Duo ming dao

THAT FRIGHTENING SWORD is an early attempt at a wuxia from Hong Kong, made before Shaw Brothers really got going and cornered the market, and contemporaneous with DRAGON GATE INN. The film features Kenneth Tsang as one of a bunch of heroic characters, including a notable amount of female fighters, both good and bad. They come into possession of a huge and deadly sword that can destroy an opponent without even touching him, and Shih Kien is the bad guy who wants to get his hands on it. This starts out promisingly but loses it along the way with cheap cardboard-looking sets and a dearth of action in favour of melodrama; the climax in particular is a non-event. Simon Yuen has a small role as an old master (what else?).

Our girl rides into town on horseback to find a gang of men abusing an elderly couple. She intervenes but this is Sek Kin's gang. After a great opening fight she is just not Sek Kin's match so a male hero drops down out of a tree to save her. They flee together. Suet Nei is the female lead and Kenneth Tsang Kong plays the hero who just saved her. They hole up and he tells her about a sword he received from his master, played by the great Simon Yuen. We then visit her master. Cut back to Sek Kin's gang training then return to her master. I am on a mission to watch every martial arts movie from the golden age of martial arts movies from 1967 to 1984. There was a time when I passed on a copy of a movie because it had no English or subtitles. Now I get anything I can see because I most likely will never see it again. My biggest thrill in this quest is when I come across a movie I never heard of and find it to have extraordinary quality. There will come a day when the well runs dry and that will never happen again but today is not that day. This has no English, no subtitles, but what a difference a real actor makes. The audience does not need to understand Sek Kin's words to know what he says, he talks through his acting. Simon Yuen is credited as the action director and it shows. The opening fight sequence is possibly the best fight on film as of 7/3/1968 the release date of this movie. Of note is the character actor with the prominent front teeth. He is Sai Gwa-Pau and between 1946 and 1996 he had parts in no less than 786 movies. He was on the set with everyone from Kwan Tak-Hing in the Wong Fei-Hung series to Shaw Brothers studios and leads like Gordon Liu all the way to Jackie Chan. He was even in "Legendary Weapons of China", the movie I consider the greatest martial arts movie of all time. I figured the final fight would be fabulous based on the great first fight. Spoiler:Nope. Stuntmen are supposed to make the actor look good by selling the moves. These guys simply looked too clumsy to walk. Plus the flimsy props did not help. A silk curtain managed to stop four guys in their tracks and the iron cage looked like a cardboard cage.