Vengeful Beauty, The (1977)

The exploitive, female revenge genre goes old school in The Vengeful Beauty. The attractive Chan Ping stars as a pregnant woman with Wu Tang-trained kung fu skills out to avenge her husband’s murder in China’s early 1700’s. The film features the infamous ‘Flying Guillotines’ and exaggerated choreography by Tong Gaai, but it still ends up lacking.

The Vengeful Beauty could be considered an unofficial sequel to The Flying Guillotine, but the relationship is strained. Both films were directed by Hoh Mung-wa, yet Shaw Brothers produced a different official sequel, Flying Guillotine II the same year with other directors attached. The Vengeful Beauty features some of the same characters including Ma Seng, played by wuxia pien regular Norman Chu and Emperor Yung Cheng, this time played by Frankie Wai Wang who also appears as a Flying Guillotine assassin in the other two films. This film also contains the least amount of ‘Flying Guillotine’ action, with a few scenes actually lifted straight out of the original Flying Guillotine.

As the trained Flying Guillotine assassins secretly working for the Emperor begin their attacks, one (played by Yuen Cheung-yan) is caught by local security forces. Flying Guillotine leader Jin Gang-feng (Lo Lieh) is ordered to kill every witness including the prison interrogator and his family to keep the assassins a secret. Rong Qiu-yan (Chan Ping) returns home to find her dead husband and immediately fingers Gang-feng. With her superior kung fu, she nearly kills him, but retreats to protect her unborn child. Now Gang-feng is in deep doo-doo. He’s told the Emperor under threat of execution that all witnesses are dead. In order to keep his head, Gang-feng turns to his three adult children to quickly hunt down and kill Qiu-yan who is now attempting to reach her uncle. As the hunt begins, Qiu-yan hooks up with a former Flying Guillotine member named Ma Seng (Norman Chu) and her old martial brother Wang-jun (Yueh Hua) who both help her along the way and become rivals in their love for her.

It’s a good thing that The Vengeful Beauty is not marketed as a ‘Flying Guillotine’ movie. While there is a bit of new guillotine action thrown in, the masters of this style spend most of their time using swords. The only beheadings shown are from two scenes taken from The Flying Guillotine. The guillotines are really wasted here as they are easily defeated and poorly shot. What remains is a mostly routine revenge flick with Chan Ping fighting her way through mobs of attackers sent by Lo Lieh. Wires are used frequently in scenes where Chan does the splits as she scurries up between two bamboo stalks or Lo Lieh does a crab walk up a bridge support. Tong Gaai is not working with real martial artists here for the most part, so doubles are frequently used in long and over-the-shoulder shots. Chan makes for a credible screen heroine, but no one including Chan stands outs in their action performance. The most physically-talented cast member is Johnny Wang Lung-wei, who appears in one fight but has looked better elsewhere.

It doesn’t help matters that the story possesses a few lapses in sound judgment. For instance, there is no explanation for why Lo Lieh sends his children, who are obviously less-skilled than he is, to kill someone he could barely defeat. This might have been more plausible if he sent them alone to keep the problem from reaching the Emperor’s ear. But no, each fighter goes out with members of the Flying Guillotine squad, anyone one of whom could be a spy as was the case in The Flying Guillotine.

The exploitation factor is pretty high for this feature. There is a fair amount of bloodletting, gratuitous sex and nudity, and a particularly unsavory miscarriage. A battle in a bamboo forest results in some grizzly deaths by bamboo impaling. Later, we’re treated to an awkward love scene between Norman and a topless Chan that features some truly horrible screen kissing. This follows with the appearance of a topless Siu Yam-yam (The Chinatown Kid) who attempts to seduce Norman and ends up in a frenzied battle with him and a clothed Chan Ping. There must be some serious jealously going on, because Chan doesn’t give the exposed Siu any quarter whatsoever in the scene’s brutal conclusion.

Compared with all of the other Flying Guillotine movies including the independent ones, The Vengeful Beauty is the weakest. In fact, it really doesn’t even deserve to be put into that unique category. Rather, it’s just an average exploitation flick that mixes swordplay and classic kung fu elements. It’s entertaining enough with its visual excesses, a well-crafted plot twist and good outdoor cinematography, but better examples of everything you see here are found in other Shaw Brothers classics.