continued.
(sorry for pt.1 - i wrote it on my smart phone)
5. Master of the Flying Guillotine
This movie has way to much cool stuff going for it not to make the top 10. First, it's got Jimmy Wang Yu as the One Armed Boxer. He might not have been the best on screen martial artist ever, but he was more than serviceable as well as being charismatic enough to carry off more than a couple kung fu classics. Then there's the flying guillotine itself, one of the coolest, most outlandish weapons ever come up with for a kung fu flick. There's also the blind, seemingly indestructible government agent dressed like a monk who is wielding our titular weapon which looks like a collapsible top hat lined with blades. And lets not even talk about the awesome (especially its conclusion) tournament/deathmatch and one of the best line up of bad guys ever. A must see for any fan of the genre.
4. The Heroic Ones
The best (that I've seen, at least) of the Chang Cheh swordplay movies. Featuring David Chiang and Ti Lung, two of the better actors who could still pull off a decent fight scene in what has to be one of the most violent films ever committed to celluloid. That is, if one were not comparing this to other Chang Cheh movies. At any rate, Chang and Lung give a couple of their best performances in this reenactment of a classic piece of Chinese literature and one can easily see in the way that Cheh handles the themes of loyalty, brotherhood and betrayal as well as the extended, harrowing battle scene where Ti Lung basically takes on an army while his guts are hanging out, where Cheh's assisstant director John Woo's later revolutionary style has some of its roots. Epic. Violent. And quite the genre classic.
3. Enter the Dragon.
This movie literally has everything. Prerequisite kung fu tournament/multi-ethnic deathmatch? Check! Bass-heavy 70's soundtrack? Check! Seriously high production values thanks to an american partnership? Check! Oh, and quite possibly the baddest dude who ever walked the earth? Check! You've even got a young Jackie Chan getting his neck snapped, for crying out loud! Now some people don't think that Bruce Lee's style was as photogenic as Jackie Chan or Jet Li's and thus, that Lee is not quite the action star as the others. To this I would say perhaps. His choreography isn't done to the same rhythms that later kung fu flicks would establish, but I think Lee, more than most, tried to make his fights as realistic as possible. And what does come through for every second that Lee is on screen is that this is a man who could hurt you and everyone you knew. All at once. Within seconds. Even without knowing of his reputation for being always willing to fight anyone, anywhere and at anytime and usually beating them so quickly that he freaked out and came up with Jeet Kun Do after not being able to beat up some other super badass quick enough for his tastes, one can sense from his mere presence that this is perhaps the most dangerous (and let's not forget cool!) dude anyone will ever meet. Watching him beat up a room full of people or watching him sit at a bus stop is almost the same thing. Its like watching a tiger thats not quite hungry yet walk through a classroom full of overweight third graders. And it still comes through on film almost 40 years later.
2. Fists of Fury.
Again with the man who was basically 100% menace wrapped in a layer of Steve McQueen-strength cool. And what better way to start a movie starring The Baddest Man Who Ever Lived than to have him have promised his mom to never fight again. Watching him resist the urge to whup some *** is almost as much fun as watching him whup it. And when the whupping starts, whew! By the time the cops finally haul him off you're almost relieved. And then you think, " But what if someone starts some crap with him in jail? He'd have to beat up everybody in prison! Then he'd never get to take a nap! And everyone knows that giant cats like to take lots of naps. Seriously, the guy probably sent more guys to their local kung fu/karate/tae kwon do schools than any other single factor in the last 40 years and in Fist of Fury we get to see him at his rawest.
1. Five Deadly Venoms.
While Bruce Lee, for me, is an example of the human form and spirit taken to its natural limits, Chang Cheh's work with the famous Venom Mob, a collection of mostly Opera House trained stuntmen, is the ultimate expression of the dark, violent fantasy world inherent in a genre where the standard hero is trained to mete out death in an as stylistic and visually entertaining manner as possible. Gone are the righteous heroes played by charismatic actors that marked Cheh's days of making swordplay movies. At this period in his career, mildly photogenic and barely competent actors who could do amazing stuntwork were all that Cheh needed to crank out some of the true classics of the genre. And while most individual members of the Venom Mob couldn't carry a whole movie by themselves, the more of them featured in the same movie, the more likely it is that that movie is not only cool, but one of the coolest movies you'll ever see. And none more so the the Five Deadly Venoms, which of course, has them all. And just because the acting skills on display are not the strongest does not mean that all the movie has to offer is action. The story, worthy at least of a Sergio Leone, serves the action very well and if you've never seen it before there's even a bit of mystery to it. There are enough interesting characters that the movie never has to linger with one long enough to notice the actors' flaws and the action, as with all of Chang Cheh's work with the Venoms is standard setting. Again, most of these guys were Opera House trained and the fight scenes are some of the most photogenic, intricate and downright cool fights ever put to film. It's way past time this movie was remade. And if you haven't seen it yet, its way past time you did.