EXACT REVENGE: THE EUNUCH [1971] and THE DEADLY KNIVES [1972]

The Deadly Knives, The Eunuch (1971, 1972)
Directed by: Jang Il-Ho, Teddy Yip
Written by: Chung Kuo-Heng, Lo Wei, Teddy Yip
Starring: Bai Ying, Ching Li, Lisa Chiao Chiao, Tsung Hua, Tzu-Fei Yen, Yue-Hua Kuan

EXACT REVENGE: THE EUNUCH [1971] and THE DEADLY KNIVES [1972]

HONG KONG

AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY: NOW, from EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

THE EUNUCH [1971]

AKA GUI TAI HAN 

RUNNING TIME: 105 mins

As assassination attempt fails on De-hai, the power-mad Royal Eunuch. De-hai slays the would-be killer himself, then kills all members of the royal family who were behind it except for Prince Jin, who is luckily somewhere else. Unaware of his family’s demise, he’s about to return to the palace but is lured into the forest house of hermit and martial arts master Gong-san who agrees to train him though De-hai’s men are bound to find them soon. De-hai is visited by his long lost father who tells him that he’s the father of a daughter named Yan Yan who lives nearly with her mother. This isn’t something that he wants to know or even get around, so he decides to kill even more people, even members of his own family. However, Gong-san has a wife who’s just as skilled as her husband, so Yan Yan soon receives some training too….

As martial arts movie fans, we love seeing lots and lots of brawls onscreen, and don’t at all object if a film is just one fight after another, but it’s also often nice to see a product where the fights aren’t as dominant and just one aspect of a well balanced film. The first of the two offerings in Eureka Entertainment’s next Shaw Brothers release, and another one that doesn’t feature works from Chang Cheh, is a rather good example of this. The title probably gives the impression that it’s about a heroic eunuch, but that’s certainly not the case, this eunuch being a particularly hissable villain whose evil seems to have no bounds. The storyline cooked up by Lo Wei is perhaps typical of him in that it’s slightly more cluttered in terms of characters then it needs to be, and a few scenes go on for longer than they probably need to, but then again I was pretty involved in what was going on so I didn’t mind some dialogue scenes lasting a while. The plot compels, even if there are instances where more could have been done with the relationships between a few of the main characters. With only a few fights coming along until the final reel, and all of them being rather short, I’d say that the film would have been okay if it hadn’t featured any at all, despite its employment of one of the silliest things that you often get in such movies; the way that some skill or technique is set up but our hero of heroine holds back on using it until the end, when realistically he or she would be employing it as their first move and defeating their opponent immediately. However, this would rob us of a proper end fight, wouldn’t it?

We zoom into photographs of the three main characters, after which we get similarly tinted – the schemes being black paired with several other colours – stills that seem to be from the film. We immediately meet out eunuch, waiting with a lot of attendants for the arrival of Liu Guo-sheng, the brother of the Empress, who wants De-hai’s help with something and invites him to his place. A guy arrives with a “seafood dish for the master eunuch”, and it’s checked, but not well enough, because the man grabs a dagger from the bottom of the container and lunges at De-hai when he’s close enough, but De-hai jumps out of the way before challenging his attacker to fight him. The former is no match for the latter though he keeps attacking until an arm, a leg and his neck all get broken -just before he’s finished off with a sword from a guard. It’s easy to be on the side of De-hai here, a man who’ll fight attackers himself rather than getting his men to do it, but suddenly our impressions of him are changed when he visits the Emperor [Wei himself, in an oddly likeable part for him] and tells him to drink some poisoned wine, then, in another very brutal moment, kills the Empress, picks up her very young son and throws him towards his guards, one of whom is skilled enough to slice him dead with his sword! However Prince Jin is not present, and must be hunted down and killed pronto. Jin is busy chasing after a man who’s just grabbed a woman’s baby; however, it turns out that this was just to get Jin to run into the forest and find the remote house of Master Gong-san, aka “The Old Man of the Bamboo Forest”, though it doesn’t make sense that Gong-san knew that he had to save Jin seeing as De-hai had only just committed the crimes that we’ve just seen. I guess travels fast in this part of the country.

