Finch wrote: Wed Oct 22, 2025 11:33 pm
FOMO got me and the prices were just too tempting. Ordered Ti Lung & David Chiang set and SB Classics Vols 3+4 directly from Shout. Between this and the Criterion sale earlier today, this may be the most I've spent in a single day. Telling myself I can always trade those sets in at Orbit if Arrow ever releases those titles in better versions.
The Ti Lung/David Chiang set is incredibly strong, with pretty much all the Chang Cheh movies you would ever need to see in a lifetime.
Have Sword Will Travel is a wonderful start to the David Chiang/Ti Lung partnership, as rivals who team up against the much sleazier Ku Feng (who also looks young and very fit in this film, super fun to watch), to win the heart of Ti Lung's girlfriend, or of one another. This involves storming a extremely tall, incredibly dark-looking lookout tower full of Ku Feng's goons, level by level. The playing of the two leads is exceptionally adroit here.
The Heroic Ones is a story of the collapse of a clan of tartars. Weirdly, the Shaw Bros stars play the thirteen brothers (along with father Ku Feng) of the tartar clan, whose individual ambitions (especially the personal ambitions of the patriarch) do almost all of them in. Ti Lung has the standout scene here, fighting hundreds of guys while trying to hold together a vicious stomach wound, dying standing upright, staring straight ahead. for some reason David Chiang gets graphically drawn and quartered in this film. The movie ends with a few of the surviving brothers killing their traitorous family vizier and lamenting the way all the young stars of Shaw Bros playing the brothers have died here. It really ends with a bunch of plump old-timers as the only brothers left to make things right. I don't know what the themes here are actually supposed to be, but the film is huge, one of the largest Shaw Bros productions, with enormous setpieces and some of Chang Cheh's most exciting action sequences (especially a wild handheld bit in the middle of the film somewhere). It also features David Chiang beating the breaks off Bolo Yeung, which is always hilarious.
Vengeance! is the indelible classic of this collection, featuring David Chiang splendid in a pristine white suit with a mandarin collar, a look so striking Bruce Lee rips it off immediately for Fists of Fury. Chang Cheh's buried homoeroticism is at its most beguiling and bizarre in a story of an opera performer who rolls into town to get revenge for the death of his bosom buddy, practically a brother, or something more than that, whose memory he keeps graphically reliving as he works his way through the town's corrupt hierarchy to settle the score. Maybe Chiang's best performance, and some of Chang Cheh's most well-crafted scenework, especially in the building of atmosphere, which is something he is exceptionally good at doing, but which he can, especially later on, go a whole movie without bothering to even try. The most striking element of Chang's homoerotic subtext is in this movie, when Chiang is dying at the end, and sees a vision of the woman who loves him, waiting for him––and the vision is supplanted by one of him joking around with his friend he's avenging, doing flips and horseplay together.
Duel of Fists and The Angry Guest are one story, about two brothers separated at birth (David Chiang and Ti Lung), one of whom becomes a Hong-Kong-dwelling architect and kung fu hobbyist, the other one of whom becomes a pro muay thai fighter in Thailand. The first movie is set and partially filmed in Thailand, and features the against-all-odds reunion of the brothers. It's a pretty movie, but also a little rote. The Angry Guest, however, is a bonkers sequel, in which Ti Lung's girlfriend gets kidnapped by ninja, and the two brothers have to go to Japan to fight director Chang Cheh and his amanuensis, Yasuaki Kurata. Chang himself plays the "Japanese" crime kingpin here. Chang so laughingly stereotypes the Japanese characters here (except for Kurata, whom he seems to admire), and there is an extended sequence shot in a car when the heroes arrive in Japan, where the car stops at a traffic light and continues filming uninterrupted as hordes of people cross the street, and then the car drives on. It is the weirdest editing I've ever seen in a movie, since the rest of the picture just blazes along at a fast pace. The fights are better in this second movie, the interplay between the brothers is ever more enjoyable, and the film is funny and really fun.
The Duel is at once a sort of apotheosis of these movies, and a kind of tired end of the formula. It's visually one of the most beautiful of the films, and it features a mysterious antagonism between David Chiang and Ti Lung, playing martial artists whose paths cross again and again once Chiang befriends and treacherously murders Ti Lung's master. By the final duel, the two respect the hell out of each other; Ti Lung, who has lusted to kill Chiang the whole time, now wants to halt the duel, but Chiang knows it has to go on. The fatalism is mawkish and crazy, but that's sort of Chiang's point––the world as it is (in this case, the martial arts coterie) won't accept the love of these two.
