Chop Socky Cinema is your go-to corner for all things martial arts on screen—from high-flying kung fu classics to modern bone-crunching brawlers. We dive into the legends, the hidden gems, and the genre-defining moments that shaped martial arts cinema.
Beginning in the middle of the burning of a Shaolin Temple, Heroes Two throws the audience right into a fight sequence in which a whole lot of burning things becomes obstacles for our heroes Alexander Fu Sheng and Chen Kuan Tai to duck and dodge as they take on the oppression of the Manchurian ...
It’s time to get spooky, Chop Socky fans! The Bride from Hell might be tonally inconsistent, running the gamut between horror tropes and comedy in a very clunky (but lovable) way, but it is damn revelatory in its take on gothic tropes as the Shaw Brothers tackle Hammer Studios-like atmosphere with ...
“The wall may be low, but the buddha is high.” The ultimate martial arts film when it comes to training, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin remains an amazing watch. Here, we get an intense look at the steps in the Shaolin style of martial arts, which includes lightness, balance, arm strength, wrist technique, eyesight ...
Let the street brawls begin! Cue the funk music because it’s time to kick some serious ass and look badass while doing it, too. Man of Iron has arrived on sparkling blu-ray! ...
The Shaw Brothers made a lot of martial arts films covering Shi Nai-An’s The Water Margin, the 14th-century Song Dynasty novel, but it is here, with 1972’s Chang Cheh adaptation (covering chapters 64 through 68 of the novel, if memory serves me correctly), where they struck gold. The film is ...
There are a lot of firsts involved with the legacy of The One-Armed Swordsman, which is now on blu-ray thanks to Nova Media. Obviously, it’s the first in the trilogy of Swordsman films, but (and more importantly) for Hong Kong cinema, this was the first film to make a million bucks in its initial domestic ...
Secret passageways! Zombie-looking baddies! Corpse worm pills! Evil dungeons! And Hammer Studio-like atmosphere galore! Also featuring an impaling from a peg leg, The Devil’s Mirror is bananas! It definitely puts the SOUP in the supernatural ...
Written by Ni Kuang, Chang Cheh and Chin Shu-mei, The Delightful Forest is actually a restaurant in a small town. It is also a place where gambling and prostitution is accepted. But, wuxia fans know it as the movie in which Ti Lung steals the show as Wu Song, a lone warrior who believes wine makes ...
Written, directed, and starring Jimmy Wang Yu and made for Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest (and not the Shaw Brothers after he left them), One-Armed Boxer takes its kung-fu leanings as seriously as it does its villains' row. Recognizing this, Arrow Video presents the film in a special limited ...
Cheng Pei-Pei is back in action! This time she wields a whip instead of a sword and, as it is time for the Shaw Brothers to experiment with their brand of wuxia, one shouldn’t be surprised that its take of revenge comes across as paper-thin. ...
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