Some of De-hai’s men soon show up under the leadership of Zi Cong, but Gong-san defeats most of them. He, Gong-san, plus a woman who lives with Gong-xan and her very young daughter then have to go on the run. Jin asks Gong-san to be his teacher, Gong-san eventually excepting. The baddies then try another trick, kidnapping the child. Jin offers himself as captive, but then the day is saved by a soldier who’s decided to help them and holds a throat to the knife of Zi Cong unless Jin is released. It’s here where we learn that De-hai plans are to have “Concubine Cao’s son” to get the throne. I have no idea if this has any basis in fact, but in any case the script never refers to it again. Then De-hai has a visitor named Ma Liang-Bo who seems to be very interested in the things in the room that he’s waiting in, in a drawn out but rather poignant moment. He’s De-hai’s father and has been looking for him for 20 years, though he evidently hadn’t been trying very hard seeing how powerful and therefore well known his son has become. De-hai got a woman pregnant then abandoned her, and he wants to keep this quiet as it will ruin his reputation if it got out. so he actually kills his dad and orders the killing of Yan Yan and her mother. However, along comes the wife of Gong-san to save the day. She doesn’t have a cool nickname or even a name but we’ll name her “The Old Lady of the Bamboo Forest”. She and hubby are going to train both Jin and Yan Yan, who are drawn to each other, but what’s going to happen when Yan Yan eventually does meet her father? Will he say goodbye to his villainous ways? How will she react when she finds out that Jin is out to kill her dad? Do we care? Yes we certainly do, especially as we already know that people we like can be killed.

Simon Chui Yee-Ang was responsible for the fight choreography here, and he does a pretty good job, though a scene where Jin and Yan Yan dress as Ninjas then literally glide through the air into De-hao’s palace goes too far with the wirework aspect. Okay, this is a Wuxia so one should expect combatants to jump into the air sometimes, but this bit is silly; why don’t Jin and Yan Yan employ this skill elsewhere. However, the brawls mostly featuring swords, are fairly smooth. Though we had that opening fight, the action only really kicks into gear when Gong-san sets about the soldiers threatening his house, causing a lot of bloody mayhem with his bamboo staff, then dueling with Zi Cong. Gong-san’s wife gets a similar scene later on, then otherwise it’s just tiny confrontations until De-hai for some reason decides to have a martial arts competition in his main hallway which begins with Sammo Hung getting his ass handed to him by a guy who then has to fight Yan Yan who doesn’t even bother to take her sword out of its scabbard, Lisa Chiao Chiao looking good here despite her entrance wearing a mask that in no way would hide her appearance [though at least she’s not pretending to be a man] in realityas she then has to battle Zi Kong, then Pai Ying as De-hai before Chung Wa as Jin finally comes to save the day in s climactic fight which has a decent length, though the emphasis on more on the emotions of all the characters. In a film that’s generally serious except for a neat little scene where most of our good guys and gals are having dinner and Gong-san keeps giving more and more of his and other people’s food to Jin, we do chuckle during the two times when the “Wandering Souls Style” is depicted, with purple lines appearing and Jin suddenly having teleported himself several metres.

More could perhaps have been made of the double training that’s going on, though Gong-san and his wife are a great pair, with mischievous glints in their eyes, a sense thar they’re having fun. Jin and Yan Yan get a training fight, but then start to get closer, the first signs of romantic emotion neatly signified by there suddenly being lots of closeups of the while they say things like “your martial arts practise has made you even more beautiful”, before there’s a return to more distant shots as the mood of love is replaced by more serious matters. Both stars are fine in their roles, Chung Wa doing especially well in an intense sequence where his character is poisoned in an odd but believable way but it’s often Pai Ying, essentially repeating the role that he played in Dragon Inn, who steaks the show. You could say that it’s mot too hard to act a study of evil, but Ying really transmits to us that only one thing is important to him; power. The director is Teddy Yip, in what was probably his first effort despite the dates. No, I hadn’t heard of him either, even though he’s actually acted in a lot of movies I know and a few I love so would be recongisable. He wasn’t a prolific filmmaker, but on the evidence of this film he should have been. He brings some interesting stylistic elements and moments, without detracting from the story he’s filming. A particularly nice example is when one character realises the truth about somebody else and similar but slightly different images of this person appear on the left hand side of the screen while the profile of the other character fills the right hand side.