All Men are Brothers is a sequel to Chang's The Water Margin, and isn't super coherent without seeing the first movie, or just knowing what happens in these ultra-classic stories. The standout bit of both these Water margin films is the meaty character performances by tons of Shaw Bros regulars, and the incredibly, ear-bleedingly, brain-meltingly funk-ti-fied score from the DeWolfe library. The film ends at a point in the Water Margin tales that does not convey much finality, and offers some really out-of-nowhere last-minute surprises. Not the best in the set, but very distinctively-made.
Blood Brothers is a classic for a reason. David Chang, Chen Kuan-tai and Ti Lung play sworn brothers, who fall out over the way Ti Lung covets Chen Kuan-tai's wife. The film is homoerotic in the extreme, but also a surprisingly gruesome tragedy. Well-made, though the drama moves a little slowly for the modern era. I think we can all take on board the idea of adultery faster than this film is willing to play it.
The Savage Five has a Twilight-Zone-like simplicity of storytelling that I find appealing, as well as another great DeWolfe score. A whole town of pacifists are menaced by a bandit gang, and have to learn to stand together to resist their oppression. Great performances all around, I seem to remember the most sympathetic performances coming from Danny Lee and Wang Chung, actually––though David Chiang is clearly the lead character who has to find courage somewhere and stand up to the brutes.
7-Man Army is a weird one, guest-starring Pai Ying from the King Hu films (he's the general in Touch of Zen, the Eunuch in Dragon Inn, a hero in Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones, etc.). Huge pageantry in the battle sequences, but the whole film takes place on one set (minus some flashback sequences, I believe). The film is full of chest-thumping patriotism, as the Chinese soldiers battle the Japanese expeditionary force in Manchuria to the death. Four Riders––not included in the set––a war movie with much the same cast set during the Vietnamese war with the United States, is much, much, much more critical and interesting a picture, and has much cleaner, clearer action, to boot.
The Anonymous Heroes and Deadly Duo are fun early teamings of Ti Lung and David Chiang where the chemistry is still really fresh and dynamic.
Probably worth explaining what I think is good about the other films I've recommended, too.
Deadly Breaking Sword is director Sun Chung's masterpiece. Ti Lung is the vainglorious hero getting on in years, a man whose sword gets shorter with every duel, as his schtick is to break off the tip of the sword in his foe as he kills them (a metaphor! In a Shaw Bros movie?). He agrees to a noirish plot to help a courtesan kill an evil doctor in town. Eventually he teems up with Alexander Fu Sheng as a casino security guard who marches to the beat of a different drummer. Sun Chung's style is not at all like that of Chang Cheh or Chor Yuen; he develops characters richly and uses that development to make the story extremely dynamic. There's a Peckinpah-like feel to the rivalries in this film, and it helps that Sun doesn't let any characters get dispatched too easily. Often they'll run away and return later on in the picture, sadder and wiser and more threatening. There's a strong sense in this movie that making a rivalry with anyone is a deadly business, and that the harm martial arts experts do comes back on them as they get older and live longer. It's a thematically rich film, and it has a really strong and different visualization as well. Sun Chung uses the zoom lens way more artfully than Chang Cheh or any of the other Shaw filmmakers except maybe Lau Kar-Leung.
Though I love the Sentimental Swordsman, it has to be said that all of Chor Yuen's best moviemaking, and his best films, come from the early part of his career, before the unending glut of Gu Long adaptations exhausts us and the director. Earlier, the films are much different from one another, more aesthetically adventurous, and more original-feeling. Duel for Gold has a blistering yellow and red color palette, and puts Ivy Ling Po and other actors you wouldn't really expect in this sort of thing through a noir-inflected roundelay of double-and-triple-crosses. The film feels immediate and very tactile (something the later movies will be increasingly abstract about). Killer Clans is a greater film, in spite of the fact that it's an undisguised wuxia remake of The Godfather––it even opens on a celebration scene like the wedding in The Godfather, an extended sequence in which we meet all the film's most important characters. Nonetheless, the adaptation works like a charm, and the film is full of intrigue, sleazy eroticism, fast swordplay action, and a huge cast of Shaws' best performers. One flaw is that the lead actor doesn't seem appropriately edgy in his role as a hired assassin––Danny Lee or Wang Chung, who also appear in this movie, would have been better fits for the role. The lead is Hua Chung, who just isn't quite capable of conveying the character as it's written. But there are so many other standout performances that it hardly matters. The film predates The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue, and so it might not seem as fresh to audiences, because those films borrow heavily from what the director achieves on this movie. But it has a fatalism that surpasses the other two films, a kind of sadistic confucian fatalism not many other movies display. Don't mess with the godfather, I guess.
