The Flying Guillotine/The Dragon Missile - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

The Flying Guillotine/The Dragon Missile



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Shout Factory has been on a mission to release a ton of the old classic Kung-Fu movies with regards to Jackie Chan and Sonny Chiba as of late, but one of their biggest (and latest) undertakings has been to release massive 11-12 disc sets of the classic 1960s and 1970s Shaw Brothers classic films. Highly coveted and incredibly hard to get all of them outside of expensive imports, we get a lovely set of 12 films in this second box set (sadly we weren’t able to review the 1st boxset, but I can fully attest that it was just as great as this one as I bought it personally) that covers a six year period for the Celestial Pictures produced films. Last but not least we get to my favorite film of the entire box set (The Flying Guillotine) and a film that I haven't seen in the better part of 20 years with The Dragon MIssile.

The Flying Guillotine:
Ahhh, now on to my favorite film of the entire boxset. 1975’s smash hit The Flying Guillotine. A touch of horror, a touch of classic Kung-Fu cinema and we have one of the most fun and cheesily innovative films of the time period. Set in the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Yung Cheng (Chiang Yang) rules through fear and power in order to maintain his rule. That means if some officials do something that jeopardizes his image, he whacks their head off and kills their family (totally nice guy, right?). When two officials need to be killed, but killed secretly, his advisor Xin Kang (Ku Feng) comes up with an ingenious way of killing from afar. He invents a bladed “hat” that can be thrown from a chain, and when said hat is thrown onto a person’s heat it drops a hood down and slices their head clean off. Which means all said assassin needs to do is yank the chain and return the bladed hat back to it’s owner and the victim is left decapitated with no one know where the attack came from.

The Emperor is delighted with the invention, and tasks Xin Kang with heading up a dozen man strike force trained in using the flying guillotine (which the device has been dubbed) that would become the emperor’s private hit squad. Among the twelve assassins is Ma Teng (Chen Kuan Tai) who turns out to be the best at using the flying guillotine. Rising through the ranks quickly as the Emperor’s favorite, Ma Teng soon finds out that success at his job is not all it cracked up to be. A sneaky conniver by the name of Shuang Kun (Frankie Wei Hung) is spying on him to the Emperor, and Ma Teng’s conscience is having a hard time with all of the innocent men that they’re required to decapitate. Soon it’s a convergence of his own conscience and the Emperor’s will, leaving Ma Teng no choice to but to escape his life as a government hitman and leave for good.

Ma Teng’s escape is not exactly taken well, causing the Emperor to send the remaining members of the team out to hunt him down, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes. Ma ends up falling in love with a street performer named Yu Ping (Liu Wu Chi) and begins a new life as a farmer, where he and his new bride settle down while keeping a wary eye out for any of his old friends on their relentless search. Naturally Xin Kang and the rest of them catch up to him, and it’s now a battle to the death with spinning blades, more decapitations, and his rival Shuang Kun showing that his was never to be trusted.

The Flying Guillotine sounds like it’s a hilariously cheesy film just off of the premise, and you would be correct. It is a hilariously cheesy movie, but one that is a whole barrel of fun. The movie has more decapitations than the entire French Revolution, and while there is some “horror” elements to it, it plays out more for comedic effect in modern audiences. However, the action is non stop, and Chen Kuan Tai is absolutely mesmerizing as Ma Teng. He’s always been a powerful performer in his films, but this is easily one of his best Shaw Brothers roles, and my personal favorite of the series.

The Dragon Missile:
1976’s The Dragon Missile is pretty much a stone cold staple of the Shaw Brothers world. It’s straight forward and paper thin on the plot as can be, and doesn’t try to blaze any new trails or become overly unique among their massive catalog. Directed by Flying Guillotine’s Meng-Hua Ho, we get more decapitations (this time with a missile weapon instead of a flying bladed hat), more kung-fu action, and that’s about it. Meng-Hua Ho had been part of Shaw Brothers all the way from the 1950s and 1960s, so in the 1970s he had started to experiment with more horror and other genres, which explains why this and The Flying Guillotine was so much different than his older works (although not massive differences). His penchant for bladed weapons and lots of fake blood comes out as cheesy in modern day audiences, but back then to a 1970s Hong Kong world this was rather inventive and horrifying.

The film begins with evil Lord Chin Kuan (Chi-Chin Yang) who has skin cancer (shown as blistering boils) and orders Jun (Lieh Lo) to go retrieve a sort of palm mandrake root that Chin Kuan believes will cure his boiling skin. Along the way Lo has to fight through the typical array of villains who try to stop him on his journey, with Lo naturally cuts through them like paper. However, along the way we also get met by the good guys in the form of Tieh (Tony Liu) and his band of merry and the rogue Tan Li (Nancy Yen). Unfortunately Lo kills the blind mother of Tier and steals her rattan root he was after. Tieh and Tan Li both realize that Lo now has to be taken care of, forcing them to team up and retrieve the root before he gets back to Chin Kuang.

