Blazing Temple (1976)

That rare beast, widescreen subtitled old school! The DVD looks great - really good definition & bright colours - along with the Mandarin audio it feels like quite a different kind of movie to the dubbed VHS dupes that most old school kung fu movies get. That makes it very difficult to do a fair comparison to movies like 5 DEADLY VENOMS or SHAOLIN CHALLENGES NINJA, so I'm not sure how fair it is to say that I really found BLAZING TEMPLE quite boring.

I think even dubbed and blurry it would still have been boring though, but I might have been more apt to forgive some of its flaws. Sample flaws... well, the plot was kind of nonsense... I think this might be a print that's been re-edited, as there was a certain lack of sensibility to some of the developments... e.g. Chia Ling, billed second to Carter Wong on the DVD and in top billing at HKMDB, appears for about 5 minutes at the start of the film and about 1 minute at the end. Carter Wong's own role seems odd... like it could well have been a minor part that was later padded out as much as possible to claim that he was the star.

Also, the fight scenes were not terribly interesting... lots of people leaping through the air in a King Hu style, but the actual fisticuffs were kind of pedestrian, which is also true of King Hu but BLAZING TEMPLE doesn't have the excuse of being way ahead of its time and otherwise a beautiful and fascinating film. Hmmm. Well, I can't defend myself much more than that... perhaps it was mood, but I didn't enjoy the movie. But if you want to see the movie, the Mei Ah DVD is pretty good .