Hei ling guan

It opens to a group of men escorting prisoners across a snowy landscape. They stop at the home of the leader's mother. She recognizes Tien Feng, now a convicted murderer. His gang attacks at night and the family is killed. Tien Feng then double crosses his partner Li Tung. Tang Ching, the police escort, is now considered a criminal for letting them escape. He spends 15 years wrongfully imprisoned. On release he deals with revenge against Tien Feng for killing his mother, raping his sister, and marrying his sweetheart. That's a full plate of revenge. Tien Feng has been blind but his skills from using his ears as eyes are no less than super powers.

Tang Ching is a dramatic actor who transitioned into martial arts movies back when no real fighting skills were expected of the lead actor. That's the same situation for Tien Feng.

There are plenty of fights in the movie with the great Leung Siu-Chung as action director. Most of the action is swords but other weapons and bare fists are also used. There is the usual acrobatics. I felt that Tien Feng's powers were more magic than martial arts. There is no training sequence either to account for these blind skills but can there even be an interesting training sequence in this respect?

Overall I find myself rating this as just above average for the year and genre. What makes it just above average? Probably not the fights but the Shaw Bothers production status. I do recommend it for fans of the genre but acknowledge this DVD was hard to find when I acquired it a few years back. Nowadays, DVDs (unless newly released) require a bit of effort to find at all. Plus it seems the DVDs I already own have become a nuisance. I have hundreds that have resisted efforts to copy to digital media. These occupy an entire wall of my house whereas I have a few thousand more movies that occupy a digital drive that fits in my pocket. First world problems.