THE REBEL BOXER (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This chopsocky is currently streaming with the title SA MU CHEN, which is the name of the heroine essayed by star Nancy Yen. Since that title isn't very catchy I'm substituting one of the English alternative titles, even though the "boxer" here is more a revenger than a rebel.

BOXER is a shot-back-to-back sequel to another film, FURIOUS SLAUGHTER, about a fellow named Yung, a folk-hero who opposes an evil band of criminals, the Axe Gang. (One guess as to the miscreants' favorite weapon.) At the end of SLAUGHTER, Yung is blinded by lye and killed. BOXER claims that he didn't get killed but went into hiding, though he still has to recover from the blinding. Miss Ma, Yung's sister, hears about Yung's supposed death and investigates, though her main profession is that of a doctor and her proficiency in martial arts is not explained (though possibly her brother taught her). The Axe Gang not only traps Ma, they lure forth her brother (played here by Jimmy Wang Yu). After lots of fighting, Ma devastates the Axe Gang, though her brother dies anyway.

This is one of the most straightforward chopsockies I've ever seen, with no side-characters and only one bit of comic byplay, wherein a nasty gangster tries to get lady doctor Ma to examine his nether regions. From what I can tell BOXER was one of Nancy Yen's first starring roles, though I know the actress only for support-cast performances. She handles the close-up, non-doubled fight-scenes quite well, and does nicely with one or two scenes in which she has to emote about her missing brother. Still, if the producers hoped to mold Yen into another kung-fu diva, BOXER was probably too mild a concoction to impress the HK audiences.

The Axe Gang enlists two outsiders to help fight Ma, one a swordsman and the other a monk with a peculiar but non-uncanny weapon: a short staff he uses as a club, with a human skull mounted on the end. The only uncanny weapons here are the chosen weapons of the Gang. There would be nothing weird if the villains simply carried around ordinary axes, as seen in depictions of Tong wars. But most of the gang use axes that are attached to the end of long chains, which they even use to "net" Ma in the scene shown above. I find it unlikely that any professional gang ever made use of axes on chains, which seem only a little less impractical than flying guillotines.