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
Part sports documentary, part biopic and part clip job, Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is all steaming pile. It’s also all comedy — and not that intentional kind, either. Matthew Mallinson’s film is so inept and pathetic on every level that it deserves to be known as the Plan 9 of not just Bruceploitation pics, but martial arts movies in general.
As it begins, ’70s trailer narrator king Adolph Caesar (Oscar-nommed for A Soldier’s Story, but certainly not for this) discusses the big impending karate championship at Madison Square Garden, where someone will walk away with the honor of the title of Bruce Lee’s successor. But will they also walk away with Lee’s curse — aka the Touch of Death? That’s the conflict set up by the — how you say? — “script,” and then completely discarded 80 minutes later.
Credited as “Hammer, the Ladies Man,” Fred Williamson (Vigilante) wakes up next to some skanky white ho in a hotel room. He’s gotta get to the Garden for the match, but his mattress partner wants to “make it a six-pack,” not fully satisfied with being Hammered the mere five times prior. In a running gag, the Hammer is continually mistaken for singer Harry Belafonte. This, my friends, is what the dictionary means by “funny.”
After giving Williamson a lift to the Garden and then interviewing him, Caesar brags about having discovered Lee, and then gives us the whole story about Lee’s pre-stardom years, courtesy of poorly dubbed black-and-white sequences. In these, Bruce often dreams of his great-grandfather’s prowess as a samurai warrior, which we see flashbacks of, courtesy of color clips from 1971’s kick-ass Invincible Super Chan with a fighting midget and a guy who uses an abacus as a weapon.
Caesar briefly mentions Lee’s breakthrough role as Kato on TV’s The Green Hornet, and in present day, we see karate champ Bill Louie decked out as Kato, beating up would-be rapists in the park, killing one with hurled ninja stars. The whole ugly scene starts when some horny redneck, spotting a comely jogger, exclaims, “Shit! Fuckin’ cantaloupe tits!”
As for the much-discussed karate match, we see precious little of it, but that’s okay. At least we get to see a bit of one bout, ending with one guy’s eyes being ripped out of their sockets, complete with cartoon sound effects! So what the hell are you waiting for? —Rod Lott
According to this Lee-alike flick, before he died, Bruce Lee wrote a book about how to kill people using only your fingers. Like the ghouls they are, the criminal underworld wants a copy of it so bad that they go as far as to kidnap Lee’s ex-girlfriend.
It’s up to a young martial artist — luckily named Bruce Le — to not only find the book, but rescue the girlfriend as well. He does this using not only public domain (?) clips of Lee, but masterfully by going from San Francisco for five minutes and then switching to another movie in Hong Kong after the credits and then to another one in, I think, Taiwan. With plenty of fights in open fields and courtyards, the book … is never really discovered.
I guess no one noticed that black-and white composition book peeking out from under the couch over there?
While Bruce’s Deadly Fingers really is, for the most part, your standard Bruce Lee death-curse rip-off flick, the one area of true maliciousness where the scummy nature of the film shines is when the assorted mob types torture the various girls who don’t wish to hook their bodies, including one mildly graphic scene with a deadly snake. It’s a scene where I could’ve used Bruce’s deadly fingers to poke my own eyes out. —Louis Fowler
Cüneyt Arkın, one of the proud futuristic freedom fighters from Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — also known in the States, rather dumbed-down if you ask me, as Turkish Star Wars — is back on the small screen in a rather good-looking print of 1975’s Kiliç Aslan or, for the sake of argument here, The Sword and the Claw.
In this bargain-basement flick, a king with a birthmark of a lion on his back is killed by his sleazy mustachioed rival. When his concubine, pregnant and on the run, has his baby in the woods, said child is kidnapped and raised by lions, mostly done through a quick vignette of a small child feeding an equally immature lion some raw meat, which couldn’t have been safe, but the kid and the lion look like they’re having fun.
