The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles

 
       
Director: Chui Fat
Year:  1993
Rating: 6.5

You have to love - ok perhaps you don't but I do - these medium budget Wuxia films that just stuff in as much high flying sword and martial arts action as possible in a 90-minute film. Like a fat man in a size 30 seersucker suit. Practically before you can blink or have any clue what is going on dead bodies litter the landscape. Rarely does a few minutes go by in so-called character exposition or plot nuances before the action starts up again. On a boat in the middle of nowhere? Safe? Of course not as disguised masks come flying off and bodies hidden in the water fly aboard swords flashing. Walking by an odd set of ancient statues and you just know bodies will come crashing out in an ambush. Directed by Chui Fat who directed kung fu films in the 1980's and Girls with Gun films in the 90's with stops along the way for ones like this and The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead isn't considered a top flight director or action choreography but he brings imagination to his films within a very limited budget.



They save money by having no big stars - though Waise Lee and Cynthia Khan were well-known though not really for wuxia styled films. The main male lead is Lau Ji-wai to which you will likely go - huh? Ya me too. No idea who he is but he doesn't have much of a filmography. Two of the other characters were veterans going through a career rebirth - Lau Shun the Eunuch in Swordsman and Yen Shi-kwan plays a similar role to that of his Evil Master in The Heroic Trio.



The plot shifts all over the place where you think ok this is the main character - nope - shifts to someone else - then back and then elsewhere. But the gist is that Foster Father (Yen) has brought up and trained 13 orphans to become killers to stamp out evil - or so they believe. He orders them to go around the country killing other Masters and steal their secrets. Among the Eagles are Waise and Lau Ji-wai who begin to suspect that all is not as it seems in their club of killers. Cynthia - in a role they would have killed to have gotten Brigitte Lin to play - is the daughter of one of these masters and she is quite the master herself. Near the end the 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles are much less than that - but the 13 Cold-Blooded Eaglets are ready to take their place - by killing them. Hard to get emotionally involved with characters as they keep getting killed but the action is at hyper speed and very good.



This is based on a 1978 Shaw Brothers film titled The Avenging Eagle which had Ti Lung in the Lau Ji-wai role and Alexander Fu-sheng in the Cynthia Khan role. Slightly more star power. It is based on the writings of Ni Kuang who has a bunch of films based on his novels and scripts (One Armed Swordsman being one) - perhaps the Wisely books being the best known. I read something about how he got started in his writing career which is a little off-beat but I expect true. He was brought up in the Mainland under Communist rule and his job was to write the death sentence blurbs for people being executed. He wasn't thrilled and thought the government was cruel - a theme in many of his books - and so escaped to Hong Kong in the late 1950's and began writing wuxia and sci-fi novels. Some of his Wisely novels (he wrote over 100 of them) do seem to be available in English but not on Kindle.