Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine begins with a monkey-owning blind old man learning that his two disciples have been killed by the One-Armed Boxer. This makes him mad, so he jumps out of his house — through the roof, mind you — burns it to the ground and grabs his flying guillotine, that blasted basket-and-blades contraption that tears heads clean from their bodies.
The blind man goes in search of each and every one-armed man he comes across, and then promptly beheads them. As a result, there’s an absurd amount of three-limbed fellas in this epic, which is simply one of the best martial-arts films ever.
Wang Yu, however, is the one the blind guy is, um, looking for. He’s a kung fu teacher who can walk on walls and ceilings. They almost meet up at a kung fu tournament where all sorts of miscreants battle each other to the death, including an Indian man with long, retractable arms like Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four!
When Wang Yu and the blind man do meet, it’s one helluva finale in a booby-trapped coffin shop. But the action is good ‘n’ plenty throughout all of Guillotine, including a fight on a flame-broiled floor where one poor sap is barefoot. There’s no shortage of flying fists, drunken monkey antics or rolling noggins in this killer flick — and with a Krautrock theme song, no less! —Rod Lott