Crippled Avengers

People With Physical
Disabilities Assemble

Crippled Avengers
aka
Return Of The
Five Deadly Venoms
aka Can que
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so this one’s quite fun. Crippled Avengers is the 10th of the 12 films featured in Arrow’s generous but costly ShawScope Volume One Blu Ray box set and, for a while in the US, it was released under the title Return Of The Five Deadly Venoms and marketed as a sequel to The Five Venoms (reviewed by me here). All I can say to that is... there’s absolutely no story connection with the former film at all. The only minor bit of glue attempting to hold that marketing campaign gimmick together is that five of the lead actors here also starred in the former movie.

This film deals with Kuan Tai Chen as Black Tiger Dao Tian-Du and it’s hard to tell if you should be rooting for his character or not. At the start of the film, three avenging heroes seeking justice for some misdeed come to slay him at Black Tiger Manor but, initially settle for cutting the legs off his wife (killing her in the process) and chopping the arms off his young son. If Dao Tian-Du wasn’t completely evil then, he certainly is after dispatching the three with his martial arts skills. Over a period of years he creates and finally perfects special iron arms for his now grown son, which are bizarrely flexible in their science defying way and can also shoot darts out the fingers. Hey, he can even shoot the fists out on extenders and so his son is, somewhat, turned into Inspector Gadget. Except, he’s a ‘deadly martial arts, angry at the world Gadget’ who, with his father, hold the local district under a reign of fear, as they render any challengers and upstarts who try to deal with them, pretty useless, crippling them so they have to live with their horrible disability the way that... well let’s call him Iron Arms... had to live with no arms.

So, long story short, various upstarts who make up the four title heroes of this film, all come a cropper at the hands of this iron handed son. One is rendered blind when he has his eyes poked out by those steely digits in a sequence where, unless Arrow are being dishonest with the uncut status of these works, the director inserts a half a second or so of red to try and enhance the impact of the moment, much like Hitchcock had a bunch of red frame cut into the villain’s suicide scene in Spellbound. Another one is rendered deaf and mute while a third has his legs chopped off. A fourth one, a stranger who tries to avenge these three, has his head partially crushed and is left, with his martial arts skills in tact but, yeah, pretty much a complete idiot as he mentally regresses to childish ways. The three others manage to get him back to his master in another region and then all four are trained up in the ways of Kung Fu for three years, so they can go back and exact revenge on Dao Tian-Du, his son and his gang of skilled kung fu experts.

So, for example, the blinded man learns how to extend his other senses such as hearing and, in essence, becomes a lethal, blind martial artist, just like the hero of all those Zatoichi movies. And flexible iron legs are made for the legless man, as he becomes an expert in various acrobatic moves such as jumping through small steel rings and weaponising them like a lethal hula hoop.

And, yeah, it all leads to the inevitable showdown with various factions of the main villains’ men in some spectacular displays of kung fu fighting which, despite the US marketing, make this a much more watchable and entertaining movie than The Five Venoms, for sure. One of the villains even has a weapon called a ‘meteor hammer’ which, in actual fact, is just a big metal ball on a chain and it’s obviously the influence on the weapon of choice for Gogo Yubari’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One.

With one of the avenging heroes acting like a complete childish idiot and the mute/deaf guy being very enthusiastic and acting like a kung fu version of Harpo Marx... or at least Nick Cravat... the film is full of characters just fooling around and performing zany but, admirably energetic and skilled, acrobatics. This is mixed with some fairly ballet-like but brutal kung fu scenes which arent afraid to ramp up the goriness at certain points. And all matched with the director’s penchant for fast zooms to hone in on details and what looks like some fairly overly used, recycled but still pretty effective sets.

There seems to be a bit of needle drop in terms of the score and there are certainly some De Wolf library cues at any rate, three of which are included on the second of Arrow’s bonus soundtrack CD compilation discs bundled in with this lovely presentation box. And, really, there’s not much more to say about Crippled Avengers other than, I had a pretty good time with this one and it’s certainly one of the better and more physically spectacular of the films included in this set.

The Five Venoms

Spied A Man
Fighting Venom

The Five Venoms
aka Five Deadly Venoms
aka Wu du
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Ninth up in the recent(ish) Arrow films ShawScope Volume 1 boxed edition is The Five Deadly Venoms and it’s one of just two of the films presented here which I had already seen. The last time I watched it was on my old Region 3 Celestial pictures DVD under the title which I personally think it’s still more well known as, Five Deadly Venoms. I think I quite liked it the first time I saw it but, I have to say, catching up with it again now I feel it drags quite considerably compared to many of the other films in this set.

