Sfida alla morte

There seems to be some differences between the film I watched and the other reviewer, perhaps because of different international cuts. I find no alternate title of "Shaolin Killers" for this movie, just "Bloody Duel:Life and Death" from Crash Masters. My copy is from Crash Cinema and is "Bloody Fight". The DVD quality is excellent. Yes, it's the evil Japanese plot. There is plenty of fighting and most of it is good enough for 1972. Tang Ching once again plays the good guy, this time with a thin moustache. The high point of this movie is the drunken boxing fight. Tang Ching takes on Kuan Tai-Chen and Pai Ying's other students after drinking too much wine. To my knowledge this is the first drunken boxing fight choreography ever and it is well done. That fight alone made the whole movie above average.

I wonder how many Hong Kong movies there are about noble kung fu fighters being harassed by wicked Japanese martial arts experts trying to prove their superiority; I've seen a few (the most famous being Bruce Lee's 1972 classic Fist of Fury), but given the racial tension that has long existed between the Japanese and the Chinese, and the prolific nature of the Hong Kong movie industry, I have the strange feeling that I've only scratched the surface...

Shaolin Killers (AKA The Bloody Fight), which was made the same year as Fist of Fury, stars Tan Chin as Choi Sai Ho, a talented fighter who is rejected by Master Tien for killing a Japanese warrior while defending a young couple. Shortly after, a gang of Japanese fighters, led by Chen Chang (Fong Yao), rock up and challenge several local kung fu masters to a duel to the death—which results in several dead kung fu masters, including Master Tien (who forgives his exiled student just before dying).

Tien's pretty daughter Chi Ling (Ingrid Hu) flees to her uncle's school, but it's not long before Chen Chang turns up there as well. After Chen knocks seven shades of the proverbial out of Chi Ling's uncle, the young woman tracks down Choi Sai Ho and he is accepted into her uncle's school. There, Choi Sai Ho helps to develop a fighting technique designed to beat the Japanese, by combining three styles of martial arts and perfecting a method of always landing on one's feet when thrown (based on the aerodynamics of a shuttlecock!!!).

If you manage to lay your hands on this movie, I hope for your sake it's of a better quality than my DVD, which looks like it was taken from a fuzzy old VHS tape. Image quality issues aside, I quite enjoyed this old-school chop socky flick: it features a cool villain in the expressionless Chen Chang, lots of fight action with plenty of leaping through the air, a fun battle involving drunken style kung fu, a pair of kick-ass Chinese cuties, a smattering of bright red gore, the obligatory training montage, and a frantic smack-down at the end which culminates with the hilarious sight of Choi Sai Ho balancing on Chen Chang's shoulders while his partner Tien Hwon (Alan Tang) gives the Japanese bully-boy a jolly good kicking.

This movie was so amazingly good that i could not sit through the entire thing. I was in awe of it's sublime nature and profound meaning. I actually went out and contemplated the world after watching this movie. The fight choreography was so well done that it made a movie such as Enter the Dragon look as though the fights were done by drunken porn midgets. After watching this movie i could not contain my amazement that this has not become the top rated movie in the world. How "The Godfather" gets a higher rating than this movie is beyond me. All I can close with is "Wow!" and enjoy the movie.