Swordsman

Rather tendentiously credited to the veteran King Hu (it was supposed to be a ‘comeback’ film for the director of A Touch of Zen, but he left the production very early on and none of his footage remains), this actually plays like a vulgar and resolutely modern-spirited pastiche of the kind of movie he used to make. As such, it’s a lot of fun: a roller-coaster ride through memories of the great Chinese swordplay movies of the ’60s. It plays out the joke about an explosion in a dye-factory, and then romps through a series of gravity-defying fight scenes in which the antagonists not only clash in mid-air and slice each other in half, but also unleash darts, poisons and swarms of deadly insects at each other.