The Return of the 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 雍正大破十八銅人

Qing prince Yong Zhen (Carter Wong Chia-Ta) doesn’t like the choice of successor to the throne made by his late father, and so changes Daddy’s last will to become emperor himself. Framing the actual successor for an assassination and grabbing the throne is all in a day’s work.

Most of the rest of the movie flashes back to Yong Zhen’s earlier years, when he, an already accomplished martial artist, takes on the role of a commoner to be taught the legendary martial arts of the shaolin. The harsh training regime isn’t quite enough for the guy, so he also commits some minor acts of villainy trying to acquire further shaolin secrets.

Joseph Kuo’s follow-up to to his rather wonderful 18 Bronzemen is a bit of a mess. The first act and the final ten minutes or so seem to belong to a different film – one that doesn’t even have an actual ending. The film appears to believe because its audience already knows the folklore surrounding the destruction of the shaolin temple, it is not its business to actually tell that story even in so far as it touches on what’s happening in its own main plot, the shaolin temple sequence. Which leaves Return not just without an ending but also without a dramatic climax. There’s a pretty random fight against Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, out to take vengeance on our nasty protagonist, but since we never actually spend time with her, or see the reason for her need for vengeance, or even get a conclusive ending to that fight, this just strengthens the feeling of Return simply being unfinished – or consisting of scenes of two different films with the same cast that have been smashed together without rhyme or reason, or interest in coherence.

The main shaolin training sequences are fun, at least, with some nice further ideas for shaolin torture, I mean training and testing, regimes that make much of visual interest of the film’s small means, fun choreography, and a very accomplished editing flow. This part of the film really only lacks at least somewhat distinctive characters – none of Yong Zhen’s co-students are fleshed out to any degree, and even he doesn’t have anything like actual character development – to be riveting. However, the martial arts are fun enough and the training methods weird enough, to make for a somewhat entertaining middle film, even though it never acquires an actual narrative or makes anything much out of the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of one of he major off-screen villains of kung fu folklore.

The 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 少林寺十八銅人

His grandmother gives Tang Siu-Lung (Tien Peng) into the care of the Shaolin temple when is just a little boy, so they can train him for vengeance on whoever is responsible for the death of his parents. Though nobody bothers to tell the kid, apparently.

Twenty years or so later, Siu-Lung has grown up beside the abrasive, rude, but also protective, Brother Wan (Carter Wong/Carter Huang Chia-Ta) and the rather less strict Ta Chi (Chiang Nan) as brothers who share a somewhat sadomasochistically coded training regime. Little does Siu-Lung know that the man he is supposed to take vengeance on later for murdering his father is already making plans to assassinate him right in the monastery. But then, Siu-Lung has no clue who his father was or that he was murdered in any case. Before any of that becomes important (or, depending on the cut of the film you watch, before any of that is even mentioned), our hero and his friends must get through the final test of accomplishment for Shaolin kung fu students, an often deadly gauntlet that features some of the best robot armour ancient China has on offer as well as a lot of monks painted bronze and some rather remarkable tests of fortitude.

Afterwards, vengeance on an evil general (Yi Yuan) and a surprise fiancée with considerable fighting skills (house favourite Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) and a tendency for crossdressing and wearing capes await, as well as betrayal and dramatic revelations concerning all three of the Shaolin students.

I’ve never really delved into the body of work of Taiwanese martial arts and wuxia director Joseph Kuo Nan-Hong, and what I’ve seen didn’t exactly impress me much. His films – like most Taiwanese martial arts cinema of the era I’ve seen – tend to the rough around the edges and the scrappy, and while I usually like that sort of thing, I don’t seem to appreciate it as much in martial arts cinema for some reason.

However, a film like The 18 Bronzemen does make a boy rethink some of his prejudices, and there’s certainly going to be more Kuo in my near future. Ironically enough, the versions of The 18 Bronzemen made available by Eureka, doesn’t actually feel all that rough around the edges and scrappy. In fact, particularly in the reconstructed original version of the film, Kuo shows a decidedly great hand at providing his film with a proper flow – there are some simple yet wonderfully effective transition shots (half of which are missing in the the prettier cut of the movie based on a Japanese recut) that make clear passages of time and space easily enough. Even though the film does show its (much lower than Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest) budget from time to time, there’s an energy and visual inventiveness to the direction that always puts itself in service of making the martial arts look cooler than the excellent choreography already is.

Kuo’s sense for flow also helps along the film’s curious structure of half shaolin training film – with that wonderful version of the 36 Chambers that predates the Shaw Brothers interpretation – and half martial arts vengeance movie whose feel borders on wuxia. Of course, you can see where Kuo got his ideas for some (or even most of it) but his execution is excellent and energetic, with neither drama – there’s some great melodrama here as well – nor action letting the side down or slowing the film down.

Being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course particularly fond of the film’s weirder elements, like our main villain’s final defence consisting not just of stolen Shaolin skills he trained with the help of useful little statuettes of bronze as a memory help the movie flashes to when appropriate but also of dressing random fighters up as himself (even doubling up on his transport for it), or male, heterosexual men not being able to identify a cross-dressing Polly Shang-Kuan as a woman (still one of my favourite classic martial arts movie tropes after all these years). I’m also particularly happy how much ass Shang-Kuan is allowed to to kick once her character is finally introduced halfway through, not always a matter of course in films on the martial arts side of the martial arts/wuxia divide. As always, what she lacks in precision during the fights, she makes up for by so fully applying herself to the action one can’t help but be convinced by her fierceness.

Hell, I even like Carter Wong in this one.