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| Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment |
Over the last year, Eureka Entertainment has shown a great
deal of love for Chinse producer-writer-director-songwriter Chang Cheh’s
filmography with Shaw Brothers and their ShawScope widescreen line. Between their recurring sets for Horrible
History, Venom Mob and The Magnificent Chang Cheh, their
pairing with Celestial Pictures have resulted in the floodgates being burst
open for Shaw as well as Golden Harvest titles.
Having released a smattering of titles among the sets with Horrible
History amassing four titles, the UK based boutique label making a gradual
domestic line of releases here have finally done with Chang Cheh’s oeuvre the
closest thing to one of Arrow Video or Shout Factory’s respective Shaw Brothers
collections in a new ten-film set entitled Furious Swords and Fantastic
Warriors: The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh.
Spread across five discs and made between 1967 and 1983, the series is
distinctly divided between realistic sword fighting and martial arts battles
aka Furious Swords amassing the first four films while Fantastic
Warriors which freely mixes in magical realism and fantasy elements take up
the remaining six.
Often dubbed the ‘Godfather of Hong Kong cinema’, though he
was prolific Cheh never made the same film twice as evidenced in this eclectic
lineup of ShawScope films that give viewers a wide range of his capabilities
including but not limited to Peking opera, kung fu and wuxia pian films with
supernatural leanings. The arrangement
of films is chronologically out of order but is thematically consistent with
the Furious Swords portion before going into the remaining Fantastic
Warriors films. Each disc housing
two pictures seem tailored thematically to each other with my personal favorite
being the third disc which introduced the Peking opera and notions of
hallucinatory supernaturalism. All of
the films come digitally restored by Celestial Pictures in a hardbound box
limited to 2,000 copies along with a collector’s booklet featuring essays
encompassing every picture. A mixture of
old-school bloodshed, brotherly fighting in battle together and self-sacrifice
for a greater cause and classic revenge tales sometimes going from beyond the
grave, the collection here of films by Chang Cheh often co-authored by Kuang Ni
represent some of his best offerings across the board.
In the first film Men from the Monastery from 1974, the
story at first seems like a collection of disparate vignettes involving three
different characters’ origin stories played by Fu Sheng, Kuan Chen and Kuan
Chi. But as it goes on, a master plan is
revealed as the unlikely trio following their own respective quests join forces
against evildoers who have burned down their temple, resulting in an epic
extended color-shifting fight sequence involving hundreds of adversaries. The second film made in the same year 1974 Shaolin
Martial Arts again reunites Fu Sheng with Kuan Chi while also tagging on
Gordon Liu, involving a group of students who are up against a newly formed
Chinese dynasty which aims to overthrow the school. The backstory of Pei Mei in Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill film series as well as many of the martial arts
techniques and filmmaking styles can be attributed to this film though the
subject of precisely which one influenced it the most is debatable. It’s both a training drama and a wartime film
of sorts featuring ripping bark off of trees with bare hands as well as fishing
that way while also being a historical drama of the Manchu crackdown on the
Shaolin Temple.
The second disc, still on the side of Furious Swords,
jumps into the third film King Eagle from 1971 with Ti Lung as a lone
swordsman who keeps to himself until one day he intervenes with an injured man
who carries a secret regarding the betrayal of the clan from within by the
second in command. When the culprits
show up to finish the job, they suspect he may have passed the message along to
the swordsman who begin tailing him.
Further still, he becomes romantically involved with their 7th
chief played by Li Ching. The fourth
film Iron Bodyguard (co-directed by Hsueh Li-Pao) posits Kuan
Chen at the forefront again, this time following Wang Wu (Chen) who joins
forces with a group of scholars intent on ending the Qing dynasty, something
that doesn’t go over well with the Empress Dowager who has no plans of abandoning
her position of power. Though an apolitical
warrior, Wang Wu soon finds himself caught in the crossfire between an epic
political battle dealt with by way of the sword.
Disc three is probably my favorite in the set for jumping so
freely into the realm of fantasy, particularly with 1975’s The Fantastic
Magic Baby which begins with a loose hour long adaptation of chapters of Wu
Cheng’en’s 16th century novel Journey to the West followed by
a straight-laced photographic documentary portrait of an actual Peking
opera. The experience of seeing a
fantasy effects-heavy film followed by an authentic Chinese opera with a
voiceover explanation of how one of their operas functions proved to be
startlingly educational and informative and not just the usual kick-punch
action fighter flick. Jumping ahead to
1983 with The Weird Man, we get something of an unfinished business
demonic possession ghost story involving a Taoist priest Yu Ji (Cheng Tien-Chi)
who is seemingly killed by an evil magistrate only to come back from beyond the
grave possessing fellow soldiers and proceeding to make the magistrate’s life a
living Hell including tricking him into murdering his own soldiers. It’s goofy, playful and fun with a lot of
magical realism throughout.
Disc four jumps back to 1967 with The Trail of the Broken
Blade, a mixture of the action film, the musical and the romantic drama
picture. Starring Jimmy Wang Yu as Li
Yueh, it represents a strange mixture of the Japanese samurai film with
outlandish costumes, makeup and tonal inconsistencies. Visually its arresting but is something of a
transitional film for the Shaw Brothers studio still steeped in Peking opera
while trying to move away into the action picture. The Wandering Swordsman from 1970
fares far better comparatively as a kind of riff on the Robin Hood mythos
involving a highway swordsman played by David Chiang who takes it upon himself
to rob from the rich and give back to the poor.
With his constant snarky grinning and his shifting loyalties drifting
back and forth between assisting thieves and then robbing from them, you’re not
always sure whose side our hero is really on.
Disc five also contains a favorite with the anthological triptych
Trilogy of Swordsmanship involving three separate tales of chivalry that
are thematically and visually related but ultimately are vignettes. Kind of a murderer’s row lineup of Shaw
Brothers talents at the time while also being a wuxia mashup, it featured
everyone from David Chiang, Ti Lung, Sammo Hung and Lo Lieh among the cast
list. The tenth and final film in the
set The New Shaolin Boxers prominently stars Fu Sheng in the fourth film
in Chang Cheh’s Shaolin film series and helped cement the actor’s
superstar status as a carriage driver who begins taking on ruthless street
punks with a murderous edge. Giving the
actor and the martial artist a chance to shine strongly on both performative fronts,
the film is also perhaps the heaviest of the series for how it deals with the
sexual assault of one of his female friends, sparking a vengeful attack against
a violent gang. Of the films in the set,
it presents the most dramatic weight counterbalancing the typical Shaw Brothers
martial arts wuxia antics.
With all ten films housed in two amaray cases with a
collectible booklet in a hardbound box, each film comes with a subset of audio
commentaries by Frank Djeng, Mike Leeder, Arne Venema, David West and martial
artist filmmaker Michael Worth. There’s
also a couple of video essays by Jonathan Clements the author of the text A
Brief History of China and all ten films have been digitally restored to
the best of their ability in 1080p. For
Shaw Brothers fanatics who can’t get enough of the huge slew of titles bursting
through our domestic moviegoing floodgates, Furious Swords and Fantastic
Warriors represents another comprehensive chunk not only of their library
but particularly of Chang Cheh’s extensive overreaching oeuvre that seems to
keep printing itself the deeper you dig.
Eureka Entertainment has assembled another splendid box sure to keep
ShawScope fans satisfied for a good while as well as giving viewers an eclectic
smattering of the many cinematic hills scaled by the Hong Kong martial arts
filmmaking empire.
--Andrew Kotwicki
