Watching as Many of the Films I Blind Bought this Year Before the Year is Over 19Martial Club, directed by Lau Kar-Leung, 1981
Two years ago I bought two box sets from Arrow Video which featured several films produced by Shaw Brothers, a Hong Kong film studio that specialized in a lot of kung fu film. This wasn’t all of their output, but it was a significant amount of their output. Watching a few of those films on those box sets reignited a love for kung fu film and I was determined to watch more. Earlier this year, a physical media storefront was having a huge sale on films released by 88Films, which specializes in a lot of these Hong Kong kung fu films. A lot of these films were going for as low as $1, so I picked up a handful. The ones I have seen were incredibly enjoyable so far, if simplistic. They’re not the visual powerhouses that I had seen in Arrow’s Shawscope sets.
However, Martial Club makes up for this by making sure their fights are more massive than other films. There are several really big fights with multiple combatants in several different locations. This makes sense given how the film starts off with a lion dance spectacle that sets up a rivalry between two different martial arts clubs. This rivalry and the deception of one over the other forms the backbone of the film’s conflict, which sees the prudence of discipline come up against greedy grabs for power. This conflict also sets up a nice generational one, as the young grow into power that they always had.
Again, the fights are fantastic. I miss fight scenes like this - a lot of modern film has to rely on quick edits and shaky camera moves in order to make up for the lack of choreography a lot of the time. The scope and scale here is just great
Watching as Many of the Films I Blind Bought this Year Before the Year is Over 19Martial Club, directed by Lau Kar-Leung, 1981
Two years ago I bought two box sets from Arrow Video which featured several films produced by Shaw Brothers, a Hong Kong film studio that specialized in a lot of kung fu film. This wasn’t all of their output, but it was a significant amount of their output. Watching a few of those films on those box sets reignited a love for kung fu film and I was determined to watch more. Earlier this year, a physical media storefront was having a huge sale on films released by 88Films, which specializes in a lot of these Hong Kong kung fu films. A lot of these films were going for as low as $1, so I picked up a handful. The ones I have seen were incredibly enjoyable so far, if simplistic. They’re not the visual powerhouses that I had seen in Arrow’s Shawscope sets.
However, Martial Club makes up for this by making sure their fights are more massive than other films. There are several really big fights with multiple combatants in several different locations. This makes sense given how the film starts off with a lion dance spectacle that sets up a rivalry between two different martial arts clubs. This rivalry and the deception of one over the other forms the backbone of the film’s conflict, which sees the prudence of discipline come up against greedy grabs for power. This conflict also sets up a nice generational one, as the young grow into power that they always had.
Again, the fights are fantastic. I miss fight scenes like this - a lot of modern film has to rely on quick edits and shaky camera moves in order to make up for the lack of choreography a lot of the time. The scope and scale here is just great
