Hello!
Two years ago, Arrow USA broke the ice on definitive Blu-rays of vintage Hong Kong martial arts cinema — we reviewed a novelty Sci-fi feature that was nested among its various Chinese mini-epics, in an enormous, gloriously appointed gift box release decorated with the spangled ‘Shawscope’ logo.
Two more Volumes down the line brings us box three, well-timed for people needing gifts for Hong Kong- crazy film fans. We plug it because, well, products like this show the Blu-ray biz at its most inventive.
To this viewer Hong Kong action cinema is a blur. If I read the pub blurbs correctly, the fourteen features herein focus on the wuxia pian, which blends the styles of Italo westerns and Japanese samurai pictures. — the comprehensive extras and analysis describe a movement with changing themes. This is the place to see the core pictures and read about ‘the sweeping stylistic evolution of the genre,’ from ‘righteous stoicism’ to ‘wild-and-weird anarchism.’
As before, the oversized box is ideal for coffee table display. The extras look authoritative to me. I even note the presence of an exclusive music CD with ‘De Wolfe Music Library’ cues that show up in Hong Kong pictures. What? Which are the pictures that simply swipe well-known music from big movies?
Get ready for a One-Armed Swordsman trilogy, fighting swordswomen, and enticing titles like Killer Constable and Bastard Swordsman.
Shawscope Volume 3 Limited Edition
It looks like videos on Internet Archive are up and running again, because correspondent Michael McQuarrie has a couple of new finds for us. This first item is a highway safety film from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
With his solemn charm, favorite Raymond Burr delivers the intro, ending with an ominous read of the film’s title that has ‘another take, please’ written all over it. We’re shown an emergency room with artfully composed dramatic inserts of fancy medical equipment. The concerned surgeon, his voice crudely dubbed, reveals the cure for all the bloody havoc: seat belts!
An Our Town- like narrator welcomes us to a peaceful but woefully complacent American dawn. The surgeon reads off a list of auto death statistics, converted into dialogue. We see crash test footage from UCLA … it’s interesting that 1961 audiences, not yet jaded by 24-7 movie automobile mayhem, were probably fascinated by the slow-motion collisions.
Anybody recognize the main surgeon-spokesman?
Interrupted Morning
Much more problematical is a series of four Atomic War! comic books from 1952. They’re basically standard war comics, except millions die. Dauntless SAC pilots and vigilant generals make sure that the USSR gets a proper pasting … after the U.S. is itself annihilated.
The comics revel in ‘imagination of disaster’ views of cities A-bombed. The commies somehow place a sabotage agent right in our missile command room! Cattle run for their lives from the Chicago stockyards! Sidebar stories assure us that Berlin, the Far North, everywhere, actually, will become an atomic battlefield.
The level of Death Wish Hysteria in these insane pages is depressing. Did Stanley Kubrick see and ponder these comics?
Atomic War!
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
