Martial artist Shen Ping (Carter Wong) needs to get his mitts on a rare medical almanac in order to cure his dying mother; to do so, he first has to defeat the Buddhist monks who guard it. Shen-Ping loses his first fight with the monks, but his second attempt is successful; however, on his way home with the book, he is attacked by a hooded stranger and is thrown over the edge of a cliff.
Somehow, Shen-Ping survives his fall, and returns home to prepare the medicine to save his mum. Unfortunately, the initially successful treatment causes her to cark it soon after. Furious, Shen Ping returns to the temple to have it out with the monks; while there, he identifies his attacker, a rebel monk who had switched the book for a forgery during their cliff-top scuffle. The nasty monk stole the real almanac to give to the 4th prince, who intends to use it as a bargaining tool to recruit Shen Mo Chao (Sing Chen), practitioner of the lightning strike, a martial arts technique that uses the legendary flying guillotine: a metal hood, fitted with a rotating blade and guided by a rope, that decapitates opponents.
From here-on in, things get a tad confusing, suffice to say that lots of people lose their heads on the way to the inevitable showdown between Shen Ping and Shen Mo Chao.
Baffling plot developments aside, The Fatal Flying Guillotines is a reasonably entertaining slice of old school kung fu, with plenty of energetic fighting (including crazy wire-work, She Ping taking flight towards the end) and a decent amount of gory violence: it's not just heads that get severed, eyes are gouged, and one poor soul is impaled on a large, sharpened wooden stake. While not as bat-s**t crazy as the hugely entertaining Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), which is hard to beat for sheer entertainment value, The Fatal Flying Guillotines is still a lot of fun for those who can't get enough of kung fu cinema's most ridiculous weapon.
