Eureka Entertainment: Horrible History - Four Historical Epics by Chang Cheh (1972 - 1976) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

Chinese producer-writer-director-songwriter Chang Cheh is widely considered to be the titular Godfather of Shaw Brothers Studio, particularly the wuxia and kung fu subgenres.  Having directed more than 90 films in Greater China between the 1960s and 1980s, the maestro behind One-Armed Swordsman, Five Venoms, and Chinatown Kid worked across a broad spectrum of spectacle driven melodramas for Shaw Scope.  One which sort of gets overlooked until now, thanks to a 2-disc set of films curated by Eureka Entertainment, is the historical costumed wartime epic drawing real Chinese Horrible History over the course of four films ranging between 1972 and 1976.  Digitally restored by Celestial Pictures and packaged together in a limited to 2,000 copies Gokaiju slipcover, the quartet of films all directed by Cheh range from medieval China all the way up through into the Korean War and give viewers an unlikely snapshot of Shaw Brothers fare as somewhat revisionist historical action-fighter entertainment.
 
As with Arrow Video and other boutique labels in the past, the arrangement of films is out of chronological order instead following a thematic and historical progression towards modernity.  In the first 1975 film Marco Polo (also known as The Four Assassins), the titular Venetian explorer played by Richard Harrison (a mainstay in exploitation films) finds himself fraught between warfare involving the Mongol Empire and Chinese Rebels in the 13^th century, bearing witness to a number of atrocities before kung fu battles point him towards the right direction.  It doesn’t have much to do with anything actually Marco Polo related and he’s a background observer in all of this rather than an actively involved character.  Mostly the film is a means to capture newcomer Alexander Sheng Fu at the height of his martial arts wizardry who pulls off more than a few wild and outlandish physical feats in his one-man-armada. 
 
Jumping back two years with 1973’s The Pirate, the timeframe of the second installment of Horrible History leaps into the 19^th century involving real life pirate Cheung Po Tsai (Ti Lung) who is evading Imperial Court agents while getting caught up in the woes of poor residents of a coastal village.  Replete with boat warfare including cannons, pirates and swordplay, it feels dangerously close to becoming a swashbuckler though Cheh’s level of violence and gore keeps it from becoming family friendly.  An unlikely offering which reunites Ti Lung with David Chiang as General Wu Yee filled with numerous stunt set pieces and special effects, it runs counter the usual clean and dry fistfight aiming for vast vistas of combat on an ocean beachside.  It’s a fun riff on a very real dark period of history with kindred heroic observer elements that would invariably show up later in Marco Polo.

Jumping ahead to 1976s Boxer Rebellion which dramatizes the 1900 anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, anti-Christian uprising in China near the end of the Qing dynasty conducted by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists before being defeated by the Eight-Nation Alliance of foreign powers, we find ourselves with one of the longest and most sprawling wartime epics in the Shaw Brothers library.  Spanning two-and-a-half hours, far exceeding the usual running time for a Shaw Scope and filled with vast images of battalions charging and firing cannons at one another, the story itself has been dramatized many times over the years from several Chinese films to the 1963 American 70mm epic 55 Days at Peking.  Clearly a story too expansive for one film to contain it, Boxer Rebellion represents Shaw Brothers and director Chang Cheh perhaps at their most technically ambitious period.

 
Reeling back to 1972 while fast forwarding to the tail end of the Korean War, a Chinese veteran of the war finds himself evading the South Korean Military Police after being falsely accused of murdering an American soldier.  Bringing three wartime comrades into the situation, the foursome find themselves at war with a drug smuggling gang stationed in Seoul.  Filmed in South Korea itself despite being a Hong Kong production, Four Riders is a tense bilingual actioner shifting between Chinese and Korean frequently while the violence and body count continues to rise in unexpected ways.  Maybe the most violent and uncompromising effort in the set, replete with spiked brass knuckles adorned on the DVD’s slipcover, Four Riders while being the most modern of the quartet is also perhaps the most brutally vicious of the bunch.

 
Of course the 2-disc blu-ray set of Horrible History would be incomplete without the expected bevy of additional special features including but not limited to four new audio commentaries by Frank Djeng of the NY Asian Film Festival, martial artist Michael Worth and action cinema gurus Mike Leeder and Arne Venema.  Also included is a video interview with Wayne Wong on Boxer Rebellion and that film’s sprawling extensive scale and a video essay by Jonathan Clements covering all four features in the set.  In the first pressing with the Gokaiju artwork is a collector’s booklet featuring original writing on all four films by James Oliver.  

As a newcomer having waded through more than his share of Shaw Brothers epics, Horrible History was a bit of a breath of fresh air.  While jumping about chronologically in terms of when the films were made, historically they follow a natural progression and all offer intriguing notions of revisionist historical fiction.  Offering four sides of history rarely seen within the Shaw Brothers universe, all the movies display from top to bottom the many filmmaking and directing talents of Chang Cheh who more than rightly deserves the moniker of the Godfather of Shaw Scope.

--Andrew Kotwicki