The nicely dramatic and suspenseful musical score is mostly Akira Ifukube’s score for Daimajin; even if you haven’t seen that film, if you’re s Godzilla fan you might still recognise several pieces in slightly different versions to the ones you know, including even s little bit of the main theme for Godzilla, because Ifukube often repeated himself. It does fit this really rather well put together piece, a film that [I say this every now and again] those who aren’t fight fans might also enjoy, because there’s much else to enjoy and appreciate. In fact, despite its 105 minute running time, it could have done with some elements being gone into a bit more.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Original Mandarin audio

New audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema
Leeder and Venema are on fine form here, as they take us through The Eunuch with their lighthearted but informative and insightful banter which sometimes digresses – but that’s part of the fun. Almost a running theme through this track fron Venema is the number of films that Hong Kong cast members and technicians make, beginning with 270, then a whopping 400, before finishing with 66o films that were edited by Hsing-Lung Chiang, though it’s Leeder who informs us that in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan actors and actresses don’t get residuals from films they worked on, so often have to keep working. Leeder also gives us the low down on eunuchs in Chinese history, some of whom “carried their preserved components in a jar hoping to be reunited with them in the afterlife and be reborn as a complete man” and tells us that bamboo is being phased out despite how good it is, while Venema, who, as with other recent tracks says as much or even slightly more than Leeder, tells us other historical details like a punishment for murder being to castrate a killer’s male children so the family line couldn’t be continued, and says that Yip was “kind of finding his footing” with this film, so I hope we get to see some others. A great track.

THE DEADLY KNIVES [1972]

AKA LUO YE FEI DAO, FISTS OF VENGEANCE

RUNNING TIME: 88 mins

Yan Zi Fei and Guan Yue Hua are in love and are returning home to tell their parents. The Yan family owns the logging operation there, but Japanese business magnate Mr. Ogawa wants the forest to himself as it will be very helpful to the Japanese army, and enlists Mr. Guan to help him. Also, an orphan the Yan’s took in, Jiao Jiao, is in love with Zi Fei, and she herself is wanted by Xu Gian, another orphan. Mr. Yan won’t sell though, so Ogawa, Mr. Guan and the local magistrate concoct a devious plan to bring terror and shame of the Yan family in addition to stealing the deeds to the area, while Zi Fei and Yue Hus’s relationship is getting tested….

The late ’60 / early to mid ’70s saw loads of martial arts films positioning the Japanese as bad and the Chinese as good. Considering that Japan invaded China several times and for a while even ruled it, this is understandable, especially seeing as the majority of these films are set during said occupation. Fist Of Fury is definitely the widest seen, and was imitated considerably, but it was certainly not the first. Nor was 1968’s The Chinese Boxer starring Jimmy Wang Yu, but that particular offering might be the first to make a major impact. The Deadly Knives, a rather more straightforward and indeed less noteworthy effort than The Eunuch, is in many ways typical of a lot of these films, containing many of the usual tropes, from battling martial arts schools, to the Japanese not playing fair in order to get what they want, to the killing of the hero’s master [well, the latter is probably the most used premise in the genre], to a treacherous Chinese guy helping those nasty Japs and being a person we perhaps despise even more, and so forth. In this one, early on we’re presented with a love square [as opposed to a love triangle] and are given the impression that romance and intrigue will be the order of the day; well, there’s certainly intrigue, but this love stuff is utilised as some of the motivation for the plot to move forward, with some characters making bad decisions, and it gets pretty dark and brutal, with an emphasis on the poor treatment of women even though things aren’t graphic in that area. However the fairly frequent fights aren’t particularly distinguished despite being choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping and Yuen Cheung-Yan, with its star looking somewhat mechanical at times. And the title is a bit of a lie – the “deadly knives” only make themselves known near the end and aren’t even used much.

