Shaolin Temple

Temple’s Fugit

Shaolin Temple
aka Shao Lin si
Hong Kong 1976
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so this movie is set during the real life events, from two years and right up to, the burning of the Shaolin Temple. As such it serves as an almost parallel story to Joseph Kuo’s Return Of The 18 Bronzemen (reviewed by me here) and also acts as a kind of prequel (but not quite) to the previous Shaw Brothers film included in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema label’s ShawScope Volume One blu ray set, Five Shaolin Masters (reviewed here). In that prior film, various students escaping the destruction of the temple by the government had survived to set up a revolution against the Quing Dynasty and, in the process, find out who the traitor in the temple was. This film literally finishes with a bunch of characters... some of them the same characters played by some of the same actors but in different stages of their lives from what I could tell (confusingly)... gathering at the end to kick start the revolution but, by this point they already know the various traitors in their midst (and have pretty much killed them all).

So this one starts off with actors like Sheng Fu and David Chiang playing more or less identical characters but a whole load of other good guy characters too... way too many to keep track of, almost. Following a credits sequence showing the usual ‘monks in training, performing their synchronised katas’, we get a party of people waiting for days in hard conditions outside the temple before they are finally let in to train... another cliché of the genre. Followed by another bunch of ‘all but one’ good guys from the previous dynasty’s army, who are also let in to train and hide. There’s yet another bunch who are then waiting outside to be let in for a number of days, whittled down to another three who are accepted. So, yeah, more characters to keep track of than in a Marvel Avengers movie but without the different costumes to help distinguish their personalities and traits visually.

The reason they are all let in is because the wise monk who runs the place knows, since they are teaching martial arts in a country which has banned the teaching of such things, that the government will come knocking with a big army to massacre them at some point in the near future. So he takes on all these new students so that, when the time comes, they will be able to spread the wisdom of the martial arts skills if some of them manage to escape.

That time comes after two years of various training montages which rely on the old steadfast kung fu movie ritual of preparing the students to be good at stupidly mundane tasks, while hampered with chains, weights or pointy obstacles, so that when the time comes for them to learn the various fighting styles, they will possess superhuman powers of concentration, agility and, literally, be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound (which they quite often do here).

After a gruelling trial for two of them in an area reminiscent of the one in the Bronzemen films but, with different challenges, the army finally strikes and the last battle is crosscut between about 12 different main characters with the occasional black and white flashback moment to the training sections to remind the audience which of the heros is finding which style appropriate to their personal combats. And, yeah, it’s quite entertaining stuff it has to be said, ‘tween all the bashing, high kicks, high jumps, summersaults, sound effects and needle dropped music tracks from other films or music libraries.

The director does some nice things with the compositions too, although his choice to show a distorting curve from the way the anamorphic lens is used in certain shots got on my nerves a little, truth be told. He made up for it in a brilliant scene where a high level traitor monk is trying to recruit the ‘almost but not quite until this particular scene’ other bad guy into working for him on behalf of the Quing government. The particular shot is using some bars in the room from which the camera is placed, with those bars creating vertical slats to separate the screen into five or six thin, vertical sections. And of course, each of the two characters is speaking from a different visual strip but, as the aforementioned bad guy decides to turn traitor properly and throw in with ‘bad monk guy’, he walks across the screen to join him in the same vertical segment. So we literally see the character joining up with the other guy underpinned with a visual metaphor of this act on screen. Lovely stuff.

Other than that kind of thing happening, Shaolin Temple is all good, energetic fighting stuff mixed with some nice work building up the personalities and sympathies of some of the characters and it’s pretty entertaining, it has to be said. There is a kind of weird sequence of sub sections where a faceless (she has her back to us at all times) female monk trains two of the ex-army heroes and then just drops out of the narrative entirely. I think this is because she, like a few off hand one liners about other events going on at the same time, is representing certain famous historical Chinese people who, I have to admit, I have no knowledge of. But it doesn’t really matter... I’m happy to be watching these guys kicking and punching their way noisily through another furious movie so, yeah, I don’t really question the stuff which doesn’t make much sense, to be honest.