As the child grows up into strapping vine-swinging man Arkin, he immediately runs afoul of the same corrupt leader and, for his troubles, has his hands burnt black, Cajun-style. Thankfully, an old man forges a pair of new unwieldy metal hands — lion’s claws, if you will — and, in the last 10 minutes of film, rips out the throats of the supreme leader’s army and, of course, the big boss. Roll credits.
That seems simple enough, right?
A prime example of the popular Turkish costume dramas of the time, The Sword and the Claw has choppy editing, uneven music and the worst dubbing in history, but damned if it isn’t an entertaining flick, with Arkin jumping off the screen, somersaulting into every fight scene, with particular abandon being given to the bloody finale and his angry lion-face.
If memory serves me, I vaguely remember the VHS box for this movie when it was called Lionman, always overlooked and gathering dust. Still, the American Genre Film Archive’s Blu-ray — from the only 35mm print in existence, natch — is the nicest I’ve even seen of a Turkish film of this ilk, a genre usually reserved for 10th-generation burns.
As a bonus feature, the AGFA disc includes the kung-fu foible Brawl Busters starring Black Jack Chan, produced by the “Official Chinese Black Belt Society.” Yep, that sounds totally legit. —Louis Fowler
Finally, one of mankind’s greatest mysteries is solved by the film DOA: Dead or Alive: What would happen if a ninja princess, a leggy cat burglar and a star-spangled-swimsuit-clad pro wrestler were invited to join a high-stakes martial-arts competition on a hidden island?
The answer: Kicking.
Based on a video game franchise, the Maxim-rific DOA sat on the shelf for a number of years before quietly receiving a theatrical release. That suggests the flick is unwatchable; in truth, it does exactly what it sets out to do: titillate.
Kasumi (Devon Aoki, Sin City) is the aforementioned princess who leaves her Asian homeland to avenge the rumored death of her brother. Because she abandons her people, she is pursued by an assassin with pink hair.
Christie (Holly Valance, Taken) has just pulled off a lucrative heist when she’s questioned by police in her hotel room. She manages to fight them off while naked, simultaneously grabbing a falling gun as she puts on a bra.
And Tina (Jaime Pressly, Torque) is a beer-guzzling redneck wrassler who’s just defended her yacht from a band of pirates.
All three lithesome ladies are recruited — via electronic throwing-star invitations, naturally — to be among a handful of combatants in the winner-takes-all “DOA” competition, which promises a $10 million prize. No one said this makes any sense, but it all happens over the course of the film’s first 10 minutes, so at least it wastes no time.
On the island, a squeaky-voiced roller skater introduces them to Dr. Victor Donovan (Eric Roberts, Sharktopus), the mastermind behind the games. Yes, he’s evil, with the sport merely a cover for his greedy, misguided machinations.
With snot-slick visuals and leaden attempts at slapstick comedy, DOA: Dead or Alive plays like a marriage — or at least a one-night stand — between Mortal Kombat and TV’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s the kind of movie that keeps cutting away from a karate-laden fight scene to a women’s beach volleyball match because … well, hey, bikinis!
At least DOA wears its T-and-A intentions on its thong strap, not pretending to be anything but a made-for-cable-level exercise in action and eye candy. The DOA logo even appears full-screen at several points, handily suggesting where commercials could be inserted for airings on Spike TV.
It’s mindless, sure, but it cannot be accused of being boring. The actresses are easy on the optical orbs, and up to all the upskirt wire-fu that director Corey Yuen (The Transporter) has in store for them. For the viewer, that also means bright colors, quick cuts, slow motion and other shiny things to keep you entertained while dissuading you from applying logic.
If the shenanigans leave you in the mood for a much smarter film centered around three lovely ladies who know how to throw a punch, rent 2002’s So Close, also directed by Yuen. It may not have a wisecracking black guy in a shark-fin mohawk, but you can’t win them all. —Rod Lott
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.
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
