Blu-ray release: ‘Shawscope Volume Three’

By   |  Nov 21, 2024

Arrow Video are bringing a collection of classic Shaw Brothers films, entitled ‘Shawscope Volume Three’, to US and UK Blu-ray on November 25/26, 2024.

Before Hong Kong’s mightiest film studio mastered the art of the kung fu film, Shaw Brothers hit box office gold with a very different kind of martial arts cinema, one that channelled the blood-soaked widescreen violence of Japanese samurai epics and Italian spaghetti westerns into a uniquely Chinese form: the wuxia pian. With their enthralling tales drawn from historical myth and legend of sword-wielding (and often gravity-defying) noble heroes, the wuxia films housed in this next instalment of Arrow Video’s best-selling Shawscope series demonstrate the sweeping stylistic evolution of the genre, from the righteous stoicism of the late-60s Mandarin period, right through to the wild-and-weird anarchism of the early-80s Cantonese explosion.

The iconic ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ trilogy, directed between 1967 and 1971 by wuxia cinema godfather , made household names of stars and David Chiang and set the gory template for many of the films to come. Contrary to Chang’s tales of loyal brotherhood, many wuxia films focused on female protagonists, three very different examples of which we see next: ‘s ‘The Lady Hermit’, with the great (‘Come Drink with Me’) as a virtuous swordswoman called upon to stop a vicious warlord; Chor Yuen‘s scandalous ‘Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan’ in which the titular lady of the night masters every deadly skill she can to get revenge on those who enslaved her; and Cheng Kang‘s all-star epic ‘The 14 Amazons’, in which Shaws’ finest starlets play the real-life women of the Yang dynasty, avenging their fallen menfolk in battle.

Next, Chor Yuen adapted several beloved novels by consummate wuxia storyteller Gu Long to the big screen, four of which are collected here: ‘The Magic Blade’, ‘Clans of Intrigue’, ‘The Jade Tiger’ and ‘The Sentimental Swordsman’, all starring the redoubtable . As kung fu overtook wuxia at the box office, the genre evolved into unexpected new directions, with its chivalrous knights-errant replaced by conflicted antiheroes, as seen in Sun Chung’s breathlessly exciting ‘The Avenging Eagle’ and ‘Boxer’s Omen’ goremeister ‘s fatalistic masterpiece ‘Killer Constable’. Finally, just when it seemed the wuxia film had nowhere left to turn, Eighties excess reigned supreme in the special-effects-soaked, fourth-wall-breaking fantastical delights of Taylor Wong‘s ‘Buddha’s Palm’ and ‘s ‘Bastard Swordsman’.

Features:
• High Definition (1080p) presentations of all twelve films
• Illustrated 60-page collectors’ book
• New artwork
• Hours of never-before-seen archival features
• Newly-produced bonus features
• Exclusive CD of music from the De Wolfe Music Library
• Region: Free

‘Shawscope Volume Three’ is available to pre-order now from Amazon.com and ArrowFilms.com.

Phil Mills
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