Master of the
Flying Guillotine (1976)
aka: One-Armed Boxer vs. the Flying
Guillotine; One-Armed Boxer 2
Chinese Title: 獨臂拳王大破血滴子
Translation: One-Armed Boxing Champion and Flying Guillotine
Starring:
Jimmy Wang Yu, Kam Kong, Doris Lung Chun-Erh, Sham Chin-Bo, Lung Fei,
Wang Yung-Sheng, Hsueh Han, Lau Kar-Wing, Huang Fei-Long
Director: Jimmy Wang Yu
Action Director: Lau Kar-Wing, Lau Kar-Leung
The first movie to depict this fearsome armament was The Flying Guillotine (1975), directed by Ho Menghua. The film detailed the contraption’s conception, design and initial use by trained assassins by the Qing, or Manchu, court. A sequel followed three years later, titled The Flying Guillotine part 2, starring Ti Lung and directed by Chen Kang. The sequel was arguably better than the first, with more and better action and superior fight choreography, courtesy of Shaw Brothers legend, Tong Gaai. However, it never matched the near-horror film atmosphere of the original, although it didn’t really try. In 1977, a Taiwanese independent studio produced The Fatal Flying Guillotines, starring cult favorite Carter Wong of Big Trouble in Little China fame. That was a more conventional kung fu potboiler, with a villain who just happened to use the weapon on occasion. Other films that feature the weapon[1] include Dynasty (1977), which had the hero fighting a gang of guillotine-wielding assassins in 3-D(!); The Heroic Trio (1993), a fantasy actioner about three heroines who battle a demon; and also The Guillotines (2010), a lavish remake of the original Ho Menghua classic.
It is rather astonishing then to contemplate that the film based around this weapon that has gotten the most attention by fans and mainstream critics alike was Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976). That is to say, between this movie and the films mentioned above, especially those three with “guillotine” in the title, this Taiwanese indie film is easily the ineptest, lacking merits in the more artistic areas of filmmaking, while being laughably gaudy in its technical aspects. And yet, writer/director/star Jimmy Wang Yu makes up for this by presenting the viewer with a parade of increasingly surreal sights and sounds, never wavering for a moment in his commitment to the absurdity of it all. Or to put it more bluntly, Master of the Flying Guillotine will short circuit the critiquing mechanisms of all but the stuffiest film critics. It is the sort of film that will snatch your measuring sticks for film evaluation out of our hands, break them over its knees, and then put its arms around you and lead you into its compelling world of the bizarre and insane.
Jimmy Wang Yu took up the pen for the fifth and final time for Master of the Flying Guillotine, making it an official sequel to his 1972 hit, The One-Armed Boxer. And right off the bat, Wang Yu starts taxing our ability to suspend disbelief by retconning the setting of the movie. One may assume that the first film was set during China’s tumultuous Republic Era (1912-1949), based on the hairstyles, clothing and the fact that most early 1970s kung fu movies set in period chose that particular time to save on costumes and wigs. And yet, in the opening narration of the film, that story is retconned two hundred years into he past, back to the early days of the Qing Dynasty and redefines Jimmy Wang Yu as a Ming Dynasty patriot, which had nothing to do with the plot of The One-Armed Boxer. And despite the new setting, many of the male characters walk around with 20th century haircuts, despite the fact that wearing a queue, or pigtail, was mandatory to all males under penalty of death.
While Wang Yu’s other efforts as a writer were nothing particularly special, he at least had a decent idea of how to set up a beginning, middle and an end. That doesn’t happen here. The first act is comprised of four scenes taking up the first half hour of the film. We are introduced to Fung Sheng Wu Chi, played by Kam Kong, the titular villain, as he takes up his weapon to get revenge on our hero for killing his two pupils—a pair of corrupt Tibetan lamas—in the first movie. We are then introduced to the One-Armed Boxer, as he’s called throughout the movie, as he teaches his students to walk on walls and ceilings. Another scene introduces the organizer of a martial arts tournament, while the third scene re-establishes the villain’s insanity by showing him murdering random people with one arm.
The aforementioned martial arts tournament makes up the entire second act of the movie, lasting almost thirty whole minutes. Strangely enough, the One-Armed Boxer doesn’t participate in the event: he’s a simple spectator. That’s right: in a kung fu movie about a super-powerful fighter with only one arm, the only thing he does during the first hour is walking on the ceiling for a few seconds and then watch other people fight. In fact, he spends most of the first two acts not even aware that there’s an external conflict a-brewin’! The entire tournament sequence is bereft of character and plot development altogether: it’s simply a series of fights between some very colorful fighters. The plot only kicks into action at the end of the second act, when Fung Sheng Wu Chi murders a one-armed snake fist fighter at the tournament, revealing his existence to the rest of the cast. It’s enough to make one wonder if Stephanie Meyer wasn’t taking notes from Master of the Flying Guillotine while penning the Twilight Saga novels.
From there on out, the film continues to be a series of fight scenes, but now they finally involve our hero, who fights against the foreign martial artists who have allied themselves with the villain. In Western Cinema, we generally have this concept of fairness when it comes to heroes fighting villains. If there is any double or triple-teaming involved on the part of the protagonists, it’s because the script has already established that the main antagonist is so strong that a one-on-one scuffle would be outright foolish, if not suicidal. In old kung fu moviers, however, it’s pretty common to have two or three, sometimes even four, heroes ganging up on the villain, even if he established skill level would allow one opponent to beat him with a little extra effort. The uninitiated may find that to be unfair, but veterans will simply shrug it off, declaring, “That’s just the way it is.”