The Dragon Missile is a straight forward and pretty cliché Shaw Brothers film. Good guys have to defeat a sort of kind not really bad guy in order to defeat the super evil Lord, and lots of kung-fu fights along the way. The only real stand out feature of the film is the Dragon Missile itself, as it a super sparky and violent tool that allows for some cool decapitations and some interesting deaths. Otherwise this is not the typical martial arts films of the 1970s that Bruce Lee was bringing in. It still hearkened back to the late 1960s where the Shaw Brothers blade and epic Wuxia was dominating. It’s an interesting flick, but at this point in their life span, the Shaw Brothers films were losing steam, barely holding back the tide of the modern Kung-Fu flick with Bruce, Jackie and Sammo looming on the horizon. Still fun, but definitely one of the last of it’s kind.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA / Rated PG-13 by the MPAA




Video:

The Flying Guillotine:
The Flying Guillotine is a good looking film in 1080, with a strong encode that hovers in the mid 30s for bitrate. Like several others before it, the film rebounds from incredibly revealing and sharp imagery, to other shots that look blurry and not nearly as crisp. Watching these 12 films back to back to back it’s pretty clear that this isn’t an encode or mastering issue, but something stemming from the filmography techniques used in the day. It’s not the end of the world, but it is definitely something that keeps these films from being totally amazing looking. The really amazing 50% of the film looks great, with richly saturated reds and deep inky blacks, while naturally the blurrier shots suffer a bit more. All in all, this is nice looking film with almost no print debris, smudges or damage anywhere that I can see.

The Dragon Missile:
The Dragon Missile suffers a bit in the film department, even though I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the fault of the master at all. The image is a bit dulled, with less sharp colors than we’ve seen before, along with the typical “one scene looks great, one scene looks a bit mushy”. That being said, everything is done well enough, with strong primary colors that splash through on occasion, and not very much print debris on the master. Bitrate is solid in the mid 30s, and overall this is a nice looking image. It won’t shock and amaze you, but still a nice encode.








Audio:

The Flying Guillotine:
Both films have been given a 2.0 DTS-HD MA track in both Mandarin and English, and as usual, I would leave the English track for sentimentality sake alone, as it is the very epitome of the old 1970s Kung-Fu dubs. HORRIBLE voice acting, and a nasty tone to them which may be fun for MST3K films, but not for serious fans. Anyways, the 2.0 Mono Mandarin track is on par with most of the others. It’s clean and clear where it counts, with minimal distortion on the end of the dialog. The whistling and whirring of the flying guillotine is a cool little sound effect for the simplistic track, and the score comes through pleasantly in the 2 mains. All in all, quite a nice track considering the time period.

The Dragon Missile:
Much like the video, The Dragon Missile’s 2.0 Mono Mandarin track suffers just a hair. Dialog is clean and clear for the most part, but it does sound a bit muffled and stifled at times, with the typical dialog distortion/hiss at the end of words. The score is perfectly fine though, and outside of sounding just a bit stifled or “squashed”, the audio mix is perfectly serviceable.











Extras:

The Flying Guillotine
• NEW Audio Commentary By James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic At easternKicks
• NEW Audio Commentary With Chris Poggiali, Co-Author Of These Fists Break Bricks And Brian Bankston (Cool Cinema Blog)
• NEW Flying Without Wings – Actor Kai Kang Shares His Memories Of Working With The Studio In His First Ever On-Camera Interview
• NEW Dubbing Delirium – Joseph Ellison, Dubbing Artist On FLYING GUILLOTINE For Its U.S. Release, Reflects On The Early Kung-Fu Film Boom
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Celestial Trailer

The Dragon Missi
• NEW Audio Commentary By James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic At easternKicks
• NEW Cutting Comments – Jim Marcovic, Editor Of Many Martial Arts Trailers For U.S. Cinemas During The 70s And 80s, Speaks About The Kung Fu Film Boom
• Trailers For Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 1 And The Brave Archer Collection (The Jade Raksha, Little Dragon Maiden, Killer Darts, The Flying Dagger, Dragon Swamp, The Brave Archer And His Mate, The Bells of Death, The Sword of Swords, The Invincible Fist, And The Thundering Sword)

Final Score: ​

Wrapping up the box set with one of my favorite Shaw Brothers films of all times was just about perfect. Left on a high night and rightfully so. This was a fun period piece duo that wasn’t as strange bedfellows as some of the other pairings we reviewed. Audio and video was good for the most part, and this set has more extras than I was expecting. All in all, a very fun watch.

(as this is a single release from the massive boxset, our "buy now" links will go directly to the boxset and not an individual release)


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Kuan Tai Chen, Feng Ku, Hung Wei, Ti Ai, Lieh Lo, Tony Liu, Nancy Yen
Directed by: Meng-Hua Ho (both films)
Written by: Kuang Ni (both films)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC (both)
Audio: Mandarin: DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono, English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
Subtitles: English
Studio: Shout Factory
Rated: NR/PG-13
Runtime: 106 minutes / 86 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: August 15th, 2023

Recommendation: Fun Watch

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