This one starts of with an old master trying to cure himself of some unspecified illness by boiling himself in a large cauldron of medicine. He is alone in his house with his young student. However, that particular house he is the master of is the... drumroll... House Of The Five Venoms. The young student he has taken on recently is technically the sixth venom but, he is not fully trained up in martial arts yet. The old master is a villain and the Venoms have committed unspecified evils against martial artists over the years as they are ‘anti-martial arts’. All have since gone into the world under special aliases and continue to do things that some may find could be be considered regrettable.

And then we are shown each of the five venoms in training scenarios practicing martial arts as the master breaks down their special skills to the kid. Which, excuse me, makes absolutely no sense since they are an organisation opposed to martial arts but, who am I to argue with the ways of kung fu. So, in the training sessions, each of the five venoms wears an elabourately painted face mask that makes each one look like a member of rock group KISS. The only real difference being that each has the animal of his special skill stuck as a kind of 3D relief on the mask on the forehead (don’t worry folks... it looks sillier than it sounds).

So we have Thousand Hands... who practices the Centipede Style and can move his hands around very fast to make it appear he has lots of hands (kind of). We see him smashing lots of plates to somehow demonstrate this. We have Snake Spirit, who does Snake Style... his hands imitating the style of the head and tail of the snake (originally this was supposed to be a female character in the original script). I don’t think they needed to explain that one to me too much, I would say since, later in the movie, whenever he fights, his hands make hissing, snakey noises for emphasis.  We also have three more venoms practicing in Scorpion Style, Gecko Style and Toad Style. Yeah, don’t ask.

Anyway, the old master is repentant of running a house of evil masters and so he knows that an old man living in a town with the secret of the treasure of the five venoms, will be under threat from these five. He says that youngster venom number six would be no match for any of these guys but if he teams up with any of them who may show that they still have a sense of righteousness, if he can find them, he will be able to defeat the others and then get the secret of where the treasure is, so it can be used for charitable purposes. The old master then dies, leaving his new ward with his noble mission.

So we have a backdrop of a small town with a police force but the five venoms, some known to the audience and some not but, certainly, at this stage, unknown to each other (since none of them knows what each looks like or what name they have taken) are also in town. Two of them murder the old man and his servants but don’t get the location. The mysterious scorpion, whose identity remains hidden but... well... I worked out which one it was from very early on in the film, over an hour before he reveals himself... does have enough intelligence to discover where the treasure map is hidden. Then, when people who are mostly hidden venoms get implicated in the murder, he starts playing people off against other to whittle down the number of surviving venoms Meanwhile, the local police and magistrate, who are taking things very seriously... also have more than a couple of the venoms hiding within the system (yeah, saw through those right away too). In fact, the police take things very seriously indeed and I think modern policing could learn from this method. The officers are told they have ten days to solve the case. The first outstanding day where the case is not solved they will get ten strokes of the cane and the second day, twenty strokes and so on. If only Cressida Dick could have employed these same methods, she may well have had a more efficient police force and still be in charge of them today, I suspect.

There’s not much more to the story than that but I would say that the film is big on mystery, conspiracy and intrigue and little on actual action. There are a few small set pieces including the inevitable fight at the end between four surviving scorpions and the young novice (who has teamed up with one of them) and the action is good, especially the wirework which allows two of the actors to suddenly jump up and stand on a wall at right angles to everybody else like Spider-Man without showing the faintest trace of the wire work. So this stuff is very well done but... there’s just not enough of it to maintain any kind of pace for the movie and it feels a little uneven in that way. There are also some pretty mean spirited torture scenes in the movie which I could have done without.

So yeah, that’s my short take on The Five Venoms and, although the film is highly revered by many, I still can’t see what all the fuss is about on this one and personally I wouldn’t recommend it as a jumping on point for Shaw Brothers. Certainly not the best of the films in this set but still fairly entertaining if you’re not expecting too much from it, I would say.

Chinatown Kid

Frisco Fu Fighters

Chinatown Kid
aka Tang ren jie xiao zi
Hong Kong 1977
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one.

