Le bras de la vengeance

"The One-Armed Swordsman" is a classic and one of the best martial arts films of all time. So, it's not surprised that the movie had sequels. While not nearly as good, Yu Wang is back as the title character and it's interesting enough to merit watching if you like these sorts of pictures. If you don't, this one is unlikely to convert you.

When the film begins, a group of baddies named the 8 Kings attack the leaders and best students of the 40 martial arts schools. They then send an ultimatum to all the surviving students back home...."Cut off one of your arms or we'll kill your masters". Not surprisingly, they decide instead to seek out the One-Armed Swordsman and enlist his help. Will he come out of retirement to help? Well, considering the title of the film, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Along the way, they encounter a lot of treachery and baddies. My favorite was the evil woman who smiles so convincingly...as she murders folks right and left. She is an amazingly good villain and it's a shame she's only in a small portion of the film. In addition to her, you'll see LOTS of blood and gore and tons of ridiculous fight scenes using 'wire fu'. This is the most serious problem of the movie. In the first film, there is some wire fu but mostly it's just really, really great swordsmanship and martial arts. Here, however, the quality of the fighting is much, much lower with blood substituting for quality fighting. Not a terrible fighting film but certainly not near the quality of the first one despite having the same leading man and director. Diverting but far from a must-see. After all, you DON'T expect total realism from a one-armed film...but you do expect better than this.

By the way, if you want to make this film a drinking game, I suggest everyone take a shot every time a character is mortally wounded yet miraculously, for a few seconds, begins fighting again despite losing gallons of blood or having HUGE swords thrust through them! I especially love the scene with the guy impaled with a sword and he manages to kill a dozen more guys for about the next five minutes before he ultimately expires!

Fang Gang and XiaoMan are living peacefully as farmers. Brothers Black and White Swordsman deliver him an invitation to a gathering by the Eight Warlords. Each warlord with their own minions fight using specific weapons and techniques. The Black and White brothers kill anybody unwilling to attend. Fang Gang refuses and rebukes the brother. The various masters who submit are slaughtered with some imprisoned. The Eight Warlords order the students of these sword clans to cut off their right arm before retrieving the bodies of their masters. In desperation, some of the students come to Fang Gang for help.

This sequel has far more swordplay and action than the original. There are more stunts, bigger stunts and even rudimentary wire work. The various fighting styles are fun. The story does have a few minor problems. The story isn't quite as compelling. It's relatively straight forward. It's still plenty of fun to battle each one of the Warlords.

Fang Gang says that he suspected Hua Niangzi (the Thousand Hands King) all along but he allow her to walk around killing so many men. He could have just searched her for her swords. Even worst, he allowed her to kill his badly injured man telling him to finish her off. The guy needed immediate medical attention. There are also a lot of coincidences and too convenient moments. I'm willing overlook all of those flaws for some some pretty awesome fun fights.

I guess The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) must have done pretty well, because just two years later it got a sequel. One thing I've noticed about Shaw Brothers movies is that sequels are shockingly rare. The genre/action movies made in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s often got tons of sequels greenlit straight away (the Stray Cat Rock series had all five movies released in a window of less than 18 months, from memory), but Shaw Brothers in the Hong Kong scene seemed to have a different practice. They produced movies with similar premises often featuring a rotating cast of actors, but direct sequels themselves weren't too commonplace (maybe that's a natural consequence of having like half the movies end with the main character dying in an epic blaze of glory).

So as for this sequel to The One-Armed Swordsman? It's just okay. It benefits from being able to hit the ground running, but none of the beats it ends up hitting are all that amazing. It's just a serviceable martial arts movie, and in typical (and unfortunate) sequel fashion, it more or less does what the first movie does, but just in ways that are slightly less exciting. It's consistent in that regard... just consistently less exciting and entertaining, and I say that as someone who liked but didn't love the first movie.

But then again, an average Shaw Brothers martial arts movie is still better than an average anything else movie, because their standard of quality was generally so high throughout the late 1960s and into the 1980s. That makes Return of the One-Armed Swordsman a worthwhile watch for martial arts movie fanatics, but I don't think I'd recommend it to more casual action movie fans, in all honesty.

After watching the original One-Armed Swordsman, directed by Chang Cheh and starring Wang Yu in the title role, I knew I had to watch this direct sequel, as the others had David Chiang replacing Wang Yu as Fang Gang.

Continuing where the first movie left off, we see Fang Gang leading a life of a farmer, without a care of JiangHu politics. But as the saying goes, and in martial arts movie, so long as you're a reputable swordsman, trouble will always be looking for you. The emergence of the evil Eight Demon Swordsmen clan brought about chaos, with their issuing of forced challenges and a grand meeting amongst the swordsman clans. The senior members of various clans get annihilated or captured, and its down to the junior members to try and convince Fang Gang to come out of "retirement" to assist them in their quest of rescue, and getting rid of the Eight Demon Swordsmen.

It's also pretty cool to see the main villains being crafted with various deadly weapons and different personalities. Like the one with the deadly chain-attached sickle, or the mean looking knife-shield. How about a weapon which seemed to fire pellets of poison, and a sword with extensible blade? Perhaps the more interesting villain was the lady assassin, with her demure looks, and deadly hidden knives, giving a new meaning to back-stabbing! However, being villains, our hero and his gang of merry men, while on the way to the villains' fortress, get to dispatch them one by one in deadly, bloody fashion. Although by today's standards the blood is pretty fake looking, it's still quite a bloody affair with slashing, stabbings - knives through body, and squirting blood. But I must add that it did give a sense of cheesy nostalgia to how blood was created for the screen in those days.

Classic martial arts movie scenes like the bamboo forest also get featured in this movie, though the forest did look a bit sparse, since it was filmed in a sound stage. Added to the fight scenes was a demonstration of superb "qing-gong" (light-skill, fleet-footedness) by Fang Gang, though the wire work used was extremely elementary, and came across quite laughably. Back in those days, this sequence would have been da bomb though.

The story's nothing to shout about - it has almost every thematic element that you'd expect from a martial arts movie, and classic scene settings like forests and inns. But it sure is one heck of a fun ride - bigger, bolder, badder than the original, with a lot more disposable characters for the body count.

Code 3 DVD extras contains a pretty weak lineup of only the trailer (and trailers for other movies), colour stills, the poster, selected cast and crew biography and filmography, and a one screen production notes. The DVD for the original seemed better and more thorough.

A great sequel to the original film 1967 with the two main characters husband and wife reprise their role but went straight to the plot a against the eight dagger clan more action less drama more blood shedding and fight scene... it's already built up all the storyline in the first one... the second one is just smooth sailing onwards

Smooth transition from the original to the sequel... great antagonist and protagonist.