Okay, I wasn’t quite telling the truth; they turn up at the very beginning too, the credits taking place over shot of knives in leaves pinned to logs and houses, the significance of the leaf aspect being something which escapes me.  Then we see three trees falling, having been felled, followed by shots of a machine and logs on a moving train. We meet the dastardly Mr. Ogara, dubbed in the English language version [regular readers will know that I tend to prefer watching the English versions of these films] with a suitably overbearing and campy voice which I think we’ve frequently heard before and doing similar parts.“The timber in this forest will be very useful to our army, we must get out hands on it”, he yells. Now we find ourselves on a train, a different one, the one taking our two young lovers to the town where the parents of both live. “Nothing will ever come between us”, says Yan Zi Fei to his fiancee Yue Hua, but then a group of drunken Japanese thugs come through the carriage being noisy and hassling a female passenger. Zi Fei politely asks them to leave, then rather calmly engages in combat with them when one tries to strike him, and wins. “Shall we reconsider getting married, I’m scared you’ll beat me up as well” says Yue Hua in one of the usual several lines that we’re not sure if we’re meant to laugh at or not. Arriving in town, Zi Fei is greeted by Jiao Jiao, an orphan his father took in when Zi Fei was little. She has a huge crush on Zi Fei, so doesn’t give Yue Hua a particularly warm welcome even though Zi Fei had never shown interest in her, and she has an admirer herself in the form of fellow orphan Xu Qian! Even without the Japanese around, no good can come of this situation, can it?

Zi Fei’s dad tells him that the Japanese have been causing trouble and he must take over from him in leading a defense. An old guy challenges him to a fight and Zi Fei deliberately loses so the man can keep his pride. The Japanese have heard of Zi Fei but, as with any martial arts movie villain worth his salt, Ogawa is getting in some skilled fighters to help out because he really wants the Yan lands, but Mr. Yan won’t give in. This is overheard by Zi Fei, who sees that Ogawa has an ally in none other than Yue Hua’s father, which ain’t good, and another in the local magistrate, which isn’t good either, though Zi Fie is mysteriously told to father to “just look inside the statue, what you find in there will solve your problems”. Well that’s certainly setting something important up. A fight ensures which achieves little, then Mr. Guan thinks of a way that Ogawa can get the land transferred to him, but first of all the deeds need to be stolen from the Yan house. Zi Fie and Yue Hua meet up, but Jiao Jiao confronts them and in her jealousy picks at Zi Fei, while Yue Hua runs away upset, Zi Fei follows, and Jiao Jiao is approached by Xu Qian who’s been following her. She rejects him, but suddenly all this building up of the love melodrama and the villainy overspills when the bad guys get Xu Qian drunk, he dreams of Jiao Jiao naked then tries to rape her before being interrupted by Zi Fie. Xu Qian is kicked out, then goes to the Japanese and will steal those deeds in return for some demands. However, in the process he kills Mr. Yan. Some of the plotting here is rather clumsy, but we had to get here somehow, and now we get a relationship break up, the Japanese getting greedier and crueler, and hopefully a training sequence?

Well, all we have of that is a bit of knife throwing, when, in a really silly bit, our hero sees a knife that’s impaled a leaf and realises that he needs to brush up on his knife-throwing skills, though all he does is do a little bit of throwing at the beginning of the climactic melee, then engage in an admittedly rather cool Western-style duel with Ogawa’s righthand man Ishikawa, who wields a pistol throughout [seeing as how in charge of situations he seems to be, maybe a point here is being made about how useless martial arts can be when pitted against firepower] which doesn’t end the way that you expect. Before that, the action can basically be classed as “okay”. The early scene of Zi Fie on the train besting those thugs makes good use of the awkward space, but already there’s something about Li; he’s a bit stiff and rigid, Most of his fights have him emphasising Karate moves as he faces off barehanded against multiple Japanese wielding swords and, while the chaotic nature of some of these confrontations, which don’t employ wirework, would normally provide some sense of realism – a different feeling to the wonderful but more stylised and theatrical nature of what we usually get in these films – we’re not convinced that Li’s character can best all these opponents. It seems appropriate that he’s rescued not once but twice from death by others, and things become overly repetitive with little variation in the fights except for a mass brawl showing up every now and again, and they aren’t great either. . There’s no big ending duel either. A nighttime one in a field might be the best staged fight. We still get lots of those long takes that we love, one great one being when, about halfway through, Ling Yun as Xu Qian gets a samurai sword and shows off with it.

