Scissors (1991)

In 1992 Sharon Stone became, overnight, the hottest property in Hollywood thanks to Basic Instinct. She seemed set for a glittering career, which didn’t happen to the extent one would have expected. She made some interesting movies in the 90s but apart from Basic Instinct they were not loved by the critics. Scissors, made a year before Basic Instinct, is one those critically unloved movies. Some of these movies were in fact very very good but once the critics turn against you there’s not much you can do.

Perhaps the problem is that some of her most notable 90s movies were about sex. They were to varying extent erotic thrillers. That always makes mainstream critics nervous, and often brings out their natural snarkiness. They do not entirely approve of erotic thrillers.

Scissors starts off very promisingly, creating unease on several different levels. Angie Anderson (Sharon Stone) almost gets raped in the elevator of her apartment building. That’s obviously unsettling to the viewer but there are other things vey early on that unsettle us. When we first see Angie she is dressed a bit oddly. She is dressed shabbily but we find out that she is not poor. She looks a bit like a refugee from the Summer of Love.

She collects dolls. There’s nothing inherently abnormal about a grown woman collecting dolls. It’s a not uncommon feminine hobby. But Angie seems to be obsessive about it. The dolls sleep on her bed. She sleeps on the couch. We see her looking at her naked breasts in the mirror and she does so in such a way to suggest that she’s a woman not quite comfortable in her own skin, and perhaps not quite comfortable with her sexuality.

She is rescued from the attempted rape by another tenant, Alex Morgan (Steve Railsback). He’s an actor. He shares an apartment with his wheelchair-bound brother Cole. They both seem a bit too tightly wrapped. Not overtly creepy, but just a tiny bit unsettling.

Then we find out that Angie is a virgin. Not by choice but through fear.

Cole Morgan is a painter. One look at his paintings is enough to convince us that he has a few issues with women. Then he shows Angie one particularly painting. She’s disturbed, and so are we.

So we have all sorts of disturbing provocative elements and what’s nice is that we know they’re important but we can’t yet see exactly how they’re going to fit together.

There are other characters who are also perhaps a little ambiguous. There’s Alex’s bitter ex-girlfriend Nancy Leahy (Vicki Frederick). There’s her psychiatrist, Dr Carter (Ronny Cox). Angie might have a slight emotional fixation on him. There’s Dr Carter’s ambitious politician wife.

And then there’s Billy (who might be someone from her childhood), and Richard Bailey (her new employer). There’s mystery surrounding both of them.

Angie sees her attacker again. Or she thinks she does.

This is a subjective movie. We see things from Angie’s point of view, and maybe her judgments are not always reliable. And her sexual hangups can cause her judgments about men to be dubious.

Then things get really strange. Now Angie is in real trouble.

This is not a Hitchcock-style suspense movie. Hitchcock always maintained that suspense is achieved by giving the audience information that the protagonist doesn’t have. In Scissors by contrast we only know what Angie knows. It’s more of a mystery thriller.

The production design is superb.

Steve Railsback handles his dual role rather well. I loved Sharon Stone in what was a very demanding role. She has to keep us guessing about this woman. The other performers are fine but this is a movie that is going to stand or fall depending entirely on Sharon Stone’s performance and she delivers the goods.

This is an erotic thriller in the sense that sex does to a large extent drive the plot and provider the character motivations but there are no sex scenes and only one brief topless scene. The violence (and there’s not much of it) is similarly mostly implied. There are no geysers of blood in this movie.

What it does have is a very disturbing atmosphere and most all a nice sense of uncertainty about whether we’re seeing reality or Angie’s distorted view of reality, or possibly there are things that exist only in her mind. Those questions are left unresolved up to the end. And the ending is very neat. I like this ending a lot. This is a very underrated movie and it’s highly recommended. And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

I’ve also reviewed Sharon Stone’s other much-maligned and very underrated 1993 erotic thriller Sliver.

The Phantom (1996)

The Phantom was released in 1996. It was an Australian-U.S. co-production.

