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Shaolin Cinematic Universe

A collection of 13 posts

The Shaolin Cinematic Universe

The Odd One Dies

The Shaolin Cinematic Universe

This was originally commissioned by the Vulgar Cinema website in July 2014, and was published in December 2015. Then, after that site disappeared, it was revised and republished at Frame.land in May 2019. Now that site too appears to be defunct, so I'm posting it once again

Pretty Good Stuff: The Shaolin Invincibles and Seven to One (Hou Cheng, 1977 and 1973)

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Pretty Good Stuff: The Shaolin Invincibles and Seven to One (Hou Cheng, 1977 and 1973)

The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk II (Corey Yuen, 1993)

The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk II (Corey Yuen, 1993)

The second part of the story, released four months after the first, brings back most of the cast and shifts the setting from Canton to the headquarters of the Red Flower Society. Jet Li’s Fong is apprenticed to the leader of the group, whose ostensible aim is the restoration

The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk (Corey Yuen, 1993)

The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk (Corey Yuen, 1993)

Return of the 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo, 1976)

Return of the 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo, 1976)

Probably the most confounding entry in the excellent Joseph Kuo boxset from Eureka. Not so much because of the film, which is certainly unusual, but because it is so obviously merely the first part of a multi-film story (despite its title it is not in fact a sequel to The

The 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo, 1976)

The 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo, 1976)

Finally an honest-to-God Shaolin film from Joseph Kuo, and of course it’s not one that has the word “Shaolin” in the title. Focusing on the Temple’s site as a center of pro-Ming resistance to the nascent Qing Dynasty, it otherwise follows a typical Kuo revenge plot: like in

Lau Kar-leung Capsule Reviews

Lau Kar-leung Capsule Reviews

Challenge of the Masters (1976) — June 30, 2013 Gordon Liu as a young Wong Fei-hung, an origin story for kung fu cinema’s greatest folk hero. Lau Kar-leung plays the villain, as scared and desperate as he is merciless and dishonorable. The true climax though is a philosophical one, as

Chang Cheh Capsule Reviews

Chang Cheh Capsule Reviews

The Magnificent Trio (1966) — November 5, 2017 Chang Cheh’s second wuxia film, and the oldest one to survive. The first, Tiger Boy, was a low-budget black and white film for which he did the choreography himself. By all accounts it has been lost. The Magnificent Trio is in color

Martial Club (Lau Kar-leung, 1981)

Martial Club (Lau Kar-leung, 1981)

In the prologue to this 1981 film, Lau Kar-leung himself comes on stage to tell us about some of the unwritten rules of lion-dancing, the ways one dancer can offend another and thus incite a brawl (blinking your eyes, lifting a leg, sniffing the other lion’s butt). The next

Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Chang Cheh, 1980)

Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Chang Cheh, 1980)

Well, there’s actually 15, if you count the five descendants of the Ten Tigers. Which could make this a bit confusing, but Chang Cheh gives us some friendly faces and nicely spaced exposition to emphasize that this is actually a very simple story. In the present, a guy and

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters circles back and starts at the beginning of another 1974 Chang Cheh film, Heroes Two, with the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, but then goes off in the other direction. A narrator helpfully informs us that the Chen Kuan-tai character in that film went south and met

Heroes Two (Chang Cheh, 1974)

Heroes Two (Chang Cheh, 1974)

Chang Cheh’s take on the Fong Sai-yuk character has Alexander Fu Sheng playing him as a good-hearted but dim-witted boob who is quite easily gulled into capturing one of the few survivors of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, Chen Kuan-tai’s Hung Hsi-kuan, and handing him over to

Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977)

Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977)

The anti-Qing struggle and the destruction of the Shaolin Temple is a common narrative backdrop in kung fu movies. Respectively, they’re kind of akin to the role the Civil War and Little Big Horn play in American Westerns. The Temple story is a subset of the larger Qing-Ming war,