The blood really flows and spatters in this one, and Zi Fie gets tortured on a water wheel, while one of the female characters gets strapped to a cart which is pushed fast twice at a wall so that she bashes her head. Another of the two ladies really suffers in this film, and, while it’s possible to see the script as being crass in the way it emphasised sexual violence, the “main” scene of sexual assault is very tame and cuts away before it gets really nasty, other moments are more just threat, and for several scenes we’re allowed to see how much her experiences have damaged one woman. Most films, especially ones of this kind, don’t go into this, with rape victims often acting as if nothing particularly bad has happened. The one bit of comedy is when a drunken Japanese man wants to rape one lady and is confused by seeing another, though the darkness of the situation still dominates. Out of the two leading ladies, Lily Li has the more interesting part and really gets into it. She’s given two nude scenes to do, though her privates have been blurred by things on the curtain through which it’s shot. I didn’t think that Hong Kong censorship required this, unlike in Japan/ Also worth mentioning is Dean Shek, before he became much more of a comedic performer, in a non-mocking performance playing Doggie, a “simple” guy who helps out the good guys. Korean director Jang Il-Ho doesn’t quite have the style and class that made me want to check out Teddy Yip’s other stuff, but it’s definitely not unprofessional despite more lingering shots than usual which are out of focus; obviously we don’t mind a few because we know that there there were no monitors. Elsewhere cinematographer Wu Cho-Hua does a nice job with lots of precise character framing in shots containing lots of people. Was the very rushed final act [things  happen so quickly] due to the production running out of money?

There’s a particularly beautiful example of the artificiality of Shaw Brothers sets, the outside of a house with multicoloured clouds in the sky and the red of leaves on a few trees sticking out. Of course soundtrack nuts will notice a music cue repeated from Joseph Koo’s Fist Of Fury score, not to mention some Diamonds Are Forever [John Barry] chords that show up in loads of these films from the period. This film has some very clumsy moments and the fighting rarely soars. But, in the course of writing this review, my estimation of The Deadly Knives has grown. It can happen. Some thought was clearly going on in terms of how showing the depletion of China’s natural resources in symbolic terms, though the rape element can be defended even without that seeing how appalling the treatment of Chinese women was by Japanese soldiers, and it even seems to end with a warning. And again, most of the story could have been told without any fighting at all.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Original Mandarin mono audio 

English dubbed audio

New audio commentary by Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival)
Cheng does another one on his own, and as usual he doesn’t bore for a moment and remains focused. He’s a bit slower and more relaxed these days – though that could at least partly be because he’s commentating on less well-known films about which there’s not an awful amount of information and isn’t trying to cram in as much stuff as possible. In any case, his talent for observation is well in evidence, such as noticing that Lilly Li suddenly has a bruised cheek in one scene, this probably being because she’s been slapped though the shot depicting that was cut out, and explaining an insult not shown in the subtitles. And I’m so glad that Djeng also sees the symbolism that I mentioned, seeing that Djeng is far more qualified than me to speak about such things! He sees the fights as getting more complicated, which I guess I’d agree with even though they’re not executed particularly well and, somewhat disturbingly, remembers his father telling him about Japanese soldiers going from door to door looking for women to take away and rape.

Falling Leaves, Flying Daggers – new video essay by Jonathan Clements, author of A Brief History of China [13 mins]
Clements offer a good look at The Deadly Knives without repeating that much material from the audio commentary, though one wonders why he didn’t talk abpout The Eunuch too seeing as, despite the other film’s qualities, it’s still the more notable product. He says that the falling leaves imagery is common and that we see “an image of discarded bit bits of foliage tumbling from their branches after a life spent in the service of state”, as well as telling us that political events, especially a cultural love-in between China and Japan led to the wave of very anti-Japanese films being made, and that the recognition of the Korean market in 1966 led to a lot of Korean-focused elements and Korean crew members. Clements also points out an important quote on a wall in the film which most of us would have missed. One only wishes that this could have been longer and also covered the other movie.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Limited Edition [2000 copies]

Limited edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré (Gokaiju)

Limited edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing on both films in this set by writer and film critic James Oliver and East Asian cinema expert Camille Zaurin

1080p HD presentations of both films
For the most part, both films look as great as we’ve come to expect, with colours which pop out, deep blacks, a lot of detail and evenly managed grain – and makeup that’s extremely obvious in closeup! However, one brief scene from The Deadly Knives looks like it comes from a lesser source, and I’ve already mentioned those out of focus which of course aren’t the fault of Eureka or Celestial Pictures. These issues shouldn’t really hamper your enjoyment

Optional English subtitles, newly translated for this release

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While not quite classics, these two films are a good example of Shaw Brothers craftmanship and are more than just fight flicks, the action just being the icing on the cake. The featurette and, as usual, the audio commentaries from our favourites, provide strong added value. Highly Recommended!