Description

Before Hong Kong’s mightiest film studio mastered the art of the kung fu film, Shaw Brothers hit box office gold with a very different kind of martial arts cinema, one that channelled the blood-soaked widescreen violence of Japanese samurai epics and Italian spaghetti westerns into a uniquely Chinese form: the wuxia pian. With their enthralling tales drawn from historical myth and legend of sword-wielding (and often gravity-defying) noble heroes, the wuxia films housed in this next instalment of Arrow Video’s best-selling Shawscope series demonstrate the sweeping stylistic evolution of the genre, from the righteous stoicism of the late-60s Mandarin period, right through to the wild-and-weird anarchism of the early-80s Cantonese explosion.

High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentations of all fourteen films, including thirteen new 2K restorations by Arrow Films from the original negatives, and a new 4K restoration of One-Armed Swordsman by Celestial Pictures
Original uncompressed Mandarin mono, plus Cantonese and/or English (where applicable) lossless mono options
Newly translated English subtitles for each film
Illustrated 60-page collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by David West, Jonathan Clements and Dylan Cheung, plus cast and crew listings and notes on each film by Ian Jane
New artwork by Tony Stella, Ilan Sheady, Tom Ralston, Jolyon Yates, Kung Fu Bob and Chris Malbon
Hours of illuminating bonus features, including feature commentaries on each film, several cast-and-crew interviews from the Frédéric Ambroisine Video Archive, and the rare alternate Korean cut of Killer Constable
Exclusive CD of music from the De Wolfe Music Library, as heard in The Avenging Eagle and other Shaw Brothers classics

My love of the Shaw Brothers would probably start with 1966 with Come Drink With Me and ending with 1985 with Disciples of the 36th Chamber, so it’s my goal in life to collect all the Kung Fu films in that nearly 20-year period. Considering that the Shaw Brothers Studio cranked out about 30 films a year, we’re looking at a daunting 600 films I have to try track down!Thankfully, companies like Shout Factory and Arrow Video are releasing numerous boxsets, featuring some of these rarely-seen Hong Kong films. I personally already own most of Chang Cheh’s films (including all the Venoms films), so I have about 150 Shaw Brothers films on VHS, DVDs, and Blurays… but with these new releases, we’re finally seeing some of these DVD or VHS quality films in glorious 1080p.

So, I finally purchased Shawscope: Volume Three, released last year. What I said last year still stands, I was not in any hurry to get these boxsets, and I wasn’t really interested in these wuxia films, which is Volume Three’s theme and focus. If you didn’t know the wuxia genre preceded the kung-fu craze of the 70s, and usually have supernatural fantasy elements in the films.

The Volume Three boxset is being discounted 50% off, trying to clear their stock before Volume Four comes out. If you were on the fence about purchasing this, do it now before it goes out of print. Currently Volume 1 is out of print and resellers are selling it at double the original retail price.

Even though I don’t like the fantasy films, the boxset gave me the opportunity to explore other Shaw Brothers directors (yes, there are many other directors not named Chang Cheh or Lau Kar-leung or King Hu). One of the directors spotlighted here is Chor Yuen (aka Chu Yuan), who directed two of my favorite Shaw Brothers films, The Magic Blade and Killer Clans (not collected here). When I first saw these two films on DVD after importing them in 2002 for the first time (you have to remember that these Shaw Brothers films were lost/never released outside of Hong Kong), I was blown away. It was certainly very different than anything I was used to with Chang Cheh’s style. For example, The Magic Blade is really a weird Spaghetti Western disguised as a Kung Fu film. Those films are a little outlandish, but if you take it into context that they’re based on Gu Long novels, they are literally trying to translate those stories to film.

The four Chor Yuen collected here are: The Magic Blade, Clans of Intrigue, Jade Tiger and The Sentimental Swordsman.

While the main star/headliner in this set is the One-Armed Swordman trilogy, and as much as I love Jimmy Yu, I’ve seen these films numerous times and they’re not my favorite. Nothing against the classic trilogy (which has a fresh brand new 4K restoration by Celestial Pictures and L’Immagine Ritrovata for this Arrow release), but I feel there are better films – such as Kuei Chih-hung’s Killer Constable.

I saw Killer Constable for the first time during the pandemic and it became one of my favorite Shaw Brothers films, because of the good story and great twist. I previously bought the 88 Films version, but am eagerly interested in checking out the new 2K scans and three, count ‘em, three commentaries exclusive to this release. I feel like many other critics love this film and probably offered their commentary services to this film (that’s why there are so many commentaries).

In addition, for all Killer Constable fans, Arrow Video included a “High Definition” release of a rare Korean Version of Killer Constable. The film is watchable, but unfortunately, the only source for this Korean version is from a VHS copy. They did their best to clean up the VHS transfer and blown it up to 1080p and splice in a 2K transfer of the Hong Kong release. It is sometime jarring to watch a feature like this, because you can instantly tell which scenes are taken from VHS (it looks awful). They did this a few years ago when another studio discovered multiple cuts of Master of the Flying Guillotine and they put together an ultimate cut. Unfortunately, due to audio and visual quality, it is not my prefer cut of the film. Still, for the uber Killer Constable fan, it is extremely nice to get a Korean cut, alongside the official Shaw Brothers cut.

Like the previous two other Shawscope releases, this one also offers a third volume of Shaw Brothers Music, courtesy of De Wolfe Music Library.

If you are a Shaw Brothers fan, you probably already own this. With 14 films (with numerous special features and commentaries) in the third volume, there’s plenty of content to keep you entertained for weeks on end. Even though the truly wacky films, like Buddha’s Palm, which is not my cup of tea, I still do appreciate Arrow Video’s love and care in releasing these films. The old films look better and have better details than some modern films like 28 Years Later.