Invincible Super Chan (1970)

After a swordsman takes on an entire army in order to get revenge for the killing of his master by the martial world’s top fighter, he retires with the love of his life but is forced to fight again when another ambitious fighter kidnaps his family.

It’s a martial arts film so violent that it was banned in 34 countries, or so the hype goes for Invincible Super Chan. This early Taiwanese wuxia film is indeed violent for its day and features nearly non-stop action frequently punctuated by gratuitous dismemberment, impaling, and bodies dashed upon rocks. But make no mistake, this movie is cheesy nonsense all the way and an off-the-wall sense of humor is required to appreciate it.

The film is practically all fighting, all the time with only a thin plot about Chan (Yee Yuen), a swordsman seeking vengeance on another swordsman for killing his master. The hook is that about one hundred fighters stand in the way and our hero fights through every one of them no more than twenty minutes into the film. He eventually faces the villain who wields a nasty claw and chain weapon. But this is only half the story for he wins and then retires from fighting to spend his days with his new wife in the country. Trouble finds him again when the villain’s daughter convinces a general that he must defeat Chan in order to be the number one guy, or some such nonsense. Not surprisingly, an available spot as general soon open up and when Chan refuses to take the man’s place, a rival swordsman makes a bid for the position by forcing Chan to fight to the death by kidnapping his family.

Invincible Super Chan is quite different from your average wuxia pien. It’s violently exploitive, contains every cheap trick of the trade in spades, the hand-to-hand action is more judo than kung fu, and the filmmakers look for every opportunity to cause one gruesome death scene after another. The low production standards and excessive nature of these scenes will either generate laughter or frustration.

To enjoy this film, one must find entertainment value of some kind in seeing wild and crazy antics like people ‘crushed’ by Styrofoam rocks, obvious dummies tossed off cliffs or thrown into rock walls, shadows from the characters appearing on walls with artificial landscapes painted on them, a man surfing on a flag pole, lots of gravity-defying leaps, and unexplained explosions. It gets crazier still. Instead of seeing quality kung fu choreography, at one point thugs surrounding Chan simply dog pile on him. Later, Chan makes a thug eat a large rock by kicking it into his mouth and shoving the poor guy’s head into the ground face-first. Who can forget the impaling of three thugs on one pole or the exploitive dwarf, or even the thug who wields a deadly abacas? Chan even chops a chump in half from top to bottom.

Adding to the circus of stupidity that plays before the viewer’s eyes is moronic dialogue dubbed into English and hammy acting on par with William Shatner at his best. Topping it off is the unrestrained use of echo effects during flashbacks or internal thoughts.

It should definitely be clear by this point that Invincible Super Chan should not be taken seriously on any level. For truly satisfying martial violence, look to the Lone Wolf and Cub films or Chang Cheh’s stylishly-shot heroic bloodshed sagas like Vengeance and The Five Venoms. The action choreography in Invincible Super Chan is poorly executed while the editing is choppy and loaded with lame gimmicks meant to show off supernatural martial abilities. What saves the film is the unintended comedy of seeing substantial action cranked up into overdrive with one outrageous scene after another. Although inferior in many ways, fans of flicks like Kung Fu Zombie and Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine should get some laughs out of it.