Chop Socky Cinema is your go-to corner for all things martial arts on screen—from high-flying kung fu classics to modern bone-crunching brawlers. We dive into the legends, the hidden gems, and the genre-defining moments that shaped martial arts cinema.
In which Bryan Leung’s ponytail ruthlessly kills! It’s no secret that director Chang Cheh and wuxia screenwriter I Kuang, who wrote over 300 screenplays for the Shaw Brothers, revolutionized the action films coming out of Hong Kong. Especially for Shaw Brothers, Cheh especially was changing the face of their heroes ...
Capitalizing on the death of Bruce Lee has never been so damn out of control as the Special Branch of Investigations takes brain tissue samples from Bruce Lee, immediately after his death, and hires a mad scientist (Jon T. Benn from Way Of The Dragon and Jet Li’s Fearless) to create three clones of the deceased ...
It’s a rags-to-riches story by way of the fist! Directed by Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh Li and featuring a stellar performance from Chen Kuan Tai as Ma Yung Chen, who heads to the big city seeking his own path to fortune and fame, this Hong Kong gangster epic (clocking in at almost 2 and a half ...
In which Jackie Chan takes down a hovercraft trashing the streets of NYC with an antique samurai sword while driving a doorless Lamborghini Countach (with a broken ankle)! For many Americans, Rumble In The Bronx was their first taste of Chan’s explosive style of fighting when it came to his choreography and his stunts, with Chan performing most of them ...
It’s a rags-to-riches story by way of the fist! Directed by Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh Li and featuring a stellar performance from Chen Kuan Tai as Ma Yung Chen, who heads to the big city seeking his own path to fortune and fame, this Hong Kong gangster epic (clocking in at almost 2 and a half ...
In which some very nimble fingers pluck out a man’s eyeballs from their sockets! King Boxer remains a powerhouse of hard-hitting kung-fu action. It is, at once, a full force blast of cinematic energy that hits you square in the jaw. This iconic movie, released in the early 1970s, takes no prisoners as ...
Okay, okay. So, Dirty Ho is unfortunately titled but that doesn’t stop this kung fu film from being a masteract in comedy and martial arts choreography and, thanks to the usual high production values of Shaw Brothers, it has aged tremendously well. Directed by Lau Kar-leung and starring ...
It’s East vs East in this Martial Arts tournament movie by way of an arranged marriage! Heroes of the East, directed by Lau Kar-Leung and filmed by Arthur Wong, focuses on an arranged marriage between a student of Kung Fu and the Japanese daughter of one of his father’s business ...
The Deadly Venoms return! Bean curds; a dyeing mill; a fighting school. These are the common denominators when fighting off a horde of Ching soldiers in director Chang Cheh’s Shaolin Rescuers, a chopsocky flick from 1979 in which Jason Pai Piao and the one and only Venom ...
In which the white-haired supervillain somehow returns to rain down even more destruction upon the disciples of Shaolin! Also known as Slice Of Death, Shaolin Abbot proves that David Chiang is not to be messed with. Whether he is playing b...
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