Shaw Brothers’ master choreographer Tang Chia (Tong Gai) teamed up with Yuen Cheung-Yan to create the various fight styles on display in this early Chang Cheh wuxia. The aerial leaps and jumps aided by trampoline and light wirework are provided by David Chiang, a former...
In The Deadly Breaking Sword, director Sun Chung places reputation above all else. This desire for rank and status ripples off the quartet of men who dominate this tale. For Tuan Chang-Qing the Deadly Breaking Sword, his many duels are a minor war against any who...
Nothing in world cinema is as wonderful, as maddening, as electrifying, as absurd, as oblique or as intoxicating as the Wuxia film. Bathed in colour, populated by galactic-sized super characters who are so flamboyant that they make Western superheroes look like food health inspectors, Wuxia...
The great success of Wonder Woman this summer has been a rallying cry for big-budget, female-led films and strong, female action heroes. Hollywood has definitely slacked in these areas for many years, but any fan of martial arts films knows that the genre has been...
Come Drink With Me is widely regarded as the kung fu movie that kick-started the martial arts genre as we know it. At the time of its release, the Shaw Brothers studio was only a few months into their new direction of producing color martial...
Fifteen minutes. It took me about fifteen minutes into watching Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman before I realized I had no idea what world I walked into. Now, at this point I could be referencing Chor Yuen’s patented style of just throwing his audience into...
There is a large part of me that simply wanted to take this article, write a brief introduction, and then proceed to list everything in The Magic Blade that is absurd. However, that’s a lot of work. For those of you that haven’t had the...
I first saw Bastard Swordsman a few years back when a new theater in town attempted to jump-start a revival film community. They presented the film via the only surviving 35mm film print, and it was glorious. The theater's plans would eventually fail due to...
Perhaps the most daunting aspect about the Shaw Brothers catalog is how ridiculously massive and impressively diverse it is. Martial arts films and their ilk were not the only genre that the studio dabbled in with their robust filming schedules and fast-paced release dates, but,...
Chang Cheh is an icon for a reason. While so many film makers in their careers try desperately to make entertainment out of the art of cinema, Chang Cheh set a standard to make art out of cinematic entertainment. It’s this approach that has heavily...