The Bells of Death (1968)

Original title: 奪魂鈴

Some travelling martial world evil doers murder the family of young woodcutter Chang Wei Fu (Chang Yi) just for the heck of it, and kidnap his sister. The distraught young man soon stumbles upon an experienced swordsman who eventually – after some running and shouting by our hero – teaches Chang Wei Fu martial arts so he can avenge his family.

Some time later, Chang Wei Fu begins hounding his psychopathic – other wuxia villains at least have motives for their misdeeds - enemies with his newly developed skills and the tinkling of an anklet with bells his mother used to wear. He will also acquire something of a love interest – it’s complicated – in one Hsiang Hsiang (Chin Ping) and have a reunion with his sister (Chiu Sam-Yin). None of this will get into the way of vengeance, of course.

The other wuxia directed by Griffin Yueh Feng I’ve seen tend to a certain stodginess and aesthetic conservatism (or perhaps a conscious classicism pointing at earlier style of wuxia, in whose production Yueh was also involved in?). So colour me surprised by The Bells of Death, a grim tale of vengeance that looks and feels like an Italian western, and not just because the tinkling of bells stands in for a harmonica. There’s a lot of dynamic editing, close-ups, and hand-held camera here, not just copied like the newest aesthetic fad but used with deliberation and intelligence, always in service of making the fights feel more brutal, the melodrama more intense, and the mood more doom-laden.

From time to time, Yueh Feng adds some of the more fantastical flourishes of wuxia martial arts – Chang Wei Fu’s mastery is so large, he can even use leaves as weapons - but never lets them get in the way of the grimness of proceedings. There’s impressive tonal coherence to the work, not always a strength of the genre.

The Bells of Death keeps to its grimness throughout – there’s never any doubt this will end with the kind of vengeance that leaves nobody standing at all; what the film thinks about this is difficult to say, for this has none of the love for philosophical discourse of a Chor Yuen/Ni Kuang joint nor even just the more thoughtful moments in Cheng Cheh’s filmography, when even he paused and thought about the prize of slaughter.

If that’s a virtue or a flaw will very much depend on a viewer’s mood.