The movies of the 90s pretty much passed me by at the time. To some extent that was true of the 80s as well. For me movie history began just before the First World War and ended at the close of the 1970s. Recently I’m been filling in these gaps in my movie-watching experience and I’ve been particularly surprised by just how many good (and fun) movies were made in the 90s.

I love comics but for me that means mostly European comics, with the only exceptions being Modesty Blaise and Vampirella. In general I have zero interest in American superhero comics and consequently zero interest in modern Hollywood superhero comic-book heroes. I do however have very dim memories of reading a few Phantom comics as a kid and the Ghost Who Walks does have some appeal to me as a character.

The 1996 Phantom movie failed to kick off a franchise. It’s possible that the timing was not quite right.

The backstory is disposed of very quickly right at the start with a voiceover narration. That means we can get on with the story. It is of course set in the jungle, possibly a jungle island. The Phantom’s home is the mythical island of Bengalla so I assume that’s the setting.

The Phantom, the mysterious Ghost Who Walks (played by Billy Zane), has made a serious error. He has allowed a magical skull to fall into the hands of the dreaded Seng Brotherhood. If these arch-fiends get their hands on all three skulls they will have access to unlimited destructive power. The Phantom has to retrieve that skull.

Meanwhile in America a crusading newspaper publisher, Dave Palmer, is set to to lift the lid on the nefarious activities of businessman-gangster Xander Drax (Treat Williams). Of course we figure right away that he is the sort of villain who might well have an interest in those magical skulls.

Palmer’s daughter Diana (Kristy Swanson) sets off on a Pan Am Clipper flying boat to further Palmer’s investigation. Diana is of course a Feisty Heroine and as such she is quite capable of punching out muscle-bound guys who outweigh her by a hundred pounds or more, because girlpower! Yes, sadly, there is a certain amount of tedious Girlpower kickass action heroine stuff in this movie.

Diana is kidnapped on the way by sexy lady pirates. Now this is more like it. I very much approve of sexy lady pirates. Their leader Sala (Catherine Zeta Jones) is not just a sexy bad girl, she has a cruel sadistic streak as well. At this point I’m really liking this movie.

There are several different groups of bad guys after those skulls. Which leads to plenty of action.

My biggest issue with this movie is with one of the character arcs which develops disappointingly and unconvincingly.

A minor problem is that the Phantom comic books were aimed at kids and the Phantom is a goody-goody hero who never kills people (or at least very rarely kills). This makes him a less interesting hero since he is never faced with awkward moral dilemmas. The movie also has very much the feel of being aimed at kids. But that’s OK. This is intended as a lighthearted fun movie.

Billy Zane is OK, but his Phantom is just a bit too sensitive 90s guy. The part needed a bit more gravitas and definitely needed more of a hint of the ruthless crusader.

Diana is slightly irritating but at least she’s cute.

Performance-wise the film’s saving grace is Catherine Zeta Jones as Sala - she oozes wickedness. I like that in a girl. And Treat Williams makes a pretty decent super-villain.

I like the way Diana and Sala instantly hate each other. Sala assumes that no man can resist her charms, but apparently the Phantom can. That naturally pisses her off. Sala and Diana both think the Phantom is rather hot so they’re not likely to become best friends.

Despite my minor reservations about a few aspects of the film there is a great deal to like here.

I love the visuals. This movie aims to look gorgeous and it succeeds. It’s bright and colourful and it captures the right comic-book feel. I do like the 1930s setting. The fact that considerable parts of the movie take place in New York is utilised effectively - this was a time when men dressed with style and women wore slinky glamorous dresses. And the contrasts between New York and the jungle work well.

The production and costume designs are excellent, the cinematography is top-notch. The effects work and the stunts are very well executed. This movie is very very stylish.

This movie was directed by Australian director Simon Wincer, also responsible for a couple of bona fide ozploitation classics - Snapshot and Harlequin. The pacing is brisk Wincer resists the temptation to make an overlong movie. There’s always something happening.

The fact that it failed to ignite the box office is one of those depressing difficult-to-explain things. Maybe it just didn’t take itself seriously enough. The emphasis is on fun. It’s an old-fashioned feelgood adventure movie and I have no problems with that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks terrific.

