One Armed Boxer

Here the tournament-dominated martial arts film intersects interestingly with the more folkloric magic aspects of the sword film. Wang Yu, directing with an eye to the Italian Western, plays his own hero, perhaps the most masochistic, impetuous and fight-loving of the lot, subjecting himself to the ultimate in dispossession before, through pain and self-punishment, coming back from the as-good-as-dead to wreak havoc. Wang Yu pits his hero against a genuinely fantastic array of fighters, including a fanged karate expert with a lank black mane, given to perching in the corners of rooms between the wall and ceiling like some malevolent bat, and two inflatable Tibetan lamas (who are able to arrest their own circulation). Distributor cuts make nonsense of the care taken to build up to the fight scenes by paying scrupulous attention to the rites attached to the various arts.