As a young child, I often watched the old Black Belt theater on channel 11 out here. At the time, I didn’t know them by name, but I would watch Shaw Brothers martial arts movies on Saturday afternoons and later switch to Kung Fu theater on channel 9 later in the evening. However, the Shaw Brothers movies always felt crisper and better produced. Before that though, I remember seeing a very old movie that I did not know the name at the time in which my parents rented. It was very memorable as a child for a single scene that was embedded into my memory for years. Only the other day, I was able to re-discover the exact movie we rented: Vengeance.
Currently, both Netflix and Amazon Prime have quite the host of old kung fu movies. So I’ve been binging at night my favorites, hoping to see something that I haven’t watched in a while or ever perhaps. So, I stumbled upon Vengeance and knew about it as a result of the main cast being David Chiang and Ti Lung. This movie pretty much shows both actors in their prime with Chang Cheh directing and slowly building up his style and themes.
The movie is essentially Guan Xiao Lou, played by David Chiang, getting revenge for the murder of his brother Guan Yu Lou, played by Ti Lung. Guan Yu Lou is an actor in a theater group and performs a martial arts play while his wife, Hua Zheng Fen, is harassed by Feng Kai Shan, played by Ku Feng. Hua Zheng Fen does not seem to mind Feng Kai Shan’s advances but the moment Guan Yu Lou returns, he thwarts Feng Kai Shan.
Still angered about the ordeal, Guan Yu Lou visits the martial arts school run by Feng Kai Shan and assaults everyone, including Feng Kai Shan, threatening more violence if Feng Kai Shan would continue misbehaving towards his wife. Of course, Feng Kai Shan does not take the threat lightly and begins plotting with a few other influential people in town to assassinate Guan Yu Lou. They invite him to their place where Guan Yu Lou is ambushed and brutally murdered.
Considering this was made in 1970, Guan Yu Lou’s murder scene is quite violent. He’s butchered by axes and one man jumps down to stab both his eyes out with long daggers. Guan Yu Lou is mortally wounded in the scene but gallantly continues to try fending his attackers off, but succumbs to his wounds and lays dead in the middle of the room. Here, Chang Cheh is an absolute master of mixing violence with pathos as the slow motion shots with Guan Yu Lou flailing around with his numerous wounds and eyes essentially gouged out creates an emotional point. I remember crying for him as a child as it was an unjust butchering while my mother repeated, “Blood and guts.” That scene pretty much stayed with me and made me want to locate it again just to see how it was done.
At any rate, Guan Xiao Lou arrives in town and is immediately stalked by someone who probably heard of his coming. Yet Guan Xiao Lou has only a single thought: revenge. The first person he hunts down is Guan Yu Lou’s widow, who admits being somewhat complicit and apathetic towards the whole ordeal with her husband. Guan Xiao Lou is unmoved and slaps her before his stalker hurls a knife and ends up killing her. However, he doesn’t last long as Guan Xiao Lou retrieves the knife and hurls it back at his assailant.
From here on out, it’s mostly a linear bloodbath of Guan Xiao Lou climbing further up the chain in gaining his revenge against all those who participated in the murder of his brother. There’s a small romance subplot with Hua Zheng Fang, who has connections to the men that killed Guan Yu Lou. She aids Guan Xiao Lou in gaining him access to Feng Kai Shan’s complex. We can even see a very young Chen Kuan-Tai make a small, unremarkable cameo before getting offed by Guan Xiao Lou.
Eventually, one of the core people who helped orchestrate Guan Yu Lou’s murder also plots out Guan Xiao Lou’s demise. He tries to trick Guan Xiao Lou into working with him to uproot the supervisor. However, Guan Xiao Lou does keep his suspicions even though he does agree to aiding him.
The last portion is Guan Xiao Lou and Jin Zhi Quan temporarily working together to assassinate the supervisor and his men. During the battle, Guan Xiao Lou is injured. Jin Zhi Quan fakes concern for Guan Xiao Lou and asks if he needs assistance. Just then Jin Zhi Quan’s men mortally wounds Guan Xiao Lou as the last remnants of the men fight him off. Guan Xiao Lou fights upstairs, cornering Jin Zhi Quan in a corner before seemingly succumbing to his wounds. The men approach believing he is dead which relieves the gullible Jin Zhi Quan. At that moment, Guan Xiao Lou slashes Jin Zhi Quan’s neck and he tumbles off the second floor into a bloody heap on the floor. The other men fearful that Guan Xiao Lou still has more in him run out.
The aftermath is Guan Xiao Lou stumbling out of the complex, recalling his memories with his brother. It’s an eerie parallel with the pair facing similar fates. In the end, Hua Zheng Fang remains with another friend awaiting Guan Xiao Lou’s return. But that isn’t to be.
Looking back, Vengeance still is a remarkable movie for its time. The violence and pathos as well as David Chiang’s hellbent desire for revenge come together as a simple yet tragic story. Perhaps, one of the points in the movie was that violence only begets senseless violence. Both David Chiang and Ti Lung’s character mirror each other in some ways being extremely headstrong and fallible in their overconfidence in their own martial arts abilities. But this quality is at the heart of the tragedy. There is no negotiation for the two characters that can lead them away from the path. Also, there’s the mention of a better life in heading south by David Chiang’s character, which he could’ve done at any moment but chose not to, leading him to his ultimate demise.
I think another interesting aspect to this movie is that there’s a lot of familiar faces. Most seem to be unknown at the time. But if you blink for one second, you could easily miss Chen Kuan Tai, Feng Ko-An, Jason Pai Piao, etc. Everyone seems so young in this movie.
If anything the main criticism I have for this movie is that it’s very sloppy at times. Some of the action can look bad or the sound might seem out of sync. But the plot, although simple, is fairly ridiculous. David Chiang’s character just floats from one area to another, murdering people without major consequence. Of course, this is to lead to his ambush, but how come the police just don’t hunt him down? Also, his ability to survive unscathed right up until the end just made me shake my head.
In the end, I suppose you could attribute the movie’s sloppiness to Chang Cheh’s growth as a director. Newer movies made by him were far sharper and even quite formulaic towards the end of his peak. But the thing that I like about the basics in his movies is the unpredictability of the heroes’ fates. Many of his movies were quite tragic in having the heroes suffer heavy loss. But the redeeming quality was that Chang Cheh always put an incredible emphasis on how a hero dies, using slow motion shots, profuse blood, agonizing facial expressions and enduring a great deal of punishment. These techniques guaranteed that you would always remember a Chang Cheh movie, even if the majority of the movie sucked.
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