Jade (1995)

Jade is a 1995 erotic thriller with a dash of neo-noir. It was written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by William Friedkin.

In 1992 in the wake of the smash hit success of Basic Instinct Eszterhas was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. After this his career crashed, he had three box-office failures in a row and the critics moved in for the kill. In fact those box-office failures were extremely good and extremely interesting movies, the movies bombed largely due to extreme critical hostility and the perception that Eszterhas suddenly lost his touch is entirely wrong. But then critics usually are wrong.

Back to Jade. This is very much a San Francisco movie. It opens with the brutal murder of a very rich powerful man, Kyle Medford. Assistant DA David Corelli (David Caruso) is in charge of the investigation. Corelli has his own problems. He was in love with Trina (Linda Fiorentino), now a leading psychiatrist, but she married hot-shot lawyer Matt Gavin (Chazz Palminteri). Corelli is still carrying a torch for her, and still hoping that her marriage to Matt Gavin will break up and he’ll finally get to marry her. On the subject of Trina Corelli is perhaps not entirely rational. The situation is complicated by the fact that Corelli and Matt are friends.

The murder case takes a disturbing turn when it is discovered that Medford owned a beach house. The beach house was used by other rich powerful men for sex romps with very high-class hookers.

There are some interesting clues found in Medford’s houses. Medford was a collector. His collection included a large number of beautiful silver jewellery boxes. Inside each box is a lock of female pubic hair. There’s also a box with the word “jade” engraved on it. Not to mention some excellent photos of the Governor of California having sex with a hooker.

And there’s a video tape which had been thrown into the fire. Perhaps the scientific boys can salvage it. They can. It’s no surprise that it shows a rich important man having sex with a hooker but there’s something else about the tape that throws David Corelli for a loop.

There are also a couple of witnesses whose evidence is unsettling. One of them saw quite a few women entering that beach house. He saw them clearly.

It’s fairly evident that Jade is a woman, but finding her will be a challenge.

There are more killings and attempted killings and someone seems to have taken a murderous dislike to David Corelli.

There are thematic similarities to Basic Instinct which Eszterhas also wrote and the two films have a slightly similar vibe. There are some differences, party of course due to the fact that Basic Instinct and Jade had different directors. With Basic Instinct Paul Verhoeven was clearly homaging Hitchcock and to some extent film noir. It can be considered a neo-noir. In Jade Friedkin is going for a grittier scuzzier feel. Both movies deal with sex and power and with sex as a game in which the price the loser pays is death. Basic Instinct is more concerned with power within relationships while Jade is concerned with power in a broader sense. It also adds money to the mix. And corruption.

The world of Jade is entirely corrupt. Every person in any kind of authority is either corrupt or too scared to confront the corruption. Everyone is morally compromised. David Corelli is keenly aware that he too is in danger of being morally compromised.

There’s a spectacular and extremely clever and imaginative car chase which is of course what you would expect from William Friedkin.

Is this neo-noir? I think it just about qualifies. Corelli is a noir protagonist of sorts. He’s basically a decent guy but he’s already partially morally compromised (you don’t get to be Assistant DA without making a few sleazy moral compromises). He’s accustomed to a world of corruption in which it’s taken for granted that if a line of investigation seems to be leading to someone as powerful as the Governor then the normal procedure is to abandon that line of investigation immediately. Such people are above the law. He understands that the rich and powerful never get convicted. He’s not crooked but he has learnt to turn a blind eye to corruption.

Now he finds himself sliding further into this murky world. He’s also watching his own emotional life self-destructing. He also has people trying to kill him.

There’s a femme fatale of sorts. There’s a sense of events spiralling out of control and Corelli is certainly losing control.

David Caruso makes a pretty good lead but the standout performer is Linda Fiorentino. She’s sexy but disturbing - it’s not at all clear what makes this woman tick.

There’s a nice atmosphere of sleaze and plenty of suggestions of kinkiness.

I have mixed feelings about William Friedkin but he does a fine job here.

If you like movies that wrap things up neatly at the end, tied up with a pretty bow, you might not be entirely satisfied with the ending although I think it’s fine and it works. I don’t care what critics thought about this movie, I liked it a lot. Very highly recommended.

