I picked this up in spring of 2023 along with a stack of other films at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. Looking back at the list, I’ve done okay on watching the films I bought then–out of 37 or 38, I guess I’ve watched a dozen or so. Which counts as okay for the video-buying excursions’ buy-to-watch-within-two-years ratio at Nogglestead.
As the Return (as with Legend) indicates, this is a sequel to an earlier film which I haven’t seen. In this film, the one-armed swordsmen is approached by a pair of swordsmen, one in black and one in white, to participate in a competition at the castle. He demurs, saying he’s just a farmer now, and they leave, but he is approached by other local “families” who have also been approached. They go, and he ends up taking up his broken sword (which looks like a big cleaver) when the bad guys persist and take the “fathers” of the families hostage–and their “sons” approach him for help. One of the sons takes the one-armed swordsman’s wife hostage to get his help. So the one-armed swordsman leads the “brothers” to the stronghold to fight the Eight Sword Kings–the big boss bad guys (well, seven guys and a girl) with gimmick powers or blades. Well, they fight some of the Sword Kings on the way, but ultimately free the “fathers.” However, during their night of celebration, the Eighth Sword King, the “Unseen” attacks with a bunch of ninjas, but the One-Armed Swordsman eventually triumphs and returns home. Until, perhaps The Legend of the One-Armed Swordsman.
It’s a particularly bloody and brutal bit of kung-fu theatre (wuxia, I believe the Chinese term is)–most or all of the “brothers” die, sometimes in bloody fashion. And I have put the family relationships in quotation marks because the dubbed version I have refers to “fathers” and “brothers,” but apparently other dubbed versions and probably the original say that these are martial arts schools, not clans, and the “fathers” are instructors while the “brothers” are students. Which kind of makes sense given how many “brothers” each family has. Still, we’re not watching for the plot. We’re watching for the stylized fighting and gimmicky villains. And we got them.
Less than a decade later, and I might have seen this on kung fu theater on Friday or Saturday night after MASH and Hawaii Five-O. No telling what films I actually saw. Come to think of it, there’s no telling how many times we actually watched this when the Odya boys were sleeping over. Five? Ten? Not as many as twenty, surely. But all the time as it seemed at the time. Then all the time ended unnoticed as it often does.
