Fatal Flying Guillotine [1977]

Dreadful. As other reviewers have stated, this film is a tad difficult to follow, let alone understand! Creaky sound and bleached colour, bad dubbing and some very variable acting all add to the films tackiness.The flying guillotines, which not only can be flicked up into the air by their master, but also fly along at a merry old rate for what seemed like miles (!) are a joy to behold though and justified the 50 pence or so I spent in acquiring this classic.No true lover of naff kung fu epics should be without it, however.Wasn't the "hero" in Big Trouble in Little China...?

Well you now when you see a movie that its that bad its good(recently Snakes On A Plane).Well this film is funny and (not)put together with the usual high quality from Hong Kong.The plot goes something like this,Shaolin monks track down some villains who have robbed a sacred book....Add an evil prince,a flying guillotine,and bad kung fu, and you've got a potent mix for action.It's BAD...

I like it,kind of old Kung Fu movie.

v good

First of all I apologise if this review doesn't make a whole heap of sense, mostly it's not my fault (this time!), but the material I have to work with...A young martial arts expert called Shen is trying to improve the health of his sickly mother, so he attempts to get a special medicine book from a local Shaolin temple. There, he eventually earns the chance (trial by combats) to borrow the sacred healing scriptures, but is attacked on his way home by an unknown assailant, who switches the book for one which is filled with poisons not cures..Tragically his mother dies, and so Shen gets cross and goes back to the temple to confront the monks. Fortunately though they quickly ascertain who is the spy amongst their ranks, and the culprit of carrying out the old 'switcheroo' on the medicine book..So they interrogate him, and soon they learn of the plans of their local, megalomaniacal rich tyrant, to find and recruit the savage hermit Chen. A man who lives in the sinister 'No Return Valley', and who decapitates just about everyone he meets.So our hero, with nothing better to do (presumably?!), now his ailing mother's dead, agrees to go along and thwart the bad guys in obtaining the secret of Chen's deadly weaponry...Chen in the meantime seems a happy old dude, amusing himself during his long, lonely days in No Return Valley.. by decapitating any complete strangers he meets, goody or baddy; until that is, he turns into what looks like a twitching marionette ~ with it's strings cut ~ when the mysterious clouds of black noxious gasses descend..?!One has to wonder if this would have made any more sense in it's native language, but with good subtitles.Probably not.The action comes thick and fast, the emphasis being on the latter, with an annoying tendency to speed up during some of the fight scenes. The titular weapons of destruction, this time looking like a Cenobite's favourite hanging basket.. Grinding off people's heads like a pair of infernal pepper mills.When watched as a piece of entertainment, FFG is at worst cheap trash, and poorly made.Or however, if you're that way inclined, a delirious piece of madcap mayhem, that never takes itself seriously, and does exactly what it says on the tin.It's only really major disappointment being that whoever made this, didn't have the foresight to make this a 3D picture!!How good would that have been??It's also interesting to speculate about whether Shen is Chen's son (I don't think it says one way or the other, but there's several possible implications), or for that matter the similarities between the renegade monk in this and Kam Kong's in Master of the Flying Guillotine.Vengeance Video's bare bones disc, which features Mark Long in a 'little black dress' (which isn't even in the film! I'm pretty sure it's one of his natty outfits in Ninja Checkmate?!) on the cover, is taken from a fairly diluted full screen VHS print, but is still certainly watchable.Personally I'm glad Vengeance Video released so many of these hard to get movies, I just wish they were better prints sometimes.3.5/5

Loved it ! Arrived promptly nicely packaged and it's all good.

Firstly, let me say that this is a terrible film. Be under no illusions, it is really terrible. The picture quality is poor, the acting atrocious, the fight scenes turgid, the special effects primitive, the plot impenetrable.But in spite of this (or perhaps because of it...!), I found it hilarious, and really enjoyed it.The story, as I could decipher it, revolves around a certain Master Shen. Due to a weak heart caused by excessive training (!), he is forced to live in No Return Valley, being kept alive by the Dragon's Breath Cure (never shown). The fourth prince, hungry for power, uses a crooked Shaolin monk to steal the sacred Shaolin medicine book, which he hopes to use to entice Master Shen out of the valley to fight for him. But! A young man (sorry, I forget his name) has passed the three Shaolin tests in order to borrow the book to cure his sick mother, and instead he is given a forgery by the crooked monk, which kills his mother. Vowing revenge, he joins a party of Shaolin kung-fu masters who are (for some reason) off to kill Master Shen. It is also unclear why the young man wishes to kill Master Shen. Basically, the rest of the film involves various fights with Master Shen.The "fatal flying guillotines" of the title (referred to in the film as "lighting strikes"...indeed, the phrase "fatal flying guillotine" appears nowhere in the film) are the high point of the whole film. Wielded by the sinister Master Shen, who likes to laugh a lot, they consist of two metal buckets on ropes with spinning blades that decapitate EVERYONE. The special effects for these buckets and the decapitated bodies are so bad that they really have to be seen to be believed.Characters appear without introduction or explanation, and entire sections of the film run without any explanation of why they are happening. Most films are a passive experience, but this one forces you to actively sit up and try to work out for yourself who these people are and what is going on.Even the martial arts in the film are bad - poorly choreographed, lacklustre and...well, lazy. Half-hearted, even. It looks as though the actors have been secretly filmed whilst just performing their going-through-the-motions practise run.If you like bad films, and find them funny, this is definitely one for you. If you're expecting something well-acted, well-directed and well thought out, steer well clear. Citizen Kane it ain't. I've ended up giving this film three stars because whilst it is awful, it was nonetheless hilarious and very enjoyable (if for entirely the wrong reasons).Oh, and another thing - the guy on the front of the DVD box I saw (the Vengeance Video version) isn't in the film at all.

Carter Wong in perhaps his finest hour (before his cameo in "Big trouble in little China"). Here, he displays his prolific Kung-Fu skills in his early years as a martial arts icon. This is an excellent movie with plenty of flashy choreography!. You MUST own this video!