I bought the Spanish Blu-Ray which is (unlike some of the other releases of this film) in the correct aspect ratio and it’s a very nice transfer.

The Dirty Dolls (1973)

The Dirty Dolls is a very obscure 1976 softcore sexploitation crime thriller film which has been released by the American Genre Film Archive (paired with Things To Come) in their Smut Without Smut series on Blu-Ray.

Smut Without Smut may be the silliest idea in the history of home video. The idea was to take X-Rated movies and chop out all the naughty bits. Perhaps their next project will be Thrillers Without Thrills, or Comedies Without Comedy.

At least they had the decency and just enough intelligence to include the uncut versions on the Blu-Ray as well. I watched the uncut version so that’s the version I’m reviewing.

Johnny leads a gang of desperate armed robbers. There’s Johnny, and five hot babes including his sister Dee Dee.

And one of the babes, Sherry, is played by sexploitation legend Sharon Kelly! Sharon Kelly started out as a go-go dancer, made a major splash in softcore and later moved into hardcore.

They’re not the world’s smartest or most efficient criminals. They kill someone in a bar heist. Then they move on to something much more ambitious, stealing uncut diamonds from a diamond exchange. They find themselves having to take two hostages and then they don’t know what to do with them. And maybe they can’t unload those diamonds. Johnny is out of his depth. He’s small-time and definitely not cut out for the big time.

The bar heist is fun. The girls are masquerading as missionaries collecting money for their church. Only they collect the money at gunpoint. They’ve found that this stimulates people to give more generously.

The problem they face in the diamond heist is that the diamonds are in an attache case chained to the wrist of a security guy. They have to take him along with them. And they run into a witness in the lift. They have to take her along as well.

There are already tensions in the gang. Johnny is sleeping with all of his girls. Except for Dee Dee, although he and Dee Dee are very close. Dee Dee is worried that things are getting out of hand.

The female hostage is rich and stuck-up and treats Johnny with contempt. Two of the girls decide to have some fun with her. They’ll subject her to some sapphic loving, and since they’ve handcuffed her she doesn’t have any choice in the matter. She is naturally outraged but the girls are persuasive and Sherry is impressed. For a beginner this lady can give a girl a surprising amount of pleasure.

Sherry also persuades the captive security guy to pleasure her. He’s tied up but the parts of him that are of interest to Sherry are easily accessible. Sherry has a very nice time, and she thinks he has such nice eyes.

The relationship between Johnny and his sister will also develop in an interesting way. This is the real heart of the movie and it works better in the uncut version because it needs to have a real impact. It needs to be a gut punch. I’ve watched the butchered version and it doesn’t quite have the impact and the shock value required. It works better in the uncut version because you get a sense of erotic desperation and lust out of control. The uncut version adds a slightly more disturbing touch as well, with the suggestion that Johnny’s suspicions about Dee Dee’s feelings might not be entirely wrong.

Chopping out all the sex scenes in this movie really is an insane thing to do. The butchered version runs for a mere 49 minutes. This is a sex movie. That’s what it’s all about. Yes, there’s a rudimentary crime plot but it’s lust that drives the plot and it’s the sleaziness and depravity and out-of-control unhealthy sexual desperation that provides all of the character motivations. The sex scenes are softcore but very raunchy and steamy and sweaty. Take out the sex and you have a ridiculously short second-rate ultra-cheap boring crime movie. With the sex it’s a wild crazy roller-coaster ride of sex and crime. It’s dirty and sleazy because it needs to be dirty and sleazy.

And this is a Sharon Kelly movie. She is quite a good actress and she’s cute and charming and amusing but people watch a Sharon Kelly movie to see her take her clothes off and get down to some bedroom action. That’s because once she’s naked she’s even cuter and more charming and more amusing and she sends the eroticism levels through the ceiling.

The sex is strictly softcore.

This movie is not in great condition. There’s a lot of print damage. That’s a feature rather than a bug. It makes the movie feel grimy and dirty, which is as it should be.