Master of the Flying Guillotine, however, takes things past “unfair” and well into “outright treachery” territory. This is best exemplified in the One-Armed Boxer’s duel with the Muay Thai fighter, played by Sham Chin-Bo. The latter is depicted as being perpetually barefoot, which the former exploits by luring him into a hut with metal sheets on the floor, having his students set straw on fire beneath the house, and then have them guard all the openings, jabbing at the poor sucker with spears if he tries to escape. One may argue that our hero was just trying to make up for the fact that he had one less limb and wanted to even the playing field. But the crafty bastard took on two Thai Boxers in the original One-Armed Boxer film and won, so that argument doesn’t hold much water at all. The main protagonist is a dishonorable jerk and that’s all there is to it!
The finale is a real headscratcher, as two crippled men—the villain Fung Sheng Wu Chi is blind—duke it out inside a funeral parlor that our hero has booby-trapped with spring-loaded hatchets(!). And thus we have a blind guy armed with what is essentially a buzz saw on a chain, and who can turn his head 360 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist(!!), trying to dodge flying axes while fighting a one-armed man hiding behind coffins. As I said, it is this sort of general loopiness and disregard for sane (and conventional) action set-ups that endear so many people to this film. Unlike many intentionally kitschy films today, Jimmy Wang Yu and his action directors treat this with the utmost seriousness, with nary a hint of irony to the proceedings.
Those fight choreographers are none other than the legendary Lau Kar-Leung and his brother, Lau Kar-Wing. Both men were well-acquainted with Jimmy Wang Yu by the time he hired them for this piece of work. Lau Kar-Leung had choreographed most of Wang Yu’s swashbuckling sword epics—or wuxia films--during the late 60s, when Wang Yu was still under contract at the famous Shaw Brothers studios. Their efforts together included The One-Armed Swordsman and its sequel, Trail of the Broken Blade (1967) and The Sword of Swords. Lau Kar-Wing did action direction duties on some of Wang Yu’s mid-70s Taiwanese films, most famously Tiger and Crane Fists (1976), which was reworked by Hollywood director Steve Oedekerk in 2001 as Kung Pao! Enter the Fist.
By 1976, Lau Kar-Leung had moved beyond working as an action director under such Shaw Brothers directors as Chang Cheh and started directing his own movies, like Spiritual Boxer (1975) and Challenge of the Masters (1976). Movies like this and Ming Patriots, another Taiwanese indie film from the same year, show us the great contrast between Lau Kar-Leung the director and Lau Kar-Leung the mercenary fight choreographer. Lau’s directorial efforts have a lot of nuance and martial philosophy when it comes to depicting styles, how different people learn them, and other “martial arts lessons about intentionality, sensitivity, and hard vs. soft technique.” There’s none of that here: just a series of fights, usually to the death.
On the surface, the most baffling decision made by Jimmy Wang Yu and the Lau brothers make is to keep Wang Yu’s own action chops in the shadows until the final act. There’s a certain amount of wisdom in that, as Wang Yu was not only not a trained martial artist, but he had a difficult time convincing people otherwise, especially when it came to unarmed combat. Much has been said of Wang Yu’s wild “flailing arm” style of screen fighting, and by 1976, there were so many genuinely talented people working in the industry that “flailing arms” were just not going to cut it. His fighting here is satisfactory, with the gimmicky set-ups for his fights more than making up the difference.
The martial arts tournament was also a good way to keep Jimmy Wang Yu out of the action, while not stopping the action for a moment. There are a lot of styles and weapons on display, including hung gar, the snake style, Eagle claw, monkey kung fu, plus traditional Chinese pole and three-section staff. There are also a number of foreign participants, so we get a Javanese swordsman, a Mongolian wrestler, the aforementioned Thai Boxer, a Japanese fighter imaginatively named “Win Without a Knife,” and most memorably, an Indian Yoga master, played by Wang Yung-Sheng. This last one is especially fascinating, as in today’s world, nobody considers yoga to be a martial art at all. I’m sure it was never intended to be a martial art. But in Jimmy Wang Yu’s world, it is, with its signature ability being that it allows the practitioner to stretch his arms, Mr. Fantastic style. For video game fans, it goes without saying that the Indian yoga master in this film was the inspiration for Dhalsim in Street Fighter II.
Despite his historically-important movies like The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) and The Chinese Boxer (1970), Jimmy Wang Yu had become obsolete as a screen fighter as early as 1972, when people like Bruce Lee, Angela Mao, Sammo Hung and Yasuaki Kurata were showing audiences what good screen fighting looked like. Wang deserves credit for being a martial-arts-actor-who-didn’t-know-martial-arts who wrote, directed and starred in a martial arts films that tops many people’s top ten (or twenty) lists. That’s a magnificent feat of kung fu mastery in itself. And for a movie that is such an abject failure in storytelling and character building when there are so many martial arts films that had complex plots, well-choreographed fight scenes, good acting and frequent over-the-top moments, that becomes especially impressive indeed.
[1] - Films like Snake in the
Crane’s Shadow (1977), The Dragon Missile (1976) and The Burning
Paradise (1994) all feature similar weapons whose purpose is the same:
decapitate the poor sucker on the receiving end of the device.
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