Executioners from Shaolin (1977)


In Kill Bill: Vol. 2 he who is to eventually be killed tells the Bride a story during a flashback to her training with a kung fu master named Pai Mei, played by Gordon Liu.  The story goes that one day Pai Mei was walking down a road and, in a show of respect, nodded slightly to a Shaolin priest who was walking in the opposite direction.  When the priest did not return the nod, Pai Mei went to the temple and demanded the priest's head, which he was understandably refused.  To punish them for their disrespect he killed everyone in the temple from the students on up to the priests. 

Also known as Bai Me or Bak Mei, he is an actual historical (and somewhat mythical) figure that betrayed the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu, and is often portrayed as a bad guy with almost supernatural fighting abilities.  That is definitely the case in this movie, where he is able to retract his nether regions, one of his two weak points, in order to capture an opponent's foot and then break both legs before dealing the fatal blow.  We also find him at the beginning burning down the Shaolin Temple and battling the head priest, setting events in motion for Hung Hsi-Kuan (Kuan Tai Chen) to declare vengeance in the name of his master and his brothers and spend years training in order to defeat Pai Mei (Lieh Lo).

Surprisingly, rather than being a straightforward revenge movie, we get to follow Hung Hsi-Kuan through his life as he marries Fang Yung-chun (Lily Li), a feisty practitioner of crane style kung fu, a style that Hung Hsi-Kuan stubbornly refuses to learn.  We also follow the life of his son, Hung Wen-ting (Yue Wong), who learns elements of both his mother and father's styles.  It largely plays out the same way many legends do, with generations attempting to bring down the bad guy as a brave set of rebels hope to bring the true rulers back into power.

It's Shaw Brothers, so it's colorful and well-made, and not as stagey as some of their other productions.  The fights scenes are well-choreographed and there is a lot more comedy in this than one would expect from the title, but it flows nicely with the rest of the story.  Some of the dubbing is corny as usual, but it's much better done than some of the studio's other films, and the performances do stand out even with the English voices.  

The other thing to note is that it is obvious that this film highly influenced Tarantino.  Pai Mei, under all the different iterations of his name, means something along the lines of the "white-eyebrowed guy", and he looks quite similar here as he does in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, although he is a much more meditative character.  He exudes a peculiar confidence as if he believes what he is doing is right.  It's not the typical laughing evil chamberlain role, and Lieh Lo pulls it off wonderfully even if he is only in a handful of the scenes.  

Executioners from Shaolin is still far from a perfect film, having a number of rough edits in places and Yue Wong being a bit of an acquired taste, at least in his role here, although the ending fight is great.  It also just suddenly ends without wrapping things up a bit more, which is a pity because after spending so much time with Hung Hsi-Kuan and his family it would have been nice to see everyone achieve some sort of peace.  

Executioners from Shaolin (1977)
Time: 98 minutes
Starring: Kuan Tai Chen, Yue Wong, Lily Li, Lieh Lo
Director: Chia-Liang Liu



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more