BASTARD SWORDSMAN is a 1983 Shaw Brothers production that tells the story of Yun Fei Yang (Norman Chui, HEROES OF THE EAST, ZU WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN), a miserably treated servant of the Wudang kung fu school. He cleans floors and delivers soup and stuff but also in the opening scene the motherfuckers make him run around holding wooden targets for knife practice. When he complains that they’re throwing the knives at him instead of the targets he gets chewed out and called a bastard.
“You can beat me, but don’t call me bastard,” he says, so they immediately beat him and call him a bastard. Sister Lun Wan Er (Leanne Liu, HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD), daughter of the chief and only female student at Wudang, not only intervenes but brings him to the Hall of Justice to report what they’re doing to him to the uncles. She means well but all it does is get him dressed down some more and told “You’re being unreasonable.”
When Sister says the uncles are being unfair one o them says, “Nonsense. If we were unfair would the chief assign us to be guardians of the law?” In other words authority is always correct by reason of being authority. And authority has decided that the bullies get to keep bullying but Yun Fei Yang has to carry fifty water pails a day. (read the rest of this shit…)
BLACK SAMSON is another entry in the ‘70s Black action cinema genre (if we can call it that when it has a white director). I watched it because it was on a double feature disc with 
If you look for pictures from John Woo’s 1986 breakthrough A BETTER TOMORROW you’ll mostly find Chow Yun Fat lighting a cigar with a burning counterfeit American $100 bill, or wearing a real nice suit holding two guns. That’s from the beginning of the movie when his character Mark is a big shot in a Hong Kong syndicate. That’s not a better tomorrow, that’s a more financially stable yesterday. Most of the movie takes place years later, when Mark has been shot in the leg and has to wear a metal brace, so he’s now just an errand boy instead of a Big Brother. 
aka SHAOLIN MASTER KILLER
Well when it comes to the classics of the kung fu genre, who the fuck knows where to start? Not me, but a recent browsing of the book THE WU-TANG MANUAL BOOK 1 by outlaw award winning composer RZA gave me some tips. In one chapter he tells about the three kung fu movies that most influenced him, and this one sounded the best. He tells a story about getting high and watching it late at night with a gentleman named “Ghostface” and some other buddies from the Stapleton projects. Supposedly they all started crying because of its messages of brotherhood. It would be interesting to know which scene got them going.