Don’t bother with the hacked-to-pieces cleaned-up let’s-not-offend-anybody version. In its uncut form The Dirty Dolls is a delightfully nasty, violent and scuzzy exploitation movie and it’s highly recommended.

Things To Come (1976)

Things To Come is a very obscure 1976 softcore sex science fiction film which has been released by the American Genre Film Archive (paired with The Dirty Dolls) in their Smut Without Smut series on Blu-Ray.

Smut Without Smut may be the most senseless idea in the history of home video. The idea was to take X-Rated movies and chop out all the X-Rated bits. I know, it’s a bit like taking comedy movies and chopping out all the jokes. I did get the impression from the commentary track by the AGFA team that there was a bit of an ideological agenda behind the Smut Without Smut project.

They did at least show some faint glimmerings of intelligence by including the uncut versions on the Blu-Ray as well.

I watched the uncut version so that’s the version I’m reviewing. Having also sat through the irritating audio commentary to the non-naughty version I can say that I’ve seen both versions.

OK, back to the movie. This is a story that takes place in a dystopian future. It’s a soft totalitarianism in which the population is controlled by television. So it’s basically the world we have now but with TV rather than the internet as the method of social control. The TV shows endless sex and violence because that calms people down.

One thing that is interesting is that the movie doesn’t get ideological. It doesn’t have an actual ideological axe to grind. The subject is social control by means of technology. What the ideological purpose behind the social control might be is never specified because it’s irrelevant.

Julie (Barbara Fisk) is the heroine and she’s dissatisfied by her marriage. Her husband just watches TV all day.

Julie is involved with a terrorist group who plan to blow up the government’s super-computer.

Julie wins the lottery. The prize is a week in the Pleasure Dome, where every fantasy can be lived out. The idea is obviously lifted from Westworld.

Julie doesn’t have much fun. The leisure activities are much too violent for her. These include killer-cross - moto-cross but with motorcycle riders hunting down female victims. Once it’s explained to her that the victims are just robots it doesn’t bother her so much. And when she later kills a security guard she feels no qualms about it at all. He was just a robot. A machine.

Of course the Pleasure Dome turns out to be not quite what it appears to be.

There are obvious borrowings from various other science fiction movies and TV series (such as Death Race 2000 and Nigel Kneale’s superb TV play Year of the Sex Olympics).

The plot might not be dazzlingly original but it’s perfectly serviceable and while the ending might not come as a huge surprise it’s effective enough.

OK, back to the smut. The X-Rated material is very mild simulated sex plus a lot of nudity. Yes, there is a lot of frontal nudity. If you’re terrified of the female body maybe you should play safe and just stick to children’s cartoons. There does seem to be some doubt about the original intentions of the filmmakers, as to whether some of the softcore material was added later, and whether the filmmakers approved or disapproved of this.

I think the movie makes much less sense without the softcore stuff. The sex stuff makes it clearer that this is a society in which sex and violence are used as social pacifiers. The scene with Julie and her husband watching TV has a lot more impact when we see the sex stuff on the TV. It makes the couple’s reactions a lot more interesting. There’s a very early scene which apparently had the AGFA team heading for the fainting couches. In fact it works really well. The sudden twist in which the poor innocent victim reveals that she’s just an actress and she’s treated the whole thing as a joke helps to make the point of the movie and adds an interesting multiple voyeurism - we’re watching a couple who are watching something but what they’re watching is not what it seems to be. And the viewer is immediately drawn into the voyeurism.

Very little is known about this movie. No-one knows anything about the producer-director, Derek Ford, or the writer, Michael Greenwood. It seems to have been financed by some guys with a background in hardcore. It’s impossible to say whether Ford knew the extra sex stuff was going to be added. When you watch the non-naughty Smut Without Smut version what you have is at best a cheap knock-off of a number of well-known sci-fi movies. I imagine that it was obvious that it was unreleasable. It’s not terrible but it’s just not interesting enough to have worked as a serious art film at the time, and it’s too tame to have succeeded as an exploitation movie. The decision to add the extra sex footage was quite sensible. It turned it into an intriguing exploration of social control through vicarious artificial pleasures. Rather than just being a cheapo Westworld it becomes an interesting riff on Huxley’s Brave New World.

