This Shaw Brothers wuxia
revenge film doesn't really have much going for it but I still enjoyed it.
The pace lags, the action choreography isn't very convincing and often shot
from a distance, the actors are not top shelf and it leaves major gaps in
the narrative. But the drama of it plays out reasonably well and that was
the strength of the director Pan Lei who directed such Shaw dramas as Love
Without End, Fallen Petals, Song of Orchid Island, Poisonous Rose and Lover's
Rock. But if you worked for Shaw Brothers sooner or later you had to try
your hand at martial arts films. Before this one he directed The Fastest
Sword which I have not seen but from a few comments I saw on HKMDB it was
well liked but for the story, not the action. The action here is bloody but
rarely rises above swinging your sword and people falling over. Shaw was
still a little ways away from the fast and intricate choreography that was
coming. Jimmy Wang-yu dominated the action films up to this and he was from
the school of swinging swords and five men go down.
It is your basic revenge for the death of your parents film but it plays
with it. First the child is a female and second she isn't really that good.
She (Wang Ling - Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman) can kill the minions
by the dozen, leaving bodies strewn all over the place for others to clean
up but against the real masters she often comes up short. The leaders of
four clans - Bai-feng the Butcher, Lu Dachao the Bull Demon, the female Gu
Miaozhen the Seducer and Wang Yizhou the Wind Waving Scholar - come to the
home of the Xia's looking for the Great Mystery Scriptures (aka Tai Hsuan
Book of Swords)- and when they don't get it they set about killing everyone.
Mrs. Xia (Chiang Chin-hsia) escapes with their baby girl and then dies. An
elderly man comes along and takes the baby home after first reciting the
names of her parent's killers to the baby. Like a nursery rhyme. These are
the people you have to kill. I am so grateful no one killed my parents. The
pressure would have been way too much for me.
The narrative is then brought up to the present in a Chinese Opera chorus
- she grows up, learns martial arts, leaves the old man and kills her first
target, Bai-feng the Butcher. We don't get to see that but we see the aftermath
- dead bodies filling the courtyard and Bai-feng dead in his chair. One crossed
off. A complication arises though when his son Bai-jiang (Tung Li) comes
home to discover his dead father and swears revenge too. Off she goes looking
for more people to kill either with her sword or her trademark purple darts
- the other three fortunately seem to live within shouting distance of one
another which makes it easier to challenge them all.
But it gets more difficult - all three are better martial artists than she
is. And so it turns out is Bai-jiang who easily defeats her. When she says
can you blame me for killing your father - he killed my parents - every good
Chinese child would do the same. Yes, he says, that it is why I have to kill
you. But I will give you a year to finish your task if you promise to come
back here. She agrees. But then he follows her around giving her advice on
how to defeat her enemies - partly because he is falling in love with her
and partly because as a filial son he wants to be the one to kill her. Love
is Hard. There are some strange loose ends though - she is befriended by
an older enigmatic swordsman who is sick and near the end he gives her the
Great Mystery Scriptures. Which had not been mentioned since the beginning.
Why does he have them? What is his relation to all this? What are the Scriptures?
No idea. I am not even sure why I enjoyed this - few pluses in the wuxia
world of film but it tugged me in. This was actually produced by the Taiwanese
company Union and distributed by the Shaw Brothers. The actress Wang Ling
was from Taiwan and all her 23 films were produced there. This was the only
one that Shaw picked up - so she was not a Shaw graduate from their school
perhaps explaining her limited action skills.
