Palace Carnage

There're four movies with Flying Guillotine as part of its title. This one closely follows the plot of the first Flying Guillotines (1975) where the main character Ma Teng was played by Chen Kuan Tai. Chen did a masterful job of portraying this character, and in this sequel, Lung Ti plays the part with equal authority. Beautiful Taiwanese actor Szu Shih plays the female lead in this movie.

The plot picks up where the original Flying Guillotines left off. Ma Teng and his family has now established their life in the country, but they can never let their guards down because the emperor's assassins are after them. Emperor Yung Cheng is still the tyrant he was in the first movie, and demands that a modifications be made to the flying guillotine to counter Ma Teng's iron umbrella defense. Now a two stage flying guillotine is invented as a result. Na Lan (Szu Shih) is hired by the emperor to train a squad of women assassins to wield the flying guillotine, but she is righteous at heart, and sides with Ma Teng. A plot is hatched to assassinate the emperor, and together they go to the palace.

In my opinion, this and the first Flying Guillotines are the two with first class quality which makes them classics amongst the kung-fu movies from Shaw Brothers. The other two, The Fatal Flying Guillotines, and Master of the Flying Guillotine is of lower quality production, and are not in the same league as these.

Beautiful kung-fu action along with good story, good acting and great cinematography makes this one of the best movie to come out of Shaw Brothers. This is a really exciting movie and all the right talents have gathered to create one of the masterpieces of kung-fu movies.

The script is not as good as the first one, however the inclusion of a clan of warriors (all beautiful oriental women, gifted with talent in the use of the deadly flying guillotine) made everything more charming and engaging, even unexpected, when it comes to his year of production follows the pattern of the previous one, which was very good, good fight scenes (long), regular...