Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

One-Armed Boxer Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 16, 2022

One Armed Boxer is so relentlessly busy providing fight scenes every couple of seconds for the bulk of its running time that two kind of odd things happen as a result, as commentator Frank Djeng somewhat humorously jokes about in his enjoyable analysis of the film. The hero of the story, Yu Tien Lung (Jimmy Wang Yu, who also wrote and directed), actually has two arms until well into the running time, and indeed the film's seeming love interest, a woman named Jade (Hsin Tang), isn't introduced until more or less the moment that Yu loses his appendage, which is just a couple of minutes before the one hour mark in a film that barely runs an hour and a half. If that at least is a little unusual, much of the rest of this enterprise is kind of geared toward "lowest common denominator" status in terms of building a plot around two competing schools of martial arts who let things spiral out of control, leading to repeated mayhem and, ultimately, death. Yu of course is a student of the "honorable" school, and is tasked with revenge, though by the time he's able to totally exact it, he is missing one of his arms.

A seemingly innocent get together at a local watering hole turns to pre-credits violence when Yu attempts to stop first a theft (of some priceless birds, weirdly enough) and then just some basic thuggery on the part of the "bad guys" in the film, the Hook Gang. Yu (still with both arms intact) is able to easily defeat the assembled villains, but when he returns to his school, his master, Han Tui (Ma Kei), is "disappointed" (in that way some boys in particular may recall their own fathers being if the boy had massively misbehaved) that Yu didn't leave things alone after the theft had been thwarted. Han Tui takes Yu to task for some perceived arrogance, having him more or less flogged and then assigned to "altar duty" to atone for his supposed sins.

In the meantime, the Hook Gang, led by snaggle toothed Chao Liu (Yeh Tien), show up en masse at Han Tui's school and quickly proceed to get their collective butts kicked again, this despite the fact that the Hook Gang keep actual hooks hidden in some of their weapons. That sets up the basic dynamic, where Chao Liu and the Hook Gang are out to decimate Han Tui's Ching Te school. A bit of "international" color is attained when Chao Liu hires a combo platter of fighters from around the globe, each with different battle techniques at their beck and call.

Now all of this is handled with a fair amount of momentum, helped by regular punctuations of fight scenes which basically just erupt out of nowhere with great regularity. And while the "exotic" nature of some of the fighters Chao Liu brings into his fold to defeat Han Tui and his school are colorful, even this plot device is pretty hoary, as any lover of "specialized technique" martial arts films will know. What's kind of curious about One Armed Boxer is its basic structure, which (per the above) takes almost an hour to get to the point where Chao Liu and the Hook Gang do in fact not just defeat Han Tui and his acolytes, but kills all of them, with, of course, the sole exception of Yu, who is left without his right arm in the process. Then, perhaps even more strangely, Jade and her father find Yu collapsed on a road and instead of documenting his healing in a traditional narrative way, a series of still photographs is offered in a kind of quasi-montage. Djeng actually likes this approach, as he overtly mentions in his commentary, but I personally found it beyond strange, as if this were some kind of "reconstruction" of lost footage that could only be supplied by photographs, a la the work that was done on A Star Is Born (just to totally mix genres).

All of this said, it's still almost hilarious fun in a way to see Yu first immolate himself (in order to make his remaining hand impervious to any attack) and then attain a number of frankly goofy new "skills", which include being able to stand straight up without any help from a prone position. The final smackdowns are therefore both bizarre and entertaining, though the film has a pretty dour wind up which suggests "victory" comes at a significant price.

One-Armed Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

One Armed Boxer is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Arrow's insert booklet contains the following information on the transfer:

One Armed Boxer is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio [sic] with its original Mandarin and English monaural soundtracks, as well as an alternative Mandarin mono track with different music score. It was restored in 2K resolution from original film elements by Fortune Star, who supplied this master to Arrow Video for this Blu-ray release.

Maybe I'm unnecessarily suspicious of things like copyright dates, but at the very end of this presentation we get both a 2010 and 2020 notice, which kind of leads me to believe that at least some part of the workflow that got us to this final product may be at least a couple of years old, and quite possibly older. While there's a lot to enjoy here, especially in a reasonably intact palette, this has quite a bit of damage still on display, as well as less abundant clarity than some other vintage martial arts offerings Arrow has released. That said, there are some undeniable focus pulling problems throughout this presentation, where things are noticeably out of focus (pay attention during the "introduction" sequence of all the global fighters, and it looks like someone mismeasured their "marks" for whatever lens they were using, as evidenced in screenshot 9). While there does seem to be a bit of fade, as evidenced by slightly brown flesh tones and the like, on the whole the palette reproduction is probably one of this transfer's assets. Close-ups can offer good fine detail levels. Grain generally resolves naturally, with a few errant spikes on display.

One-Armed Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

One Armed Boxer features two different Mandarin tracks and an English track, all in DTS-HD Master Audio Mono. One of the film's unavoidably hilarious aspects for Western viewers is going to be its use of a certain iconic Oscar winning score from a 1970s film classic that may have some viewers chiming in with a hearty, "Who's the Chinese private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Yu!" That right, the first of the two Mandarin tracks steals copiously from Isaac Hayes' score to Shaft, including some frankly abysmally edited cues that are just shoehorned into things with absolutely no rhyme or reason. Even the secondary Mandarin track, while not quite as overt in its "borrowing", has some Hayes cues. All three tracks suffer from a really brittle high end, which can make the music in particular crackle and distort. Dialogue manages to escape the ravages of time and tide relatively well. Optional English subtitles are available.

One-Armed Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary by Frank Djeng


• Interview with Wang Yu (HD; 41:16) is another fantastic piece culled from the Frederic Ambroisine Archive. This comes with a warning about intermittent audio dropouts.


• Alternate English Credits (HD; 1:58)


• Trailer Gallery

  HK Theatrical Trailer (HD*; 4:13)

  
  

  US TV Spot (HD*; 1:04)

  
  

  US Radio Spot (HD; 1:00) plays to a black screen.

  
  

  Wang Yu Trailer Reel (HD*; 34:29)

• Image Gallery (HD)

Additionally, Arrow provides its typically well appointed insert booklet, this time with essays by David West and Simon Abrams, as well as cast and crew information and the "about the transfer" page. Packaging features a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady and a slipcover.

*720

One-Armed Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The back cover of this release mentions how former Shaw Brothers executive Raymond Chow founded Golden Harvest in 1970, he wasted little time in recruiting Jimmy Wang Yu, and it's obvious Chow and Yu wanted to fashion an easily accessible entertainment that had what brought fans to Shaw Brothers epics in droves, namely lots of action. Structurally, One Armed Boxer is perhaps understandably a little lopsided, and if its underlying plot premise is more than familiar, the action is so relentless that few will probably care. Technical merits are decent if improvable, but as usual Arrow has aggregated some really appealing supplements, for anyone who may be considering making a purchase.