A largely unknown eastern. Wang Yu plays a super-cool hero, who singlehandedly embarrasses a crime syndicate. Direction, art direction, score (bizarre 70s!) all fine, plot is a slight yawn though. Still, good kung fu pic.
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RonAltman26 March 2002
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Jimmy Wang Yu was the mad man of martial arts movies and to prove that you only need to watch this movie. Let me tell the back story first. "The Chinese Boxer" was released to theaters 11/27/1970 and Jimmy Wang Yu was the writer, director, and the million dollar star. Shaw Brothers let him get away with that trifecta just once. Shaw Brothers was an old style studio system but the world was changing. Jimmy broke his contract with Shaw Brothers and he was smart to do it. The studio system cranked out formulaic movies that folks paid to see but the 1970s would evolve into the most creative decade of all genres of movies and the decade of possibly the greatest movies ever made. Jimmy started out slow with no creative control but by the end of 1971 he wrote and directed "The Brave and the Evil" and that's where he found himself. The same year a young man named Bruce Lee dreamed of doing the same. Bruce ended up at Golden Harvest as a mere actor originally playing second lead to James Tien. If I never knew anything about Bruce Lee or Jimmy Wang Yu and simply watched "The Big Boss" and "The Brave and the Evil" I would have rated Jimmy's movie higher. "Furious Slaughter" has all the elements of the mad man of martial arts movies. About half of the screen time is fights, props are improvised as weapons, stunt men are set on fire, there is a "big boss" fight followed by a bigger boss then a biggest boss, the Japanese are thrown in then not just beaten but humiliated. Jimmy fights in all styles, at all distances, standing and on the ground, every move is powerful and so what if it was sloppy? The stunt men take a beating but Jimmy takes a beating too, even a worse beating by the time it is over. Women are there only as pretty props and the ending will be a tragedy on top of a tragedy mixed with a disaster, or simply put – they all die. I love it!