| Master Of The Flying Guillotine The fantastical is commonplace in the loopy world of kung-fu cinema, where laws of gravity are widely ignored, the structural integrity of ceilings is constantly threatened, and characters' nicknames frequently double as their fighting styles. That's particularly true in 1975's Master Of The Flying Guillotine, a delirious kung-fu saga that's being reissued with 12 minutes of previously excised footage. Wild even by the genre's lenient standards, the film stars writer-director Yu Wang as a renowned one-armed boxer who teaches students such useful job skills as walking up walls. While helping out at his brother's martial-arts academy, Wang becomes the target of the titular blind martial artist (Kang Kam), whose weapon of choice combines the portability of a boomerang with the head-chopping prowess of a guillotine. Kam is eager for revenge—Wang killed two of Kam's disciples in a flashback sequence tinted a garish shade of pink—and he isn't about to let his disability interfere as he inflicts as much pain and mayhem as possible. When told at one point that he's killed the wrong one-armed man (the film contains a wildly disproportionate number of them), Kam responds, with evil glee, that he doesn't care, and will kill any one-armed man he encounters. Wang, meanwhile, observes but does not participate in a fighting tournament featuring combatants such as Win-Without-A-Knife Yakuma, who, contrary to his name, finds it convenient to use a cunningly concealed blade against his opponents. A battle royal of gleeful absurdity, Master Of The Flying Guillotine often takes the form of a live-action video game, which seems appropriate, given that many of its characters have since been appropriated by popular games. Guillotine's special effects are never convincing, and its sound effects are comically overdone, which only adds to the film's naïve, ramshackle charm. Like Jackie Chan, Wang's reluctant hero never seeks out trouble; at heart a spiritual fellow, he's perpetually rejecting challenges to duels as "inconvenient." His stone-faced hero possesses a strange anti-charisma, and there's something charming about a master boxer who wins his climactic battle as much through his mastery of applied science as through his fighting skill. Goofy Z-movie fun of the highest order, Master Of The Flying Guillotine needs to be seen to be believed, and even then defies belief. —Nathan Rabin |
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