Master Of The Flying Guillotine

Master of the Flying Guillotine (Du Bi Quan Wang Da Po Xue Di Zi) (1976)

Runtime: 93 minutes

Directed by: Jimmy Wang Yu

Starring: Yu, Kang Chin, Chun-Erh Lung, Chia-Yung Liu, Lung Wei Wang

From: First Films Organisation

Because all 70's Kung Fu movies should be scored to 70's Krautrock.

I have heard of this Jimmy Wang Yu picture before, a sequel to 1971's One Armed Boxer... which hasn't been viewed by me before as I understand it wasn't necessary to do so, and that seemed like the right choice on my part. It sounded like my jam and well... if you love wild over the top martial arts pictures from the past, then boy do I have a movie for you.

Yu is a one armed boxer who has a school. However, he kills two underlings of an old blind dude and this dude is PISSED. He has a flying guillotine weapon that decapitates you if it wraps around your neck. A martial arts tournament is held and as our hero will be there, that is where the villain decides to show up for revenge. The fact that this location has several one armed people is one of the many absurdities present. I mean, this is a motion picture which shows the martial arts tournament for more than 20 minutes and it proves to be superfluous except to introduce some further enemies that assist the blind man. Thankfully, when we witness the copious amounts of martial arts battles, all are different so that aspect never wore out its welcome.

There was plenty that made me laugh. Jimmy walks on the ceiling at one point as if he's Lionel Richie. An “Indian” fighter can extend his arms, and that was the inspiration for Dhalsim from the Street Fighter series-no kidding. The fights in the tournament was typically to the death, and I laughed harder & harder each time some stooges came out w/ a stretcher to drag off bodies. There's more I dare not spoil but the soundtrack has to be discussed. Whether it was Yu or someone else, whoever decided to use Krautrock (without asking those record labels for permission, a common phenomenon for foreign movies at the time) was a genius. Personally, that made this all the more awesome seeing the villain have a theme song from Neu!-it was why Tarantino used that for Kill Bill; he loves this motion picture. A song from an early Tangerine Dream album was used, three ditties from Kraftwerk's Autobahn that wasn't Autobahn were heard, and then there's two from Neu!

This is not the film if you want to see a serious, austere martial arts film, even though the action here was fine. Rather, if you enjoy the strange, psychotronic entries in the genre, then you'll be happy this is easy to track down via YouTube.