Your kung fu is only so-so.
Kung fu movies break down into certain categories. You have Bruce Lee and his imitators - fierce, brutal choreography, usually taking place in a modern setting, plot not all that different from a crime movie. You have the more recent wuxia pictures, noted by their fanciful wirework and balletic choreography. Stars like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung specialized in stunt-heavy comic adventures, the jokes as fast-paced as the frenzied fights. And then you have the classic period epics from the Shaw Brothers Studio, probably the first to come to mind when the words kung fu flick are used. The Shaws dominated the Hong Kong film industry for much of the sixties and seventies, pumping out dozens upon dozens of classic films.
Executioners from Shaolin assembles some of the best talent available to the Shaws at the time, from stars Lo Lieh and Gordon Liu * to director (and choreographer) Lau Kar-leung. The story concerns the formidable priest Pai Mei being assigned the task of ransacking the Shaolin temple of any and all dissidents. The movie opens with Pai Mei and the head Shaolin master locked in mortal combat. Although his skills are impressive, the master stands no chance against Pai Mei, and is viciously murdered. The remaining disciples barely escape with their lives, with our hero Hung Hsi-Kuan swearing revenge on Pai Mei.
The story jumps around about as much as the principals do in the fight scenes, constantly cutting forward through time, which makes watching the film a little disorienting. We follow Hung as he meets a girl - the next scene they’re getting married, the next scene she’s having a baby, the next scene they’re training their child in the ways of kung fu, etc. But we’re not here for the story - we’re here for the fights, which thankfully are plentiful and come at a brisk pace. Lau Kar-leung’s choreography is as good as it ever was, equal parts fanciful and violent in the great Shaw Brothers tradition.
The story - disjointed though it may be - also takes some nice, unexpected turns along the way. Hung spends decades perfecting his Tiger Style Boxing to fight Pai Mei; challenging the priest on more than one occasion and barely escaping with his life, each time learning a bit more on how to defeat the master (one of his training regimes involves catching marbles that trickle down rivulets on a bronze statue in a scene that I‘m not entirely sure makes much sense, but is awesome nonetheless). By the time his son has grown, Hung finally feels confidant enough to defeat Pai Mei… Except he doesn’t. The film builds up to this final confrontation for Hung to finally exact his revenge on Pai Mei, but he’s still not ready - Pai Mei kills him just as he did his master at the Shaolin temple years before.
That would have actually made for a rather ballsy ** ending for a kung fu film, but Hung’s death is not the end. His son, Wen-Ding has been trained by his mother in the Crane Style, which his father refused to learn because, I don’t know - I guess he thought it was too girly or something. Piecing together the Tiger Style from an old book of his father’s, Wen-Ding figures the best way to beat Pai Mei would be a combination of both styles, masculine and feminine. And that’s about as deep as Executioners from Shaolin gets.
But that’s okay. With amazing choreography and story that hits all the proper beats, Executioners from Shaolin is one of the better offerings amongst a sea of kung fu competitors.
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* Although he dies early on - but the upside is he dies in one of the film’s best scenes, still fighting even after taking a hail of arrows to his chest.
** And speaking of balls, one of Pai Mei’s “powers” is his ability to pull his testicles up into his body, and trap his opponents’ feet in his crotch to allow him to deliver his killing blow. There’s a strange fascination with groins throughout, as there’s another lengthy scene on Hung’s wedding night where Hung’s bride challenges him to spread her knees apart to get to the, er… goods.
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