Chinatown Kid is the eighth of the films presented in Volume One of Arrow Films ShawScope Blu Ray boxed edition and, like all but a couple of the films included in this box, it’s a first time watch from me. There are two very tonally different versions of the film presented here, the slightly happier ending 90 minute version and the darker, more shades of gray original cut, lasting almost two hours and with a much less optimistic ending (if either ending could said to be optimistic).

The film follows two characters, the primary being main lead Sheng Fu as Tan Tung. Now, I’ve seen Sheng Fu in a number of films in this set and I’ve quite warmed to his mischievous on screen personality and Beatles style mop top... so I was sad to learn, in one of the extras presented here that, at the height of his career and happily married to singing sensation Jenny (who also co-stars in Chinatown Kid), he died in a car crash at the age of 28, in the same period as he was filming The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter... a film I’ve not seen as yet but, when I watch it, if I notice his character suddenly dropping out of the narrative, well, at least I now know the reason why.

This film follows him getting in trouble in Hong Kong by basically helping somebody out and then having to exit the country hastily, after he is framed for drug possession and the police are after him. He flees Hong Kong, heading for a destination that we also see his co-star Chien Sun as Yang Chien-wen also go to.  Yang comes from a completely different class background, having won a scholarship to study abroad. So they both pitch up in San Francisco, where cinema marquees for such famous pornographic films as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones act as a perfect time capsule of the era.

The two co-stars meet and get illegal immigrant jobs in a restaurant but when Tan, who is very much the focus of the film, keeps getting into trouble defending people using his Kung Fu skills... he eventually finds himself out of work and out on the streets. However, the combination of his blind naivete and wanting to help people out means he’s suddenly working for one of the king pin bosses of Chinatown, going from rags to extreme riches in a matter of weeks. However, when he finds out his boss is actively involved in drug dealing, he then sets out to destroy that trade. It’s lots of ‘to’ing and ‘fro’ing through a moral minefield as Tan constantly strives to do the right thing and is constantly getting himself into more trouble every time he falls into the trap of helping people. Indeed, as the movie goes on, various people who he’s helped, then reject his friendship and he even finds himself at odds with Yang after a while.

The film has it’s fair share of fight scenes where Sheng Fu gets to show off his formidable martial arts skills, facing off against some opponents who seem to be almost as good as him. Occasionally, like in the big fight at the end of the picture, he fights side by side with Chien Sun, when Chien’s character finally understands just how Tan has been secretly helping him... by funding his studies with his fat cat gangster money.

And it’s an interesting film regarding the morality of the characters portrayed. In terms of the various gangland factions throughout the movie, there are no good guys. Everyone is either the ‘bad guy’ or the ‘not quite as bad guy’ but, of course, by the end of the film, even the slightly less sinister gang turns out to be just another bunch of ruthless criminals. The only real innocents in the movie are the two male leads... Tan due to his ignorance, naivete and loyalty to people and Yang, out of a sense of wanting to keep up with his studies (which leads him to drugs to stay awake to study after a long shift at work). And, as I said, it’s a nice time capsule movie too... I mean, how many films are there where the corrupted, innocent hero gets involved with the wrong people due to his desire to own a digital watch? Indeed, it’s a sign of the times and also a nice comment on the character that, when he is dying from his wound in the final scene (he’s just arrested in the shorter version), he tries to give Yang his digital watch as an ultimate symbol of their friendship.

And that’s me done on Chinatown Kid. It’s refreshing to see a Kung Fu filled Shaw Brothers movie actually set in times contemporary to when it was made. I mean, okay, The Mighty Peking Man (reviewed here) was, for sure but... yeah... that wasn’t a martial arts movie. I can see how pictures like this might have influenced the next generation of film directors and certainly, for instance, John Woo... who was an assistant director at Shaw Brothers in the late 1960s. So yeah, a funky score (excluding the terrible title song at the start, which Tan is forever quoting the lyrics from throughout the movie) of needle dropped cues from the De Wolf library, a chunk of which are included on one of the two accompanying soundtrack albums in Arrows mighty ShawScope Volume One box set and, even a dagger disguised as a belt buckle... make this a lively and fun watch. Worth a look.

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.

