Taiwanese psychotronic cinema at its finest...
We’ve covered a handful of Hong Kong films on WHC before, but 1981’s Thrilling Bloody Sword is our first taste of Taiwanese cinema! The 1981 fantasy adventure film Thrilling Bloody Sword is an intensely psychotronic adventure full of cursed dwarf generals, evil sorcerers, monster attacks, magic swords and so much more. More than one commentator has described it as "face-melting" or "mind-melting" and I can't agree more.
On one hand, Thrilling Bloody Sword is an outstanding example of a wuxia or martial arts chivalry movie, but it’s also so much more, drawing in elements of various fairy tale and myth traditions. For instance, I felt like there were some elements that fall right in line with Alexander Rou’s 1964 Russian fantasy film Jack Frost.
A quick note on availability! This one may be one of the harder films to get your hands on that we’ve watched. There ARE some unofficial rips of it out there, but the film quality on those is terrible. Golden Ninja Video did a beautiful restoration of the only known 35 mm footage and it’s a wonderful Blu-ray. As for this writing, however, they’re out of stock. You can PREORDER a two pack that features Thrilling Bloody Sword + The Revengeful Swordswoman. Otherwise, if you’re Atlanta-based, you can rent this at Videodrome and it actually has played at a few cinemas. So you might be able to catch it on the big screen if you’re lucky.
What's up next on Weirdhouse Cinema? We're going to Return to Oz! In the meantime, be sure to check out the merch store and follow us on Letterboxd! All the movies we've covered are listed there in our list and you can click "read notes" to get links to the individual episodes posted here.
Comments