Nu du bei dao

It starts with a man tortured by being dragged from a horse. The bad guys also have no problems killing a child. Chang Ching-Ching comes to the rescue. Where was she five minutes ago when she could have saved two lives? After the opening credits she fights another gang of villains. This time she is fooled by the villain in disguise who cuts her arm with his poison blade. She is rescued by the mysterious Black Dragon but the arm cannot be saved.

Taiwanese martial arts movies tend to be heavy on the drama. Here instead of just chopping the arm off we have the drama of poison and amputation. Plus there's the hidden identity of the Black Dragon.

I have no biographical information about Chang Ching-Ching other than she was born in Taiwan in 1947 and her first roles were as a child. She started in 1969 as a supporting actor in martial arts movies then got her first lead in "Flies Over Gras" or "Blood of the Leopard 2". She first came to my attention in 1970 "The Cruelty Goddess" but I really did not like the movie. The total of her martial arts movie were filmed between 1969 and 1973 and then she disappeared from acting. It was typical of the society then for an actress to retire as the wife of a wealthy man and I assume she did exactly that living happily ever after and having dozens of fat babies.

My copy is a digital file that plays on a HDTV as a square video typical of the old VHS format. The color and resolution is above average compared to most of these old VHS conversions I have watched. The subtitles are embedded and in Dutch or whatever it is they call the language spoken by folks in the Netherlands. I do not speak Chinese or that language other than a few words.

Rule one of the motion picture business is when you find something that works you beat it to death. Jimmy Wang Yu, the original one armed swordsman, did exactly that with his character. Girls can have one arm too, so bring on the females missing a limb. The rest of this movie seems to involve the relationship between Ching and Black Dragon but because of the language barrier that is all I can say. The fights are all sword fights. There is minimal wire work and trampolines. All the fight choreography is basic and all starts to look alike quickly. It is a short run time of 82 minutes and you would not want a minute more. This is totally average, nothing special, and suitable only for a hard core of martial arts movies of the golden age from 1967 to 1984 to watch one more.

It's not rare that reviewers on the web tend to confuse every Wuxiapian (Swordsplay movie) they see as a Shaw Brother film. It would be enough to see the lack of Shaw's logo to avoid this common error. Actually this one is a low-budget but not boring imitation of Shaw's trilogy about the One-Armed swordsman, with an handicapped woman instead of Wang Yu or David Chiang. She's played by beauty Chang Ching Ching, a Taiwanese actress who made a good 72 movies (including Wang Yu's vehicle The Screaming Tiger) and then dismissed in 1973, just in the year martial arts craze stroke the world. The movie has rythm enough even if the poor tech-values and bad prints circulating here make it a not-unforgettable experience, nonetheless the girl is really something. Released in Hong Kong 4/27/72, music by Wang Fu Ling (The Big Boss composer) and produced by Park Film owned by female director-actress Kao Pao Shu (The desperate chase, The cannibals and others).