18 Bronzemen (95 min; 1976) / Return of 18 Bronzemen (92 min; 1976)
BRAND NEW 2K Restorations! With English subtitles!
Directed and Produced by: Joseph Kuo
Starring: Carter Huang (aka Carter Wong), Tien Peng, Polly Shang-kuan

18 Bronzemen
Saturday, December 11 @ 1pm
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Return of 18 Bronzemen
Saturday, December 11 @ 4pm
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The rallying cry echoes across the land: “Overthrow Qing! Restore Ming!” The Qing Dynasty were the Manchu invaders who stormed China and deposed the 300 year old Ming Dynasty, and the Ming loyalists promptly went into hiding and led an underground resistance for the next 400 years. The center of that resistance was the Southern Shaolin Temple, the heart of martial arts.

After Chang Cheh revived the wu xia movie in the late Sixties with his bloody epics, then Jimmy Wong Yu and Bruce Lee made angry young kung fu flicks all the rage in the early Seventies, the world needed a new trend. Lau Kar-leung had helped make Shaw Brothers the next big thing by staging the brutal beatdowns in Chang Cheh’s movies, but now he suggested they ease up on the gore and make some realistic kung fu flicks featuring traditional folk heroes. Thus, the next big trend, Chang Cheh’s Shaolin Temple Cycle: six movies released between 1973 and 1976 about the legendary cradle of Southern Chinese martial arts. To reinforce that they were delivering the real thing, these movies usually took a break in the middle to deliver an intense training sequence in which the hero levels up his kung fu under the stern gaze of his teacher. It was such a standard part of the genre that even a flick with no training scenes like Heroes Two (1974) got paired with a nine-minute documentary short called “Three Styles of Hung School’s Kung Fu” when it was released.

The Shaolin movies took off like a rocket and Joseph Kuo added to their legend with this one-two punch of Bronzemen movies, two years before Lau Kar-leung delivered the landmark Shaolin Temple movie, 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

Both of Kuo’s Bronzemen movies tell essentially the same story with the same basic cast, but while 18 Bronzemen gives us the Ming point of view, Return of 18 Bronzemen goes over to the bad guys to give us the Qing perspective. 18 Bronzemen begins with a bunch of ninjas slaughtering the Guan Family, and the survivors grabbing their baby and going on the run. Dad decides to supercharge his infant by dipping him in a hot wok, rolling him in nettles, and feeding him stories about the evil Qing maniacs who murdered mommy. Baby Guan grows up to be big bohunk, Carter Huang, and gets enrolled in Shaolin Temple for even more training until he’s old enough to take revenge unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.

For 20 years, Abbot Fang sends his students through one training temple after another, sticking their heads inside big bells and ringing them, making them read books all night long, and yelling “Work hard on Hard Skull Skill!” To graduate, they have to enter the labyrinth and face the titular 18 Bronzemen who are sometimes Shaolin robots and sometimes dudes dipped in molten bronze. Students who graduate get branded on the chest with a rocking dragon logo. Students who fail get scraped off the floor and tossed out with the trash. Either way, for a bunch of Buddhist monks there’s an awful lot of hitting going on.

The final fight involves revenge for dead daddies, a bad guy who can clone multiple copies of himself, and someone getting their balls ripped off. The moral? Life is just a long quest for revenge and all we can do is fulfill our duty and die. 18 Bronzemen made a million bucks, got a very rare 100-screen release in Japan, and the 18 Bronzemen themselves became part of the legend of Shaolin. So of course there had to be a sequel.

Return of the 18 Bronzemen, inexplicably released before 18 Bronzemen in every country except Taiwan, takes us inside the Death Star to focus on the head of the evil Qing Empire, Carter Huang (again), this time playing a sneering Qing prince who murders his own daddy, takes his “idiot” brother out of the running as possible heir with poison, but when someone asks him if they should burn Shaolin Temple to the ground because it’s full of rebels, he pauses. Huang turns and stares at a tiny statue of one of the 18 Bronzemen on his desk, the screen does a wipe, and suddenly we’ve traveled back in time for a flashback that will take up most of the movie.

Here, Huang is a fun-loving punch-a-holic princeling wandering ancient China and picking fights with everyone he meets, whether it’s Polly Shang-kuan disguised as a man, a Shaolin monk, or Tien Peng, this time playing a dragon-branded graduate of the Shaolin Training Program. Unable to beat Tien, Huang vows to learn Shaolin kung fu himself. Disguised as a regular guy, Huang tries to prove he’s serious about enrolling in Shaolin by doing ridiculous amounts of manual labor while the Shaolin monks laugh at him. His chances don’t look good until that night at dinner he eats 19 buns in one sitting and suddenly the monks are falling all over themselves to let this bunmaster sign up for their classes.

Determined to zip through the 20 year program in one year, Huang takes on a heavy course load of even more baroque training schemes, but after navigating the graduation day labyrinth of pain he learns a tough fact of life: he can be a Shaolin monk or he can be a Qing prince, but he can’t be both. That’s when we come back to the present and realize that we’ve just watched an entire 90 minute movie featuring bizarre hazing rituals and fistfights with robots that is actually about one man making a single decision. It doesn’t get any more ambitious, experimental, or entertaining than this.