kang Kam) is the Master of the Flying Guillotine, an emissary of the ruling Manchurian government, ridding China of it’s remaining Ming dynasty sympathisers and rebels while disguised as a Buddhist monk. (Read invading Manchu versus indigenous Han Chinese – guess whose side we’re on!) Though blind, Fung is deadly accurate, ripping stone heads of posts with ease, and woe betide any chickens that get in the way! And Fung wants revenge on the One Armed Boxer who dispatched his disciples. In a rather typical fashion for movies of this time the scene has been set. Roll titles…
Writer, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu returns to his role as the One Armed Boxer and the tournament genre that film inspired. A neat excuse for stringing fight sequences together without having to even bother about a plot, the format became popular in the seventies. The most famous example being Enter The Dragon, before Ching Sui Tung turned it on it’s head with Duel to the Death.
Here the local Eagle Claws school are holding the tournament, gathering contestants from all around Asia to prove who truly is the best. (That old chestnut!) The One Armed Boxer, however, would rather the pupils from his school go along to watch. Wang Yu uses this pretext to gather some of the most quirky contenders for the match. There’s the barefoot Thai who can kick stone blocks apart, the Indian yoga expert who can stretch his arms, and the Japanese Lone Wolf style character ‘Win Without A Knife’ Yakuma – a bald faced lair! All of whom get to show off their styles in extremely well executed fight scenes, choreographed by Lau Ka-liang and Lau Kar-wing – who also plays the yoga master.
Of course, it’s not too long till the Master of the Flying Guillotine turns up to spoil everything. The tournament in chaos, the leader of the Eagle Claws school having fallen foul of the guillotine himself, the One Armed Boxer sets about disbanding his school and hiding his pupils so they don’t come to any harm. Now he must face not just the Master, but also the foreign contenders who are also government agents, one by one. (Read foreigners = bad.) In true George Peppard A-Team style our man has a plan to give him the advantage. But will it be enough? What do you think?
It was a difficult time in Hong Kong cinema, little could fill the gap left by Bruce Lee’s death – though many tried simply by copying him. A star long before Bruce overshadowed him, Wang Yu benefits his character greatly by not following the trend at the time to make the hero in the Fist of Fury mould, purely intent on revenge. Instead he is played as rather a benign character, rarely showing his marital arts prowess – except when he proves he can walk on the ceiling without the need of a Lionel Ritchie soundtrack – until the end. Wang Yu puts enough of a spin on those old cliches to lift this above most of the contemporary martial art movies of the time.
A thoroughly enjoyable movie… so crack open the beers!
DVD details
Distributor: Pathfinder Home Entertainment (US)
Pathfinder Pictures have done a great job of restoring this film to it's former, unedited glory, though the source material is still patchy in places.
Extras include a still gallery and several trailers. But beware of the audio commentary - two film critics take us through the kind of anal, pedantic analysis that will have you searching for that area of wet paint!