Legend of the Fox, based on a Jin Yong novel, stars a very young Chin Siu-Ho in his first leading role, as well as most of the Venoms actors. Unlike the more hardcore Venoms movies, it's a story of dueling sorcerers fighting with poison, a for once pretty het romantic story (Chang surrendering, I guess to the timbre of the Jin Yong source material). There's good martial arts, the Venoms actors do the acting part of their job better than usual. Visually the film is very satisfying. It's a romantic fantasy adventure, a departure for Chang, but a good one. I don't know if I've ever gushed here about Chin Siu-Ho before, MVP of the original Mr. Vampire, brother of fight-double-extraordinaire/occasional-movie-star Chin Kar-lok. He is amazing in this movie, a great performer of martial arts on film, but also a swift, dynamic actor as at home in sly comedy as he is in more serious roles. To my mind he's a lot more fun and inspired on screen than a lot of his contemporaries, including classic actors in the same vein, like Jet Li (he is Jet's antagonist in both Fist of Legend and Tai Chi Master). And I think he has a lot more charisma than almost any of the kung fu-based lead actors in Hong Kong cinema. For some reason, his career was always a little lower-wattage than his contemporaries. Don't know why. His name now appears to be mud in HK cinema, after a couple of insalubrious scandals swirling around him, but I think he's exceptional in most movies and he should have gone farther. At the very least, all the movies his younger brother starred in would have been better with him in the lead. He was an actor with legitimate range, and some filmmakers––especially Lam Ngai Kai, cast him for his acting skills alone (he is the lead in The Seventh Curse and the crazy Mahjong thriller, Killer's Nocturne). He is in many of the Venoms movies, actually, but he is a huge value-add in this one, in particular.
Vengeful Beauty is one of Ho Meng-Hua's fastest-moving, most dramatically consistent and entertaining films, about a lady avenger, doing kung fu to avenge the death of her husband, all while in the early stages of pregnancy. The film is a spin-off of Ho Meng-Hua's Flying Guillotine movies, and the villains are the Flying Guillotine assassins––making it all the wilder that a pregnant woman fighting with just her fists and feet takes them apart. Ho Meng-Hua films can often move at a plodding pace through unsurprising story beats, but this one is much weirder than most, and directed with an unforeseen flair and intensity.
Shaolin Rescuers has some of the Venoms' best fight scenes and one of the their more suspenseful stories. House of Traps might be their sort of platonic ideal, with various members of the Venoms teaming up to do a heist in the titular house full of deathtraps. Life Gamble, meanwhile is almost like what would happen if Casino Royale was a Venoms kung fu film. Alexander Fu Sheng is very serious as the Bond-like character, and gives a good performance, and the film moves quickly through a lot of gambling and fighting scenarios. Between Shaolin Rescuers, House of Traps, Life Gamble and Legend of the Fox, you have what I think of as the best the Venoms have to offer (though maybe The Daredevils belongs in that group as well).
Lady of Steel is a western-coded wuxia film starring Cheng Pei-Pei as the drifter character. Delightful Forest is somehow Chang Cheh's sequel to the Li Han-Hsiang film which will be made a decade later, Tiger Killer. That's because they're both adapted from part of The Water Margin, just filming different parts of the story as different films, but both somehow star Ti Lung as the same character, the Tiger Killer Wu Sung. In the later movie that is a prequel to this, Ti Lung kills a tiger with his bare hands (mostly just a ridiculous dude in a tiger costume, looks like something out of Monty Python), gets hit on by his sister-in-law, and murders her and her lover when they conspire to kill the Tiger Killer's hunchback brother. Delightful Forest picks up when the Tiger Killer has been arrested for the murder of the sister-in-law and her lover, and chronicles his trip through the forest in stocks, as soldiers take him to be executed for the crime. Suffice to say, this and that happen, and he never makes it to his execution, fighting honorably to defend his jailors and fending off terrible villains out in the forest. If I remember right, he gets recruited from here into the collection of heroes in the manor at the titular water margin (a swamp). Ti Lung also plays this character in Chang Cheh's adaptations The Water margin and All Men Are Brothers––I guess Wu Sung was his specialty. Heroes Two is one of Chang Cheh's better movies about the aftermath of the burning of the Shaolin Temple, with Alexander Fu Sheng playing Fong Sai-Yuk and Chen Kuan-Tai playing Hong Xiguan.
These are really fun movies, but I'm leery of the quality. That and price has kept me from getting the Shout Factory collections. The Arrow discs look exceptional, but I have a lot of these other films on blu ray from Germany already, and I have the hunch that the German transfers are probably very similar to the Shout Factory ones. The German discs look better than the IVL DVDs, but they don't really look like quality blu rays with grain and depth and stuff. Honestly, at around half-price the Shout Factory discs are still too expensive to me. But maybe they look good? I dunno. The films are worth seeing, certainly.