Five Shaolin Masters

The Return
Of The Quing

Five Shaolin Masters
aka Five Masters Of Death
aka Shao Lin wu zu
Hong Kong/Taiwan 1974
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so it’s fortunate that I recently watched the Taiwanese movie Return Of The 18 Bronzemen (reviewed here), from the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Cinematic Vengeance box set, because it gives me a little historical context for what is yet another loose fabrication of one of many various tales inspired by real life events. At the end of that curious movie, with its equally bizarre attempt at a resolution, the main antagonist/protagonist of the Quing Empire sent his troops to burn down the Shaolin Temple. This film, the third in Arrow’s Shawscope Volume 1 Blu Ray box set and called Five Shaolin Masters, deals with the aftermath as seen by five surviving students of the temple, as each of the five get into fights with villains as the credits introduce us to each actor and character in turn. As a result of this, the credits take about a quarter of an hour to get through but this is not unusual and I’m pretty sure one of my old Region 3 Celestial Pictures DVDs, I think it might have been one of the Water Margin movies made prior to the Japanese turning it into a TV show, has the credits constantly going throughout most of the movie as each character and actor is introduced when they enter the narrative.

Okay, so the main one of the five is played by David Chiang and, also, we have Sheng Fu as the youngster upstart of the five who is almost, but not quite, serving the same kind of role as Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai (and certainly Horst Buchholz from the remake of that film called The Magnificent Seven). Anyway, the five of them survive the burning and evade their enemies for now but, they are on the run from the Quing government. So they split up and each find allies and rebels, using their secret Shaolin hand gestures which will identify people sympathetic to their cause. They also have to sniff out the ‘traitor’ who was a spy in their midst for the Quing mob.

And, yeah, it’s a strong movie with a heck of a lot of action and some of the more energetic fight scenes I’ve seen in a Shaw Brothers picture... certainly holding their own against the Taiwanese pictures I’d seen recently, it has to be said. Of course, being as it’s a Shaw Brothers production, it looks pretty good (even if I did recognise some of the sets and locations from others of their movies) and, even though the story is beyond simplistic, there’s just more of it and there’s time spent rounding out the characters and concentrating on their dialogue.

There’s also the normal distraction of the soundtrack being obviously borrowed from a whole host of other films. Now, as it happens, I couldn’t recognise any of the scores here but I certainly know enough to recognise I was listening to needle drops from Italian soundtracks. Arrow’s wonderful accompanying booklet put me straight to the films being used and they certainly are Italian scores, by the likes of Piccioni and Rustichelli but, I’m glad to say I’d not seen the particular films in question (which makes me feel a little better about not being able to identify the scores, for sure).

By the end of the movie, the five heroes decide to return to the ruins of their former Shaolin Temple and train hard in fighting techniques they believe will help them to defeat the specialist fighting styles of the various main heavies who are pursuing them. So one practices with a thing he calls a chain whip for example... while another starts practicing pole fighting techniques to deal with a bad guy who’s speciality is an axe on a chain (which he less than subtly, when he is de-chained, converts into an axe on a stick so he can carry on with the lethal duel). One guy, in order to defy the striking blows of one of the opponents, practices a kind of tumbler, ground fighting technique which, although partially effective, looks quite silly on the extended training montage we see cross cut  together of the five as they spend a year training at their new, advanced fighting styles. In fact, when this guy starts rolling around on the ground, well... all I will say is that, in my head, Ollie & Jerry were singing There’s No Stopping Us to accompany the visuals.

And the final fight, where the five stand against an army of around eight to ten of their combined enemies, which keeps cross cutting from one protagonist to another, takes up pretty much the last 20 minutes of the movie. And, contrary to how things might have ended in a Western made movie of that particular time period, not all of the five heroes make it out of the encounter alive... I’ll say that much.

And now that I have said that much, I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t really got that much else to say about Five Shaolin Masters. Other than that it’s hugely entertaining and one of the more engaging of the Shaw Brothers produced movies I’ve seen over the years. Definitely something to recommend if you are into these kinds of kung fu movies and I’m definitely looking forward to the next film in the set, for sure.

The Boxer From Shantung

Everybody Was
Shantung Fight Win

The Boxer
From Shantung
aka Ma Yong Zhen
Hong Kong 1972
Directed by Cheh Chang & Hsueh-Li Pao
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers aplenty.

Another Shaw Production then... as the end credits often said.

