KILLER CONSTABLE

One of the great underseen classics from Shaw Brothers, and standing as director Kuei Chih-hung’s masterpiece, this is the martial-arts movie served bleaker and angrier than ever before. Coming at the end of the new wuxia cycle that kicked off in 1967 with THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN, KILLER CONSTABLE is a movie in which everyone is exhausted to the depths of their souls, every swordsman is a sadist, and every blade has to be bathed in blood before it’s put away. Shaw Brothers legend Chen Kuan-tai out-grims the Grim Reaper playing a Qing Dynasty constable assigned by the empress to track down a stolen shipment of gold. Nothing stands in the way of his mission — not women, not children, not even his friends. Unfolding over a series of black, smoky, impressionistic wastelands, this is the kind of movie that’s soaked in so much gore and drowning in so much despair that you can barely breathe from the first frame to the last.

"A poem of fire and steel and mud and rain and heavy shadows and blinding hot sun and bright red blood spraying like from a hose." - Will Sloan

"All constables are bastards, criminals are human beings, and the Empress Dowager says 'let them eat pancakes' in Kuei Chih-Hung’s New Wave 80s wuxia, an intentional move by Shaw Brothers to bring a fresh approach to their martial arts films by elevating its hungry, young directors, giving its charismatic character actors the chance to play leading men, and painting everything in shadows, smoke and blood on the lens. KILLER CONSTABLE is a film that asks, 'who needs limbs, anyways?'" - Austin Gentry