The Deadly Silver
Spear
Director: Sung Ting-mei
Year: 1977
Rating: 6.0
Not a lot of this
Taiwanese martial arts film made much sense, but it has Jimmy Wang-yu doing
his thing. Killing loads of bad guys. With a silver spear this time. Over
his long career and many films, Wang-yu killed people with lots of different
weapons. I prefer him with a sword where he can slice and dice like a chef
- but his kung fu fighting with his hands always leaves me cold. He rarely
shows any real skills other than jabbing and swinging. A spear falls in the
middle. It seems a clumsy weapon for killing masses, but Wang-yu seemed to
really enjoy the moments when he raised his spear and struck down on some
poor sod on the ground. This has a solid budget and the many action set-pieces
have some clever inventive parts thanks no doubt to the choreography of Lau
Kar-wing. Wang-yu gets to kill underwater though he looked far from comfortable,
in a mortuary, a cave and in the snow with three guys in white popping out
of it. As is usual, Wang-yu shows the acting range of a stick of wet wood.
But who really cares.
I did care though that Hsu Feng gets second
billing and yet is stuck in a helpless blind women role. In Asian films being
blind can sometimes be an advantage in fighting and I kept expecting her
to show that she was faking her inability to fight - but no, the heroine
of A Touch of Zen and The Fate of Lee Khan just waits for Wang-yu to save
her. Wang-yu mind you, never liked being upstaged by a female action star
- just ask Cheng Pei-pei about that. He plays a professional assassin out
for hire by anyone - but he has two rules - the money has to be right and
the intended target has to deserve it. Not a problem finding work with lots
of villains around. He doesn't want to kill as he explains to his girl Hsu
Feng, killing is not easy or pleasant but he needs money to keep up his search
for the man who killed his parents as he looked on as a boy.
He is hired by ex-Shaw soft-core star Hu
Chin to kill three men - underwater, in that cave and the fun one in the
mortuary with skulls and snakes coming at him. I think Blackie Ko plays all
three of them. A lot of dying for Blackie. But in a side plot, the main villain
(Chien Te-men) and his righthand creep (Chang Yi) are looking for the man
who invented the Death Ring that ten years previously slaughtered a large
group of men. They want their own to rule the Martial Arts World! Where have
we heard that before? This Death Ring is a modified Flying Guillotine that
flies around with whirling blades killing anything in its path before it
returns to its master. What powers it is movie magic. This was directed
by Sung Tiing-mei who also directed the recently viewed the excellent Shaolin
Traitorous.
