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

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Duel of the Brave Ones refers to two rival street gangs duking it out while a police sergeant searches for a missing piece of jade. Sounds serious, but it’s not; just how serious can you take a gang in which one member wears a shirt with all the colors of Mork from Ork’s suspenders and another one’s T reads, unthreateningly, “Sail”?

I never could tell exactly who was on whose side, but it didn’t hamper my enjoyment, especially when one fight involved a crate of oranges, an overweight bra vendor and music destined for inclusion on a NOW That’s What I Call Kooky compilation disc. (Later fights are all about flower pots, sawhorses and barbecue grilling accessories, with the end brawl taking place on a moving public bus.)

Duel is also noted for a large amount of nudity — and not just any nudity, mind you, but nudity with uncharacteristically large breasts for an Asian film. There’s about a 30-minute stretch where five minutes don’t go by without some woman either taking her clothes off or getting them ripped off. I especially enjoyed the sex scene intercut with some random guy riding a carousel. One gag has a comically cross-eyed janitor believing a woman has four boobs, and as he continues to watch her copulate, he penetrates his mouth with his own finger. Because he can.

I love the broken-English box copy on the DVD I have in hand — one that misspells Duel as Dual — even if it seems to describe a different movie: “These fighters pray for victory from the God of War, but who is the best? Their fists and kicks will decide. You are getting action on the Master Level!!” Do not argue with two exclamation points, because you will never win. —Rod Lott

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Certainly not the best of Jackie Chan’s string of Lo Wei films early in his career, Shaolin Wooden Men casts him as an orphaned mute and the least popular student at the Shaolin temple, where he can barely perform the most rudimentary tasks, like lugging huge buckets of water on his back up an ungodly amount of stairs.

It isn’t until he secretly befriends the temple’s prisoner that he learns kung fu. The script doesn’t give him many chances to use it, with the notable exception being the film’s best scene, in which Jackie must face a gauntlet of 108 of the titular wooden men, which are like robots with cannonballs for fists.

If you’re surprised to discover the prisoner who schools Jackie in the way of the fist and the foot is the same guy who killed his father many years ago, you need to see more kung-fu movies. But Shaolin Wooden Men is not a recommended starting point. —Rod Lott

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Deadly Kick is the greatest Sonny Chiba film Sonny Chiba never made. Five Fingers of Death’s Lo Lieh directs and stars in the over-the-top fight film as an alcoholic loser with a wispy mustache. His name sounds like Marion, so we’ll just call him that. As the movie begins, he’s drowning his sorrows in drink after discovering his wife turning tricks. When he sees her being roughed up by whom I presume are her pimps, he holds up his hands like they’re monster claws and starts doing all sorts of animal-style kung fu, complete with sound effects and quick cuts to the animals — tiger, eagle and snakes — going apeshit on human flesh.

Through a flashback, we learn why Marion is so fucked-up: He fought his rival for the hand of their karate teacher’s daughter in marriage, and lost. Naturally, he responds by raping her … and then poking out her eyes immediately after orgasm! Back in the present day, the violence continues, with a man losing his forearm to a ninja star and another burning to death in a car. A semblance of a plot forms, involving $10 million, a nuclear bomb and a gray-haired kingpin in a gold lamé suit who has an underground headquarters accessible via mine shaft.

Plot schmot — Marion’s too busy making it with his new girlfriend. Sniffing her newly removed panties, he proclaims, “Smells better than whiskey!” One frame-filling sequence has him milking her nipple without using his hands, and he refers himself as “king of the nether regions.”

But they get into trouble, too, finding themselves chained to his-and-her guillotines. They’re saved by Marion’s rival, for reasons not well explained, but not necessary for your enjoyment of the film. In fact, the complete ludicrousness enhances it. To further complicate things, the woman Marion blinded comes back after five years to settle the score. She’s been practicing kung fu with the help of a little girl who jumps around with bells on a string as some sort of code to let her know what’s what and where. Marion doesn’t like getting his ass kicked by a blind chick, so he kills the kid!

Meanwhile, Marion’s true love is tied up naked in the bad guy’s lair, whipped and vagina-sworded all to the laughing delight of a dinner party. Marion busts in, pulls out an adversary’s intestines, throws them in the face of another and then chokes him with it. Then, rather anticlimactically, he pushes the head villain through a wall, which leaves an exact outline of the poor old guy, arms in flailing position and all.

With all the bad guys dead, Marion and his rival have to settle their festering differences, which is where the weirdo supernatural leaf-blowing aspects of the film come into play. Marion learns why the movie is called Deadly Kick. Then they go snow-sledding. —Rod Lott

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The bad guys in Fists of Bruce Lee don’t seem all that threatening, what with their pink telephone and idling time playing bumper pool. But the woods outside their hideout are a different story, booby-trapped with sandbags, pitchforks, rope and logs!

We’re introduced to our hero — Bruceploitation star Bruce Li — via a credits sequence in which he, wearing a blindfold, spars with another guy wearing a girdle, while Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces” blares. The film is produced by Woo Ka Chi, which also accurately describes how the music score sounds.

Li meets an effeminate guy with a name like Poochie Chan, who wears a white suit and continuously dabs at his face with a handkerchief. Li also falls for a woman who has a doll in her room that shoots metal darts out its head. How all these characters come into play with the story is a moot point, because there is no story. They simply amble amount and speak in generic terms and, every few minutes, a fight breaks out.

One colorful brawl takes place at night at an amusement park; another on a playground, predating a similar scene in Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2, except Jackie’s scene didn’t steal John Barry’s 007 musical cues, nor did it have a preceding foot chase scored to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.” One guy gets shot with an arrow by a dude who looks like either the construction worker or the motorcycle rider from the Village People. Some random minion gets a pitchfork deep in his ass. Story schmory, slightly snory. —Rod Lott

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