By the early 1980s, the Shaw Brothers Studio had been eclipsed as Hong Kong’s most popular genre film studio by Golden Harvest and their more comedic take on martial arts cinema with stars like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. Plagued by lower theatrical returns, which was exacerbated by the explosion of piracy in Southeast Asia with the advent of home video, the studio would—barring the occasional efforts in later years—cease film production in 1986 and pivot to making TV. As such, Shout! Factory’s fourth box set of Shaw Brothers films, all of which were released between 1980 and 1984, presents a cross-section of the studio’s last great burst of filmmaking.
In terms of directorial variety, this set has the least of any of these collections to date: Of the dozen films on offer, seven are helmed by Chang Cheh and feature all or some of his Venom Mob troupe of actor and fight choreographers, with each film’s plot being mostly a perfunctory setup to the team’s elaborate stuntwork. Another three films—Shaolin Prince, Shaolin Intruders, and Opium and the Kung Fu Master—represent the entire directorial oeuvre of actor turned filmmaker Tong Kai, leaving only Chor Yuen’s Black Lizard and Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s Holy Flame of the Martial World as outliers.
On the one hand, this means a reduction in the stylistic variety on offer in the prior sets. On the other, the quality of the included films runs at a much higher rate of consistency given that the majority of the discs are given over to the Shaw Brothers Studio’s greatest in-house director. One can argue that Chang by this point had become a conservative artist; as the rapidly growing Hong Kong New Wave directly engaged with the province’s social and political concerns, Chang’s films here show him still crafting period movies with themes more suited to the censorious demands of Mainland China. The Rebel Intruders, from 1980, is set during the brief Republic era of the early 20th century and portrays officials as corrupt and infighting warlords, while films like Masked Avengers and Sword Stained with Royal Blood, both from 1981, are revenge thrillers in the vein of much of his Shaw Brothers catalog.
Even so, Chang’s films double down on his pessimistic view of the very violence that he excels at staging, undercutting any propagandistic notions of heroism with a broader view of moral quagmire. Legend of the Fox, from 1980, is yet another tale of a young man (Chin Siu-Ho) whose traumatized mind fuels his bloodthirsty revenge, while Masked Avengers takes a small band of wannabe heroes and infiltrates them with members of the marauding gang that they seek to defeat, leading to a number of brutal double-crosses that end in gouts of blood. Nonetheless, throughout his films included in this set, Chang does take advantage of the Venom Mob’s charisma and camaraderie to complicate his usually dour critiques of honor-code violence with some of the easygoing humor that Golden Harvest added to the genre.
Of course, the chief pleasure of these Chang offerings is the opportunity to see a well-practiced artisan showing off his craft. Masked Avengers is a showcase for choreography involving pole weapons that’s captured almost as adroitly as it is in Lau Kar-leung’s Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, albeit swapping that film’s sense of poetry in motion for sheer force of impact. Five Element Ninjas, from 1982, shamelessly cribs Japanese ninja tropes and spins them into a variety of fight scenes where everything from warriors diving in and out of tunnels to strategically wielded metal hats makes each combat scene unpredictable. Chang and the Venoms also experiment with how to maximize the production design of the films as part of the action choreography. As its title indicates, 1982’s House of Traps takes place in a building laden with booby traps that the characters must navigate or risk drying by them, and in grisly fashion.
By this point, Chang had become perhaps the all-time master of the snap zoom, and some moments in his movies here reveal that he’s able to use the technique to effectively create insert shots without cutting. In The Rebel Intruders, for one, the camera at one point snaps from a long shot of the two combatants to a close-up of the man elegantly curving his shin around the bench that his opponent thrusts at him to counter the attack. Then, the camera jumps back out, only to pan away to peer inside a window of a nearby tavern to watch an entirely separate brawl happening inside. Most other directors would have used at least three shots to capture these distinct moments, but Chang compresses them into one, and manages to do so in only a few seconds, all the while keeping the overall flow of the action coherent and logical.
Tong Kai’s three films showcase a more workmanlike style that stresses clear framing of intricate choreography. Tong was one of the great Shaw Brothers Studio stunt coordinators prior to trying his hand at directing, and he proves a natural at taking in each elaborate exchange of strikes with relatively longer shot durations than are found in other Shaw Brothers films and a coherent balance of impactful close-ups and more broadly observant long shots.
All three of Tong’s films are a delight, but the finest is 1983’s Shaolin Intruders, which balances a murder mystery filled with twists and betrayals with some spellbinding wire-fu stuntwork. Even the best Shaw Brothers films often suffer from a whiplash in tempo between their frenetic action and lugubrious plot exposition, but both aspects here work in perfect tandem in Shaolin Intruders, which is as great as the finest in-house works by Chang or Lau Kar-leung.
As ever with these sets, a few selections show their datedness. Chang’s Two Champions of Shaolin, from 1980, gets mildly lost in the shuffle of his much stronger offerings included here. Chor Yuen’s Black Lizard, from 1981, begins with a great deal of promise, leaning into the expressionistically colorful, goofy-gory action-horror that was starting to emerge as a viable subgenre in Hong Kong at that time. But the film derails as quickly as it grabs one’s attention, diverting into a leaden, talky detective story with a plot that’s simultaneously too convoluted to easily follow and too meaningless to warrant the needless adornment.
Black Lizard looks especially shallow compared to Tony Lou Chun-ku’s Holy Flame of the Martial World, which, two years later, took similar stylistic cues from expressionistic, almost giallo-like horror but used them to action-movie effect. Still, this is by far the most consistent of the Shout Shaw Brothers sets to date, and it presents a snapshot of a studio propelling itself to new heights just as it was preparing to call it a day as a movie production company.
Image/Sound
Shout! Factory’s sets devoted to the work of the Shaw Brothers Studio have maintained a remarkable consistency in their A/V transfers. The florid colors pop across each of the films, and darker scenes rarely suffer from any crushing. The audio tracks are all clear and faithfully reproduce the assets and drawbacks of the studio’s dubbing, with each Foley effect of metal-on-metal weapon collisions ringing out and every line of dialogue front and center and intelligible in the mix because it was added in post. At this point, it’s remarkable how unremarkable it has become to see and hear these long-bootlegged and poorly maintained films in such high quality.
Extras
As expected, Shout! loads up the set with commentary tracks for each film with a range of critics and specialists, who discuss the selections with fannish enthusiasm as well as more analytical details about the productions and the social contexts in which they were made. There are also interviews with actors and crew members, as well as with some critics and film historians who cover the larger shifts in the Hong Kong film industry during the 1980s.
Overall
Shout! ups the ante with its finest selection yet of films from the Shaw Brothers Studio.
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