Bullet Points: One Armed Against Nine Killers

Jimmy Wang Yu found his niche and super stardom in 1967 when he played the titular character in Shaw Brothers’ The One-Armed Swordsman. The movie would become the first Hong Kong film to gross a million dollars domestically.

Jimmy Wang Yu would continue to use the one-armed and dangerous formula… first in the 1969 follow up Return of the One-Armed Swordsman… In 1971, he’d appear as the One-Armed Swordsman again for the epic team up, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsmen… Then Yu would drop the sword and become a One-Armed Boxer in 1972.

In 1976, Jimmy Wang Yu would go one-armed crazy and star in a triple feature of one-armed films… One-Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine, another movie called The One Armed Swordsman (minus the hyphen) and the subject of this edition of Bullet Points… One Armed Against Nine Killers.

• Man on a Mission: Jimmy Wang Yu plays Liu Ching Wu, a man who is seeking vengeance against Chu, the man (who along with nine paid assassins) killed Wu’s entire family and left Wu as the only survivor albeit with only one arm. Liu Ching Wu starts hunting Chu and the members of his clan early… within minutes Wu has killed two of the nine assassins.

• Human Chess: Word of the One Armed vigilante spreads quickly, but that doesn’t deter an old master from partaking in a game of human chess… and I am not talking about the game of human chess that the late, great Gordon Solie would often talk about on Florida Championship Wrestling… I am talking about actual men with black and white colored hats standing on a chess board painted in the dirt, while the old master looked down on them from an elevated platform. When Liu Ching Wu shows up, the master takes issue with him as he knew the two men that Wu has killed and challenges him to a game of chess with the stipulation that the loser must kill himself… the chess game gets off the rails quickly and Wu and the master battle in some hand to hands combat. Wu gets the better of the old master and tells him he has no quarrel with him, he just wants to know where he can find Chu. The old master tells him he doesn’t know, Wu believes him and moves on… the old master then kills himself because Wu made him look like a fool in front of his students.
• The Traveling Wilbury: Liu Ching Wu continues to roam the countryside in search of Chu… what he finds next is a woman named Su Lan Lan tied up to some rocks in the hot sun. Wu frees here and then learns she was tied up by one of the assassins that Wu is out to kill because she refused to be his concubine. Can you guess who Wu’s next target is?

• Scene of the Film: Now with Su Lan Lan at his side, Wu’s journey continues… after a run in with a guy known as the Turtle, Wu fears he has been poisoned. Su Lan Lan helps him get to a nearby doctor. The doctor makes a pill for Wu to counteract the effects of the poison… but after Wu takes the pill, the doctor spills the beans… the poison the turtle gave Wu was not deadly, but the pill the doctor just gave him was! The doctor laughs and laughs and that’s when Wu reveals he didn’t swallow the pill and spits it across the room into the wide open mouth of the cackling doctor, who then swallows the pills and dies soon after.
• Fantastic Voyage: From there things remain weird… Liu Ching Wu encounters a wide variety of characters… an old man who claims to hate Chu just as much as Wu, a fortune teller, a guy named King Rat (who looks exactly what you’d think a guy named King Rat would look like), a former nun and a hermaphrodite monk, a killer prostitute, one of Chu’s assassins, who in order to save his own ass, feeds Wu info on the other assassins he has yet to kill like the sword loving Mr. Lu… all of this leads up to the eventual Wu vs. Chu climax filled with a lot of surprise twists and turns… most of which were completely unnecessary.

From an action standpoint, One Armed Against Nine Killers was probably not the best introduction to Jimmy Wang Yu. But from a ridiculous scenario standpoint, this movie was on fire. The human chess, the doctor’s visit, the characters that Liu Ching Wu encounters from start to finish… these are things you won’t soon forget, unlike the forgettable fight scenes.

I did not forget to include everyone’s favorite Bonus Bullet Points… because they are unforgettable!

• AKA: While One Armed Against Nine Killers is the most accurate title given the fact that Jimmy Wang Yu’s character does not wield a sword in the film, all of the alternate titles capitalize on the 1967 Shaw Brothers original. The alternate titles include One Armed Swordsman Against Nine Killers, One Armed Swordsman vs. Nine Killers and Jimmy Wang Yu’s One Armed Swordsman vs. 9 Killers.
• Familiar Face: I recognized Chin Lung, who played one of the 9 killers, from his work as the comedic sidekick in The Leg Fighters.
• Out of Context Conversation: Wu- ” I must admit that’s long. How long?”… Mr. Lu- “Six feet”… Wu- “Width?”… Mr. Lu- “About 12 inches.”