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.