REVIEW: ‘The Flying Guillotine’ (1975)

When presented with a lethal new weapon to assassinate political dissidents, Emperor Yung Cheng orders the creation of an elite team to wield these “flying guillotines.” But when the most promising assassin (Chen Kuan-tai) rebels, the Emperor orders his capture and the hunt is on.

No weapon in the entire martial world is more feared than the notorious Flying Guillotine, a spinning metal disc of death that whistles like a band saw before it drops onto a luckless victim’s head and uses razor-sharp blades to remove it from their body with a swift tug on the attached chain. The weapon is lightweight, collapsible, and accurate up to one hundred paces in the hands of a trained assassin. Its origins spring from a historical account concerning the creation of a secret order of imperial assassins trained in secrecy to eliminate Manchu Emperor Yung Cheng’s political enemies. In 1974, Shaw Brothers produced The Flying Guillotine, the first and greatest of four films from various studios to put this marvelous weapon to use onscreen.

The flying guillotine is a fabrication, but the events surrounding its use are apparently not. Rather than make a wuxia fantasy where such a weapon would struggle to draw attention among spinning, magical swords and lanterns that emit poisonous webbing, director Hoh Mung-wa puts this outrageous weapon against a historical backdrop where characters possess real motives and fears. Most comparisons to Jimmy Wang Yu’s knock off, Master of the Flying Guillotine are like night and day. While this unofficial, independent sequel released two years later is highly entertaining, it’s complete camp that makes no pretense to being a serious film. In contrast, Meng-hua masterfully weaves fantasy into a robust period adventure with enough skill that you may find yourself cowering under a table the next time you hear the blender.

Given an ultimatum by Emperor Yung Cheng (Kong Yueng) to quietly make a pair of well-liked ministers disappear, Xin Kang (Guk Fung) invents the flying guillotine and begins training a group of guards loyal to the emperor in its use. Once trained, the group begins assassinating the Emperor’s enemies. But trouble brews for several members of the group grow disenchanted with killing good men as an ambitious spy within their ranks sets the Emperor against them. As a result, the most gifted member, Ma Teng (Chen Kuan-tai) is marked for death and makes a narrow escape. With his former comrades in dogged pursuit, Ma and an attractive street performer he marries, go on the run for two years until they are finally forced to fight back.

It may come as a shock, but the story and acting performances are very good, well above the standard for genre films. First, no one is presented as a superman. Each of the guillotine users are initially described as possessing basic kung fu skills. Chen Kuan-tai is suitably heroic when the time is right, but spends as much time running as he does fighting. There’s no ego here. He simply wants to get away and lead a normal life. This leads into the main characters’ motives which are all tied together perfectly. The Emperor is both fascinated and terrified of the guillotine and the men who use them. He nervously teeters between praise and ruthlessness. The spy is played wonderfully by Frankie Wai who is both jealous and ambitious and plays the Emperor’s fears against his enemies. Guk Fung is brilliant as a man whose only motivation is the preservation of his life and that of his family. At this time, the Emperor would often promise to kill a subordinate’s family as the price of failure. You can see Fung’s desperation as he violently kowtows to the point where he repeatedly bashes his bleeding forehead on the ground. Wong Yu has a small role as a guillotine fighter who cracks under the strain of killing innocent people.

Then there is the beautiful Lau Ng-kei. It’s not so much her acting that stands out, although she is well-paired with Kuan-tai, but how Meng-hua juxtaposes her struggles with Kuan-tai’s. She doesn’t fight, but in two excellent scenes where Chen does, we see her struggling to distract attention away from Chen while singing and dancing and later bringing new life into the world while Chen fights for his own life just outside. It’s this kind of editing that adds new dimension to the combat by making it more immediate and vital.

The ability to land a small disc on someone’s head and chop it off from a distance requires some serious suspension of disbelief, but it looks about as good as it could without today’s CGI. With multiple beheadings, the film rates as fairly gory, although it’s not excessively gratuitous. It’s nice to see that the guillotine isn’t overused and does have faults. In several cases, Chen and his opponent resort to simple kung fu sparring after shattering their guillotines. The actual choreography isn’t great, but what makes up for it is intent. When Frankie Wai challenges Guk Fung in a small room towards the end, it has greater meaning as a result of what the viewer has already learned about the two.

The Flying Guillotine is truly a martial arts masterpiece. It has the best of everything that Shaw Brothers possessed, save for Lau Kar-leung’s choreography, and goes a few steps beyond with the script. In every case, Ho Meng-hua builds a strong relationship between the action, the characters, and the story while introducing a new and fantastic visual element. This is what sets the film above many other kung fu classics.