Challenge Of The Masters

One Kick Pony

Challenge Of The Masters
aka Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong
Hong Kong 1976
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so the sixth entry in the wonderful Arrow Blu Ray box set ShawScope Volume One is Challenge Of The Masters and it’s a pretty good, fairly simple movie. It starts off with a quite striking opening title sequence with Kuan Tai Chen as Master Lu Ah Tsai and a young Chia-Hui Liu (aka Gordon Liu) as the teenaged version of famous Chinese martial artist Huang Fei Hung... going through various training routines on a white background with each other. Liu’s various poses of energetic kung fu are used as movements to herald in the on-screen credits as the two dance around against big Chinese letter forms, the meaning of which are sadly untranslated on the subtitles... perhaps they make up the title of the movie.

Gordon Liu, of course, has had a very long career and, to the person on the street in the Western world he would perhaps be best known (though not by name, I suspect) as the person who played both Johnny Mo, the bald headed leader of The Crazy 88 in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One and Pai Mei in Kill Bill Volume Two (a character he’d fought against a few times, I believe, in various films over the years). The person he’s playing here, Huang Fei Hung, in a film which starts off at the Pai Competition in the Year Of The Wood Rat, before he learned martial arts (that’s what this story is about) has possibly been played on film more than any other character. Indeed, Kwan Tak-hing apparently played him at least 77 times in the years between 1949 and 1981. Even some of the music needle dropped into this Shaw Brothers production is a theme associated with the character from some of these films and it was apparently written into the score of one of Jet Li’s versions of the character in Once Upon A Time In China (which I guess I need to grab hold of and watch at some point now).

The film itself is, as I said, very simple in its plot. It revolves around a martial arts competition where people scrabble for Pai’s (which  in this film take the form of a bunch of scrolls) fired out from fireworks and whoever’s team take one or more home, shows that they are good at martial arts (if I’m understanding this rugger scrum of a tournament correctly). Hung’s dad will not teach him martial arts but, after he accidentally causes one of his fellow pupils to be injured ,saving him from a villanous kung fu school who pick fights with them and don’t want them to have any Pai’s, his father’s former master, Lu Ah Tsai, takes him on and trains him up for a couple of years. 

Meanwhile, another friend of the family, a police officer who has come to the town to find a murderous thief, finds said thief being sheltered by the rival gang. The thief is a master of the ‘sharp kick’ deadly kung fu technique and, with the assistance of his lethal, metal toe caps, he kung fu kicks the officer to death. Thus more motivation is built for Hung to finish his training so he can take on the villain (who is played here by the film’s director Chia-Liang Liu) and then compete for Pai’s in the next tournament. All goes to plan and things play out the way you would expect them to, with Hung mastering the fighting arts but also the arts of diplomacy and compassion, to end up with the two fighting schools reaching a peaceful co-existence together.

And, yeah, it’s the usual thing of watching human dynamo’s leaping, punching and kicking on screen at a fairly fast pace and its all good fun. Interestingly, the master teaches Hung using the style of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (which is another film I need to get hold of at some point), with the old ‘tracing a circle around increasingly diminishing sizes of easily breakable China to develop the reflexes’ ploy and, at one point, uses one of the Wooden Men of Shaolin Alley fighting pole swinging machines, which he names as such as coming from the Shaolin Temple (indeed, this is presumably one of the same props from the 1976 film Shaolin Temple from Shaw Brothers, reviewed by me here).

As usual, asides from the obvious needle drop issues, the film has fairly high production values and the quick shooting schedules and restraints are not in evidence in the film on a visual level for the audience to notice... it looks great. Of interest to me was the fact that one of the characters uses a transparent Sesame Seed oil to make himself slippery in a bid to be able to squelch out from the grasp of his opponents in the Pai contest. I can only assume that this may be the origin/inspiration behind the oiled up fight featuring Jason Statham in the first of The Transporter movies.

So yeah, Challenge Of The Masters is pretty much business as usual for the Shaw Brothers in that it’s a tightly paced mix of kung fu action, humbling training exercises and Eastern philosophy leading to forgiveness and peace over violence. In other words, an entertaining production which is nicely put together. Another winner in my book.