Movies Seen Recently: The One-Armed Swordsman, The Hidden, Heroic Trio 2: Executioners

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) – Well, there’s a really swordsman who gets his arm cut off (by a girl whom he totally wouldn’t have expected it from, and she totally didn’t really mean it, but), so he learns to swordfight with his left hand, which is good, because his teacher’s school has an EE-vil rival who has developed a sword-lock fighting technique specifically to counter the ENTIRELY RIGHT-HANDED fencing style that teacher had developed. Lucky, huh?

The central concept of is a time-tested nugget I’ve seen in Western movies and sci-fi/fantasy novels and it still works, the story moves along at a fair clip, and you only rarely see the outline of Jimmy Yu’s hidden arm.  I don’t know enough about Chinese history to know if there ever WAS a time in which kung fu school rivalries exploded into open bloodshed and no one had the authority to stop it, but it’s a very strange world.

The Hidden (1987) – Body-hopping alien criminal comes to earth to enjoy fast cars, heavy metal, and general mayhem. Body-hopping alien cop gives chase. Los Angeles gets in the way.

I hadn’t watched this in probably 25 years, and was pleased that it still holds up.  It really only needs one scene near the start to sell the SF premise; beyond that, it’s all performance.  (And the wise story-telling decision of having the alien entity inhabiting Kyle McLaughlin’s body keep the same carcass while the antagonist leaves a trail of a half-dozen discarded bodies behind him.)

Heroic Trio 2: Executioners (1993) – Made the same year as the first one, it nevertheless runs with a very different premise. It’s now several years later, “Wonder Woman” has a daughter, and of by the way there was a nuclear war which has left every source of water contaminated except for the one owned by a creepy scarred villain in a mask.

All the best parts are just echoes of the first movie; a nonsensical, almost perfunctory plot fills in the lacunae in between wire-fu sequences, and even more so than in the first one, sad and soulful gazes take the place of characterization.  At least the death of one of the trio spared us further diminishing returns in a third installment.

Abandoned movies: River of Death (1989), Solomon and Sheba (1959)