And regarded in that light it’s not too bad. The ideas might not be original but they’re good ideas, and they might not be explored in profound depth but they are explored. I enjoyed it more than I expected to and it’s worth a recommend rating.

What’s interesting is that for decades this was thought be be a lost movie, until AGFA discovered they had had a complete print (in fairly good condition) sitting in their archive.

Night of Open Sex (1983)

Night of Open Sex (La noche de los sexos abiertos) is a 1983 Jess Franco movie that springs a few surprises. It’s not quite what it initially appears to be.

This is one of the movies Jess Franco made for Golden Films. This was both the worst and the best part of his career. It was his worst period in the sense that Golden Films turned out to be totally incompetent when it came to securing foreign distribution for his movies. These movies remained entirely unseen and unknown outside of Spain.

On the other hand it was his happiest period because Golden Films offered him an unprecedented level of creative control. He could do absolutely anything he wanted to do. And nothing mattered more to Franco than creative control.

Even when Franco’s cult following later started to build these movies continued to be almost totally unseen and unknown to his fans outside of Spain. This finally started to change some years back and these movies are now available, in subtitled form (they were never dubbed into English) and in remarkably good transfers, on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Their initially very poor reputation among eurocult fans has gradually grown but they are still far too often overlooked.

Night of Open Sex introduces us to erotic dancer Moira (Lina Romay). Through the rather sleazy Vickers (Miguel Ángel Aristu) she has become mixed up in some sort of espionage plot. Her job is to take the place of another girl, Tina Klaus (Juana de la Morena), and deliver a secret message to the General. Vickers has kidnapped Tina and she has been forced to reveal the plan concerning the message.

Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans) appears on the scene. The name suggests that he is going to be another variation on the Al Pereira character who pops up in so many Franco films, usually in the guise of a hardboiled private eye.

Whatever deal is going down, Al wants in on it. He wants Moira to accept him as a partner.

He also wants to sleep with Moira. He has to be very forcefully persuasive at first but Moira seems delighted with the outcome.

Al and Moira have a problem. They have the message but it’s in code and they have no idea what it’s all about. Al figures there’s money involved.

There’s still the problem of Vickers, and there’s another couple who want a piece of this action. There’s plenty of potential here for violence and double-crosses.

It all leads up to a totally unexpected ending which I absolutely loved.

There’s a staggering amount of sex and nudity. Lina Romay is nude for the majority of the film’s running time and you won’t be surprised to see a lot of shots of the most intimate parts of her anatomy. The other actresses spend a lot of time naked as well. The sex scenes are softcore but very raunchy.

The highlight of any Franco movie is likely to be the nightclub act scenes and Moira’s act has to be seen to be believed. When you’ve seen it you still won’t believe it. The things she does with those magazines. And the car. She’s a very imaginative lady.

At some point in this movie you’re going to have one of those “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more Toto” moments. It’s not that anything supernatural or paranormal or science fictional, or impossible, happens. You just know that this is not reality. Maybe part of it is reality. Or maybe none of it. You start to realise that the plot is following dream logic rather than ordinary logic. Characters suddenly do wildly unexpected out-of-character things. It’s clear that this is not a flaw in the script. This is intentional. Uncle Jess is playing with our heads.

Stephen Thrower has suggested that the entire movie is an extended sexual fantasy (or series of sexual fantasies). I think he’s probably spot on. It’s a sexual fantasy rather than a dream or a hallucination or an exercise in surrealism.

Which raises lots of interesting questions. Are we supposed to believe that these people have any actual existence? Is this Jess Franco’s sexual fantasy which he’s inviting us to share? Is it to any extent Moira’s fantasy? And given the close collaboration between Franco and Lina Romay and the fact there was apparently quite a bit of improvising going on, are there any elements that might be Lina’s fantasy? Or a fantasy shared by Jess and Lina?

There is one genuinely shocking scene, but of course if this really is supposed to be taken as a fantasy then that scene becomes much less disturbing. Other mildly disturbing scenes become not disturbing at all.

