Considered a seminal martial arts film more for concept than execution, The Flying Guillotine is about your basic greedy Asian dictator who delights in his staff’s development of a new weapon for his armies. This unusual device looks like a basket affixed to a chain, but when thrown onto the head of your enemy and yanked back, blades within the basket pop out to chop off the unfortunate wearer’s head! Every movie could use one.
This is first demonstrated on a dog, much to the evil guy’s delight. It’s sick, yeah, but it should be even sicker. The movie often cuts away so you rarely see any decapitations. I wanted to see twitching headless bodies running loco for several seconds, like Anne Ramsey in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, right after she gets beaned with a basketball.
But I’ll give the Shaw Brothers and director Meng Hua Ho (The Oily Maniac) points for even pursuing something this demented in the first place, even if they weigh down the second half with needless chitchat. For an infinitely more entertaining flick, Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine from 1976 is, um, heads above. —Rod Lott