The Shanghai Killers

This Golden Harvest movie was released the same month as Bruce Lee's "The Big Boss". Jason Pai Piao and Chen Kuan-Tai are listed as action directors and I also spotted them in some fights.

I watched this movie once before and made notes that it was excellent. Today I watched it a second time.

My copy is a regional coded VCD. That stands for Video Compact Disk which was a short lived format between VHS or Beta tapes and DVDs. The movie cannot fit on one compact disk so it abruptly stops in the middle and you have to switch the disk. The good part is that you get true wide screen instead of the getting the side cut off. It is a rather narrow picture (top to bottom) to compensate.

It begins with everyone wants James Tin Chuen's broken sword. Some will fight for it and others offer to pay. Instead of simmering this bit of a mystery there is an expository dialog and flashback that explains the mystery but adds another question. This cycle repeats over and over again and is the only way the story moves forward. Oddly enough this lazy writing actually held my attention the first watch. I suspected though that all these little mysteries did not really add up. Even after a second view I have that suspicion but it is all too convoluted for me to be sure.

Of course in these movies it all comes down to the final fight. All the earlier fights were weapons fights and as good as could be expected for 1971. By that I mean there was good focus and power, there were long shots showing all the movement and minimal close ups and no shaky cameras, and there were up to ten or more moves before a cut in the action. The final fight, however, was not at all the best fight in the movie and it should have been. Instead it was too short and just repetitive of the earlier action. Overall, I rate this movie just a bit above average for the year and genre.

I came across a trailer of this flick on a grindhouse compilation DVD. Immediately I thought that I would like to see it but it wasn't that easy to track it down. I had to went overseas to the States to track it down because it's only available on NTSC VHS. But first you had to be sure to hunt down the right title because it was released as The Chase aka Shanghai killers aka Slash:The Blade Of Death. It do pops up sometimes on Ebay and Amazon for a reasonable price.

I was also surprised how good it was made even as it was a low budget. Some will turn this grindhouse flick of but if you watch it it is over before you know it. The story is easy to follow but what made it laughable was the English dubbing. That was out of sync and even as cheesy as it could be. No emotion in voices even as you see emotions on their faces. On the part of gore or red stuff, forget it. You only will see some scratches or here and there a hand being sliced by a samurai sword.

As I said earlier the acting was rather European style. Maybe it's explained that it was shot in Hong Kong. But what really makes it grindhouse are the fighting scene's that really looked laughable. The typical wiring shots are added but it's all done in a camp way. Still, I enjoyed it.

Gore 0,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Slash: Blade of Death aka Shanghai Killers aka The Chase is an early Golden Harvest film with above average gore and swordplay. It was released to VCD in Hong Kong in 2007, but is also available as a Region Free NTSC Special Edition DVD. Search for the website thekungfurobberfilms

There is no such thing as a regional coded VCD. Back in the late 90's and early 00's, their main appeal for martial arts fans was that VCDs have no region encoding whatsoever and do not even require DVD playback software; any computer with a CD-ROM could play them. The format was admittedly short-lived in the USA, but in Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Turkey, among others, they were huge, and are still released for commercial sale to this very day.

In the early 00's not many Americans had multi-region DVD players, so VCDs were very appealing. I have over 400 of them myself, and yes, I can play them on my Windows 10 Dell PC and on my Toshiba region-free Blu-ray player, as well.

There's an excellent web page about the VCD format. Look for a site called The Gweilo's Guide to Hong Kong Chinese Movies, and in the What Do You Want section in the right column, click on VCD. Otherwise, in the Archive section a little further down, select October. It's the fourth article.

A mysterious stranger (James Tien) wanders around China- various people are after his "Blood Sword", which has something to do with his father's death years before. There are many sword fights in this movie, and it is moderately interesting. The only problem is that the people in the flashbacks don't look any younger than in the rest of the movie. It's not a bad movie. The dubbing in the English Version is not very good. 6/10.

Eight stars for pure entertainment value.

I first saw this film in 1973, when it was released in America on the first wave of the '70s kung-fu fad that followed the success of 5 Fingers of Death. It remains as much fun now as it was then.

Not a great film - no, let's be honest, this is a really bad film. But it moves along so quickly, with such cartoonish violence, that you readily forget that there are any standards by which to judge such a film.

All the sword-fu in the film is of the unbelievably super-human variety, complete with the cheesiest wire-works ever. Really: there's not a single realistically portrayed fight scene in the whole film.

The acting is somewhat sub-professional, the dialog is hilarious, the staging and direction makes every scene look like a rehearsal. The plotting is overly complicated, but made over-simplified by cheap revelations - the villains lie to the hero, and then almost immediately tell him that they've lied to him, which kind of makes the deceit rather meaningless. But, then, this is not the type of film requiring any meaning at all - just 90 minutes of spare time when you have nothing to do or to think about. Just put your brain in neutral and enjoy.