The Chinese Boxer

The Chinese Boxer (Long Hu Dou) (1970)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: Jimmy Wang Yu

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Lo Lieh, Ping Wang, Hsiung Chao, Mien Fang

From: Shaw Brothers

Here's another review I'll copy and paste from Letterboxd. Finally I watched another Shaw Brothers Studio film. I explain the plot in the write-up I did for the site, as there's none on IMDb and the one on Letterboxd looks like it was written by someone who doesn't know English as their first language. I will return Sunday night.

It had been too long since I watched a movie on the El Rey Network and also too long since I had seen a Shaw Brothers joint; as they always show a pair of SB movies every Thursday night, I killed two birds with one stone by checking out this film, one I've heard is influential in kung fu history and also one that was a big assist to Jimmy Wang Yu's career, as he starred and directed this.

It's a simple yet effective tale (I do understand why some would feel underwhelmed, though) where “Japanese fighters” kill Yu's master and most of his fellow students and he decides to get revenge. I did hear beforehand The House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill was “inspired” by something in this film and there was both samurai and Spaghetti Western influences; this is all true.

The movie made it patently clear that the villains were despicable people; there's no shades of gray. Besides the killing they do (including innocent people on the street, not martial artists), they gamble, accuse people of cheating, and yeah, there's even a rape to up the ante. That's why I enjoyed it so much when the hero gets his revenge in a bloody way, and oh yeah this is quite a bloody and graphic film, with the claret flowing often, whether it's spurting out from swords and daggers or it coming out of mouths due to internal injuries.

There was also comedy-at least in my mind-of Yu's disguise you see for much of the second half; there are reasons why but he wears a surgical mask and what pretty much are large white oven mitts; I was not expecting to be reminded of Michael Jackson while watching this, but it's true. Overall, I enjoyed the film as something different from what I typically have seen while slowly going through the Shaw Brothers filmography.