For some martial arts motion pictures, among the best testaments to their high quality is the sheer variety of occasions they have been copied. Shamelessly replicating the formulation of profitable movies was a standard development within the martial arts film style, particularly when it got here to old-school kung fu motion pictures.
There is no higher proof of that method than Bruceploitation, which was a state of affairs the place copying Bruce Lee’s fashion went to this point that the technique wound up creating its personal subgenre. However whereas Bruce Lee’s motion pictures are actually probably the most notable instance, they had been hardly the one sufferer of this explicit technique.
In reality, there have been fairly just a few nice martial arts motion pictures that grew to become the beginning factors of recent traits that took maintain within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
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The One-Armed Swordsman
One of the crucial vital constructing blocks for the long-standing definition of what constitutes a martial arts film got here in 1967 when Jimmy Wang Yu starred in Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed Swordsman. The Shaw Brothers wuxia traditional sees Wang Yu step into the position of an skilled swordfighter who loses his arm, relearns battle, and goes on a killing spree to avoid wasting his former martial arts grasp.
The One-Armed Swordsman was influential in additional methods than simply the impact it had on how martial arts motion pictures utilized male protagonists and coaching sequences; many had been much more direct, introducing their very personal one-armed heroes in movies resembling The One-Armed Swordswoman.
Apparently, Jimmy Wang Yu himself was an enormous a part of this motion. He starred in an extended listing of flicks as a one-armed martial artist, and just one was a authentic sequel to The One-Armed Swordsman. Most, like The One-Armed Swordsman Towards 9 Killers and The One-Armed Swordsman Meets Zatoichi, had been purely knock-offs and reimaginings of the unique concept.
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Fist Of Fury
Almost each Bruce Lee film has been copied in some kind a minimum of as soon as, however none has obtained that remedy greater than the actor’s second kung fu movie, Fist of Fury. The 1972 kung fu gem tells the story of Chen Zhen, a younger martial artist who comes house to seek out his grasp useless, presumably killed by members of a rival Japanese college, who act as an oppressive drive within the film.
Technically, Fist of Fury was a knock-off itself. The story clearly took inspiration from Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1970 Shaw Brothers hit, The Chinese language Boxer. However whereas The Chinese language Boxer was the foundation of that development, it was Fist of Fury particularly that so many motion pictures had been making an attempt to emulate.
Fist of Fury’s patriotic Chinese language vs. Japanese theme, mixed with Bruce Lee’s portrayal of the insurgent hero, has led to plenty of remakes, sequels, and knock-offs, from Fist of Fury Half II to Jackie Chan’s New Fist of Fury.
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The Flying Guillotine
The One-Armed Swordsman wasn’t the final Shaw Brothers movie to be the topic of quite a few rip-offs. In 1975, Shaw Brothers made The Flying Guillotine, a film that starred Chen Kuan-tai as an murderer who performs executions for the emperor with “the flying guillotine,” a weapon designed to take away folks’s heads from afar, by way of a sequence and a basket with bladed edges, wielded like a lasso.
The weapon, which was supposedly based mostly on an actual system from China’s Ming Dynasty, served as the idea for some wild motion sequences the place characters would lose their ends in a style that was each spectacular and absurd on the similar time.
The Flying Guillotine was a smash hit for Shaw Brothers, prompting rival studio Golden Harvest to reply with Grasp of the Flying Guillotine. The consequence was a cycle of dueling “flying guillotine” motion pictures from Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, together with Flying Guillotine, Deadly Flying Guillotine, and The Vengeful Magnificence.
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Drunken Grasp
The discharge of Drunken Grasp had a domino impact in 1978, launching Jackie Chan to stardom and setting the stage for a brand new wave of martial arts motion pictures impressed by its central premise, which was a martial artist combating with drunken boxing fashion kung fu.
Just like Drunken Grasp, many of those movies would see younger heroes be taught drunken boxing from aged ne’er’do’properly alcoholics, who would turn into secret martial arts masters.
Yuen Siu-tien, who performed the mentor to Chan’s character in Drunken Grasp, returned to reprise his position in a number of religious sequels, together with Dance of the Drunk Mantis and The Story of Drunken Grasp. Drunken boxing remained related for years by way of releases resembling Shaolin Drunkard, 5 Superfighters, Shaolin Drunken Monkey, and extra.
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5 Lethal Venoms
Drunken Grasp was truly considered one of two motion pictures to kick off a martial arts phenomenon in 1978, with the opposite being Shaw Brothers’ 5 Lethal Venoms. 5 Lethal Venoms instructed the story of six martial arts specialists, all skilled by the identical grasp and 5 having their very own distinct types, with the sixth understanding a bit of every.
The story follows the sixth pupil, who has to seek out the opposite 5 and determine which of them have taken the trail of evil and which of them he can rely on to defeat the others. 5 Lethal Venoms emerged as a cult favourite, leading to Shaw Brothers reusing 5 of the six foremost actors for a long-running sequence of martial arts motion pictures. They made so many motion pictures collectively that they even had their very own nickname: “The Venom Mob.“
They did not all share the identical story as 5 Lethal Venoms, however had some issues in widespread, such because the 5 actors often taking part in the primary characters, with a minimum of one or two taking up a villain position. And like 5 Lethal Venoms, they took full benefit of the Venom Mob’s particular person skillsets so as to add some variety to the martial arts choreography.
The Venom Mob consisted of Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Lo Mang, Phillip Kwok, and Solar Chien. Sometimes, any movie that features a minimum of two of the 5 martial arts stars in main roles is considered a “Venom film.”
In the end, the idea grew past the 5 actors, with different studios utilizing an analogous ensemble format and banking on the identify by movies resembling The 9 Venoms and 5 Venoms Assault.