Pursuit of Vengeance (1977)

Original title: 明月刀雪夜殲仇

Melancholy wandering swordsman Fu Hong-Xue (Ti Lung) meets wisecracking wandering swordsman Ye Kai (Lau Wing). The latter does his best to hit it off with the former with limited success.

Various other martial artists/assassins seem to be rather interested in killing one or the other, for reasons that’ll become clear eventually. For now, the odd couple are invited to the party of the local martial arts clan, the Mas. It’s a bit of a peculiar shindig, for the evening before, six empty coffins were delivered to the Ma Mansion – not before Fu Hong-Xue and Ye Kai had fought off a team of assassins who also arrived in coffins, but that’s par for the course in the martial world of a Chor Yuen film.

Can it be an accident that Ma clan leader Ma Kong-Qun (Paul Chang Chung) has invited six martial artists?

As it turns out, twenty years ago, Ma was involved in the killing of the hero Bai, and everybody believes that twenty years after the fact – which is to say now – Bai’s son is going to take vengeance on the group of martial artists who killed his father. Ma suspects this son is one of his six guests.

Things become rather more complicated from here on out and will also include a delightful anti-hero turn by Lo Lieh – dressed in what we have to assume is a bathrobe throughout travels, travails and fights –, an evil mastermind who produces life-like masks for others to add to the confusion, hordes of martial artists totally committed to their respective fighting gimmicks, and the most astonishing finishing freeze frame of any Shaw Brothers film, particularly if you’re a fan of Lo Lieh’s ass.

I’ve been loving the films of that great master of Shaw Brothers wuxia Chor Yuen for actual decades. And yet, the first proper – or what goes for “proper” around here these days – write-up I make of one of his films is for this, definitely one of the director’s minor wuxia, sharing a protagonist (and lead actor Ti Lung, of course) with the masterful Magic Blade, though very little of that film’s tone.

Well, it does share that part of its predecessor that’s wildly weird, often bordering on the goofy, the love for sarcastic dialogue wuxia on screen usually lacks, and of course Chor Yuen’s eye for the beauty of the artificial, the proper contrast between set and location work, and the artful framing of the beautifully improbable action. So let’s say it doesn’t share in its predecessor’s sense of melancholia and futility.

Pursuit features by far not the best action choreography Tong Kai did for a Chor Yuen wuxia, but there’s still enough magic for anyone who is even mildly into this sort of thing.

Just don’t expect the general weirdness of everything and everyone except our wonderful protagonist/straight man Ti Lung to be balanced with a sense of melancholia or even horror at the things these people do to one another. This case of mystery and vengeance, while having the body count to be expected of this sort of thing, is decidedly on the emotionally light side – often getting down to a downright comedy version of the martial world. Which does take particular getting used to in a film that follows the tonally very different Magic Blade but does give one a breather after all those Chor Yuen wuxia that end in doom and gloom.

It does help that the film’s jokes are generally pretty damn funny, the dialogue is joyfully absurd and dry. Lo Lieh and Lau Wing in particular seem to delight in this. But then, the curiously moral assassin Lu Xiao Jia introduces himself first by somehow dropping a gigantic bathtub into a street, getting naked, and mocking Fu and Ye from that bathtub, which is not something any actor will get to do very often during their career.