The sex scenes are very passionate but they’re also just a little jokey. They’re mostly good-natured. You have to love the way Moira starts yelling “Oh Tarzan” as her sexual frenzy increases and in one encounter she gives an actual Tarzan jungle call when she comes. It’s one of the things that is so engaging about this movie - these sudden goofy moments.

The final sex scene is priceless. It may be the culmination of Franco’s career as a filmmaker. It’s not that it’s graphic, it isn’t, but the context is delightfully surprising.

Night of Open Sex is crazy, but it’s crazy in a subtle way. The craziness creeps up on the viewer. I liked it a lot. Highly recommended.

Severin have provided a great transfer with some very desirable extras. As always the pick of the extras is Stephen Thrower’s perceptive video essay.

The Magic Blade (1976)

The Magic Blade is a 1976 Shaw Brothers swordplay movie directed by Yuen Chor.

It starts with two master swordsmen, Fu Hung Hsieh and Yen Nan-fei, taking up a duel that was interrupted a year earlier. This time it will be to the death. The duel however is interrupted again - some very nasty very bad people are trying to kill them both. They figure out they’re up against the evil forces of the swordplay underworld. They decide to team up.

What’s at stake is not just a power play but possession of the Peacock Dart, a kind of magical super-weapon. The Peacock Dart would bring its possessor absolute power. It must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the bad guys.

The bad guys of course are determined to get the Peacock Dart. It’s to be found at the Peacock Mansion which is under the control of a venerable but fairly formidable old guy. That’s where Fu Hung Hsieh and Yen Nan-fei meet Miss Chiu. She’s the old guy’s daughter. She has no martial arts skills but she’s resourceful and brave. She’s also cute and rather sweet. She ends up teaming up with the heroes.

The chief bad guy has not put in a personal appearance yet and that won’t happen until very late in the movie. All that the heroes know is that he’s Master Fu.

Master Fu has employed five master swordsmen, all renowned killers and all of them evil and each has his own private retinue of fighters.

Also on the side of evil is the fearsome Devil Grandma, a kind of wicked witch type and it’s only gradually that we learn how twisted and evil she is. She has some really scary and unpleasant habits.

The action is relentless. There’s one complex fight scene after another. This is a Shaw Brothers movie so you know the fight scenes will be expertly staged but Yuen Chor also makes every fight scene different, and every one of them imaginative. The human chess match is a particular highlight.

In its later stage the film changes gears just a little. We discover that our heroes are not just human fighting machines. They’re not emotionless. They are capable of kindness (in particular towards a young prostitute) and there are some hints of romance. There are romantic feelings towards Miss Chiu. This strengthens the movie considerably. Heroes who are prepared to risk their lives to battle evil are all well and good but let’s face it we always have much more sympathy for a hero prepared to risk his life to save a woman he loves.

We also get to meet the femme fatale. She doesn’t rely on swords or throwing knives. She wields a much more formidable weapon - her sexual charms. And her sexual charms are considerable. At this point we also get some nudity which adds a bit more spice.

I love the fact that the visuals are superb but everything looks totally artificial. This is the world of myth, legend, fairy tale, folklore, whatever you wish to call it. This is not the real world. There are no overt supernatural elements. The only real magic is the Peacock Dart. But it is nonetheless a fantasy world. Of course all the swordsmen can perform impossible acrobatic feats.

It’s visually very impressive but this is not a pretty movie. This is a slightly sinister world, a dark fantasy world, a world in which evil is palpable. There’s darkness as well as light.

The female characters are quite varied. Some are good, some evil. And the femme fatale character even has some depth - we might not approve of her motives but we can understand them.

Master Fu is also a slightly more complex villain than one night expect - in some ways he’s a victim of his own success as a villain.

Insofar as there’s a theme running through the movie it’s that the pursuit of money and power is not so much morally wrong as futile. The price is too high. The more money and power you obtain the more of a burden it will end up being.

The Magic Blade has everything you could want in a movie of this type, delivered with energy and style. Highly recommended.

The Eastern Masters DVD provides a very acceptable transfer.