Rating:
Director: Jimmy Wang Yu
Producer: Wong Cheuk Hon
Writer: Jimmy Wang Yu
Director of Photography: Chiu Yao Hu
Cast: Jimmy Wang Yu, Kam Kong
| THE MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE Rating: Director: Jimmy Wang Yu Producer: Wong Cheuk Hon Writer: Jimmy Wang Yu Director of Photography: Chiu Yao Hu Cast: Jimmy Wang Yu, Kam Kong |
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Review by: Warren
Curry
5/25/02
Jimmy Wang Yu's 1974 martial arts classic The Master of the Flying Guillotine (aka The One Armed Boxer Vs. The Flying Guillotine -- the sequel to The One Armed Boxer) has been a cult favorite of mine for some years now. A few friends returned from a big comic book convention in San Diego with a VHS copy of the film in the mid-90's and I've been a huge fan ever since. I also managed to catch a midnight screening of the movie a while back and, unfortunately, the tattered print I saw that night must've been the same one used for the video transfer. Later, I read that only a few prints of the film were known to exist, and each had been through, apparently, thousands of brutal wars with faulty projectors the world over. With that said, enormous praise must be given to Pathfinder Pictures for undergoing the project of restoring the film (with the addition of new -- to me, anyway -- footage and subtitles), an effort that reportedly took seven years to complete, and releasing it back into the world. Although the print has been enormously cleaned up, it still contains plenty of scratches, some missing frames here and there and the occasional imperfections in color. But, when you're talking about a film as satisfying as The Master of the Flying Guillotine, who can really quibble over these minor issues?
Set in the 1700's, a narrator explains that the Ming Dynasty has recently given way to a new ruling force in China, The Ching Dynasty. Several supporters of the Ming Dynasty have turned into revolutionaries, including a kung fu master known as The One Armed Boxer (Wang Yu) and his school of disciples. Several months before (as we're shown in a flashback scene from The One Armed Boxer), The One Armed Boxer came out on the successful end of a deadly encounter with two Ching Dynasty assassins. News of this battle reaches Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Kam Kong), an older, blind martial arts expert, who happens to be the mentor of the two fallen warriors. Fung Sheng vows to avenge the deaths of his comrades, and with his murderous weapon, the flying guillotine (a round projectile object with retractable blades, attached to the end of a rope -- it's designed for portable decapitation, which makes it much more practical than your standard guillotine), he sets out to, "Kill every one armed man until he finds the boxer."
Fung Sheng's journey takes him to a martial arts tournament, where we're introduced to several colorful combatants, including not-to-be-trusted foreigners like the Thai Boxer, who performs a strange, ritualistic dance before fighting; an Indian fighter, who possesses a pair of arms that can extend to ridiculous lengths and then retract in the blink of an eye; and an ominous Japanese entrant, known as "Win Without Knives." Also, let us not forget the "monkey fighter," whose hyper, simian style proves remarkably ineffective against the daughter of the tournament's organizer. These foreigners (with the exception of the monkey man, who's not a foreigner) all help Fung Sheng in his mission to try to settle the score with The One Armed Boxer.
The Master of the Flying Guillotine, obviously, was an inspiration to video games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and is, at least, in some small way responsible for the career of Jean Claude Van Damme. The action is cartoonish and ridiculously exciting. The set up of the story is interesting in the way that, if you haven't seen the film's prequel, you would initially think that the good guy is the bad guy and vice versa. Fung Sheng's (who wears an article of clothing with figure on it that looks alarmingly like a swastika. I think this is actually a Japanese symbol of peace, but since he's Chinese and bent on wonton destruction, I'm stumped as to what it could really mean.) bad ass activities are played out to his own personal soundtrack, which sounds like a lost Nine Inch Nails riff, whenever he hits the screen.
The kung fu tournament is the showpiece of the movie and it's excellent. Most of the matches, which take a place on a big patch of dirt, turn into fights to the death and, at the conclusion of each bout, a guy runs onto the battle grounds with a rake/broom device used to sweep the dirt (?!?!). The sound FX are, of course, mixed at the highest volume possible and, to be honest, I prefer watching the film dubbed instead of subtitled. The laughable dubbed voices increase the camp factor by a 1000 and some of the dialogue loses that quality in this new presentation (such as in one scene when "Win Without Knives" makes his grand entrance into the tournament by incredibly leaping over a 50-foot high wall and The One Armed Boxer, in a casual deadpan, comments, "Nice jumping").
The Master of the Flying Guillotine lines up one thrilling scene after the next and
never takes its foot off of the gas pedal. Movies just don't get
much more fun or action packed than this, and it's about time
that the film's fan base grew into a considerably larger cult.
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