King Boxer, Master of the Flying Guillotine and Other Awesome 1970s Martial Arts Movie Trailers!
Turn on the "way back" machine for this collection of trailers from 1970s martial arts movies! Excerpts from the epic Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Movies of the 1970s provide commentary and context as to their must-see status!
With the summer blockbuster season just around the corner and everyone's bandwidth being eaten alive by trailers, previews, excerpts, clips and parodies thereof for a long list of science-fiction and superhero action-adventure movies, we at BlackBeltMag.com thought it might be fun to take a look in the "waaaaay back" machine when studios — especially smaller ones — put out a trailer that was shown before feature presentations at the local drive-in. And, of course, we specialize in — you guessed it! — martial arts here at BlackBeltMag.com. So we were stoked to stumble on a collection of awesome trailers for four martial arts movies assembled by a fellow martial arts fan and YouTube user.* The films in his trailers collection include the following:
- Master of the Flying Guillotine
- The Street Fighter (featuring the legendary Sonny Chiba)
- King Boxer (also known as Five Fingers of Death)
- Fist of Fury (also known as The Chinese Connection)
MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970sMaster of the Flying Guillotine | The Street Fighter | King Boxer | Fist of Fury
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MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970sMaster of the Flying Guillotine (1976)
Master of the Flying Guillotine, directed by Jimmy Wong Yu, notably has a large cast of martial arts superstars. Wong Yu was a martial director’s martial artist. In several of his directed films, there is a large cast of kung fu actors prominently featured, and they all do different kinds of martial arts. Wong Yu gave the actors in Master of the Flying Guillotine the opportunity to flaunt their skills and show audiences the diversity and novelty of their martial ways. Take the beginning of Master of the Flying Guillotine, for example: It jumps off with 12 fights that run for 12 minutes and features 18 different styles of martial arts. I also want to point out that none of the fights feature Wong Yu, which clearly demonstrates that a Wong Yu movie is not all about him. In this film, when the blind anti-Ming assassin Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Jin Gang) hears that a one-armed fighter killed his two disciples, he leaves his mountain retreat and vows to avenge his students. Shaving his head and disguising himself as a lama Buddhist monk, Fung arms himself with the deadly and scary flying guillotine. He vows to kill every one-armed fighter he meets. This movie has the best cinematic musical shtick for a villain, one that’s foreboding and dangerous-sounding. It’s a short piece called Super 16 by the band Neu. It should rank right up there with Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars.MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970sThe Street Fighter (1974)
The neat thing about watching Japanese karate films after watching a ton of Chinese kung fu films is that for once the Japanese are the good guys. So instead of trying to kill the Chinese or destroy their martial arts schools, they are destroying the evil Yakuza. Enter Sonny Chiba, who gave Japanese karate films a different kind of fist of fury. Sonny Chiba brought Japanese karate center stage by sacrificing flair and artistry for more violence and brutality in the form of anti-hero Tsurugi Takuma the street fighter, aka Terry Tsurugi in the English dub. In this first installment of the Street Fighter trilogy, the movie opens with Tsurugi breaking karate killer Tateki Shikenbaru, aka Junjoe (Masashi Ishibashi), out of prison. However, because Tateki's brother and sister can’t completely pay for his services, Tsurugi launches one of the siblings out a four-story window. He sells the other sib as a sex slave to the inscrutable Enter the Dragon "Han" look-alike Rakuda Zhang.Go behind the scenes of Bruce Lee's final martial arts epic in this FREE download!
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