The Boxer From Shantung is another blistering classic which I’ve not seen before but, it’s a pretty good slice of action mayhem, it has to be said. Kuan Tai Chen, in his acting debut, plays real life character Ma Yongzhen... a person who has been portrayed a lot of times in various movies (some of which I’ll someday get to see, I’m sure)... although I understand the story is only very loosely based on him, which probably differs from production to production.

In this one, Ma is a drifter who has left Shantung with his brother (or possibly best friend, depends what they mean by ‘brother’ in these kinds of movies) to try and find gainful employment in Shanghai, only to be living the life of a tramp, struggling to find what work he can. He does, however, have practically unbeatable Kung Fu skills which he’s somehow managed to acquire over the years (notice I didn’t mention anything about boxing skills again... I don’t want to harp on about it but this is yet another Shaw Brothers movie that mentions a boxer without actually having one... I’m guessing the concept of a boxer is completely different in Hong Kong).

During the course of the first 20 minutes or so, Ma manages to demonstrate his kung fu skills when he has an altercation with one of the local gang bosses and, when he comes to blows with said boss, the two come out of it having won a mutual respect for each other. However, Ma takes no rewards for any of the favours he does for people (including becoming embroiled in a fight at a local tea house where he meets a woman who takes his romantic interest, sadly unfulfilled due to the strange arc the story takes) and just wants to make his own way... for a little while at least. Once again my Western thinking brain may be the problem here but the story now goes in a completely different direction to that which I thought it would take. That being said, it certainly reminds me of the kind of bleak, ‘crime sometimes pays up until a point’ US gangster movies of the 1930s starring the likes of Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, to be sure.

After a while, following a big ‘knock him down and win twenty dollars’ fight with a massive Italian fighter (which took 5 days to shoot), he doesn’t turn down the reward of owning a small part of the local territory... nor the protection racket money it brings in. It isn’t long before he’s well on his way up as a local gangster but, as is evidenced by his method, he doesn’t let his men beat anyone up for money as he remembers what it’s like to be poor so... yeah... he’s kind of the good guy gangster. However, a much worse mobster is trying to take over all of Shanghai and when he kills the other gangster that Ma looked up to at the start of the movie, things get real. And when I say real, I mean far from real but very athletic with bloody kung fu fighting featuring bashing fists, harbinger hatchets of bloody carnage and slicing, wooshy daggers that make the foley a joy to listen to.

It’s nicely shot too, including some nice colour palettes which shift to different tonal variations and some interesting camerawork, some of which uses a movement, followed by a zoom in on a detail... followed by a movement off from that zoomed location to go pick up another highlight of a scene. It’s edited in a way that it all makes sense and there’s some nice close ups of twitchy, angried up faces held for long periods as anti-heroes and villains trade scowls and work their facial muscles due to, I suspect, somebody watching far too many Leone movies.

Then there’s the final showdown in a tea house which took another ten days to shoot (out of a gruelling 30 day schedule where one director shot day scenes and the other the night scenes). The fight starts off with Ma, who hasn’t got a scratch on him in any fight preceeding this one, immediately taking an axe to his guts, which he leaves in there for half the fight (which takes up most of the last half an hour of the film... which Arrow and Celestial Pictures between them have thankfully made available in its original two and a quarter hour length cut). And yes, he still manages to take on 50 or more combatants and kill them all before perishing himself, after doing his best Samson and Delilah impression and literally smashing through a column to bring the floor above him down, levelling up the playing field to give him access to the last in a long, hierarchical chain of increasingly important villains.

And it’s quite obvious Tarantino must have watched this film quite a bit because, yeah, it’s very similar in both style and impact to his infamous House Of Blue Leaves sequence from the end of Kill Bill Volume One. That being said, compared to the fighting scenes in the eight Taiwanese Kung Fu movies in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Cinematic Vengeance boxed set I watched earlier last year, the fights I’m seeing in the Shaw Brothers movies, while immaculately edited and sporting high production values... do seem a bit low energy and slower paced to the ones I’ve seen in the Joseph Kuo movies.

However, the fights in this one are still quite brutal bloody ballets of kinetic energy and are more than entertaining for what they are. The Boxer From Shantung is an absolutely brilliant chop socky movie which was extremely successful (there were a fair few bootleg sequels knocked out by other companies very quickly, by the sounds of it) and certainly influential. I really enjoyed this one and am looking forward to exploring some more films from the excellent ShawScope Volume One box set from Arrow soon. This is good stuff.