King Boxer/5 Fingers of Death

Chao Handy

King Boxer
aka Five Fingers of Death
aka Tian xia di yi quan
Hong Kong 1972
Directed by Chang-hwa Jeong
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, full confession time. I’ve not seen that many Shaw Brothers movies over the years. Literally... probably less than 25 I would guess. So Arrow’s Blu Ray set, ShawScope Volume 1, was definitely something I wanted to check out, containing 12 Shaw Brothers classics (10 of which I don’t think I’ve seen). What I also didn’t know was that this first film in the set, King Boxer, starring Lieh Lo as the main, put upon protagonist Chao, is actually the film more commonly known in Western circles as Five Fingers Of Death and, honestly, that seems to be a better fit for a title since, as far as I could make out, there’s no actual boxing in this movie.

The plot is simply the old feuding Martial Arts schools entering a fighting competition, with one villanous school breaking all the rules, killing lots of people and generally trying to take out the potential champions of their rival before the event goes ahead... so they can proclaim their martial arts skills the greatest in the region. Chao is one such student at the school, who has a proper fleshed out background and he’s not alone in this, rather impressive slice of Shaw Brothers action cinema. There are a whole bunch of main protagonists and antagonists, each explored and built up in their own right. We even have a somewhat traitorous ‘good guy’ and a turncoat ‘bad guy feels ashamed and helps the hero’ also thrown into the mix, to add to the complexity of the story. Not to mention two women who both have eyes for Lo’s often miserable and angry looking Chao. Fighting, treachery, training montages and enthusiastic name calling ensues, with bloody consequences to both sides as the film progresses.

Asides from that, though, it also popped me right out of my seat when the opening credits used the music from old TV show Ironside needle-dropped into it. Now wait a minute, I thought to myself, is this where Tarantino nicked the idea of having his heroine Beatrix, in Kill Bill, hear the opening siren call of the Ironside theme every time she got worked up to go into battle, from? Sure enough, once our hero is handed down the Iron Fist Technique Manual from the sensei who is training him and mastered the moves for himself, the Ironside sirens play and he gets to be even more moodier looking than his usual expressions of either shame, anger or intense concentration. So, yeah, it’s no secret that Tarantino is, to put it politely, post modernistic in his storytelling.

Actually, I was brought to attention by the soundtrack quite a lot as there is a lot of needle dropped music in it. For instance, there are at least two cues from John Barry’s Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) in this and, also, a couple of instances of very short snippets from his Thunderball score too, if I’m not much mistaken (reviewed here). And later, in a few scenes but especially when one of Chao’s ‘waiting women’ is daydreaming and literally imagining the two of them running into each other's arms in an open field (no, really!), we get some of Piccioni’s score from Camille 2000 (reviewed here) suddenly dropped into the audio mix... which makes for quite an unintentionally hilariously moment I can tell you.

And it’s a sleek looking product reflecting Shaw Brothers budgets, I imagine. I saw eight kung fu films made in Taiwan shortly before I watched this one and the Shaw Brothers certainly win out in terms of the productions values and also story coherence I would say. That being said, I thought the Joseph Kuo films I saw in Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s Cinematic Vengeance set had a lot more energy and spectacle in their various fight scenes. Everything looked a lot more rigorous and enthusiastic, it seems to me.

That being said, the fights in this are not to be sneezed at either. They certainly seem better edited and, while they don’t show the various combatants reacting to their injuries as much during the fights, the Shaw Brothers have also amped up the goriness factor. There’s a scene for instance, where the traitorous good guy is punished for failure by a bad guy in a fight when, with both opponents in mid air, the bad guy plucks the other's eyes out. All during the film we’ve seen him playing with a couple of metal balls in his hands like Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny and it’s at this point, as the villain opens one of his hands to reveal the other guy's eyeballs before dropping them to the floor, one realises the whole idiosyncracy of the character was foreshadowing this moment. In a later scene, before getting killed himself, the victim goes all Zatoichi and, turning the lights out on the man who deprived him of his sight, pulls out the other guy's eyeballs when he can’t see him. There certainly isn’t a dry eye in the house at this point, I can tell you.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the movie though, accompanied by that Pavlovian use of the Ironside theme to build audience anticipation of the fact that someone’s going to get a good kicking, is the heroe's pair of... um... well his ten fingers of death. At one point in the movie, fearing his deadly hands, the villains tie him to a tree and destroy his hands with sticks, smashing them to smithereens and he is seen, as in the aftermath of the ‘horses on hands’ scene in the very first Django movie, to be contemplating his ruined fingers just like Franco Nero did in the aforementioned spaghetti western. However, just like Nero and every other hero who ever took a beating before the final reel of a picture, he regains the power of his hands, toughens them up again and once more uses them as lethal weapons. And it’s at this point that, whenever the sirens go off in his head, his palms glow an eerie red, their deathly powers shining like an aura of blood before he clenches his fists and bashes the bad guys up.

Arrow’s Blu Ray, which looks like it’s been ported over from a Celestial Pictures transfer (I used to buy the old Region 3 Celestial Pictures DVDs from places like Soho back in the day), is absolutely brilliant apart from in one fight scene where the quality suddenly drops sharply... but I suspect that’s more to do with the original footage on the negative rather than a transfer issue. There are also a wealth of extras including the first of a three part documentary (which I assume will be continued on other discs in this set) which explores Kung Fu cinema and also its later influence on Hollywood. So, yeah, King Boxer aka Five Fingers Of Death, is a vastly entertaining movie and I’d certainly recommend this one to afficionados of martial arts movies, for sure.