The picture's main claim to fame is that it marked the only teaming to date of action film legends Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and director John Woo. The film itself is quite ordinary, neither better nor worse than any number of martial arts extravaganzas pouring out of Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. It's no lost masterpiece, and billing Chan alone on the front cover of the box art is highly misleading, but the movie's not bad, certainly harmless fun for fans of such pictures.

Hand of Death's star isn't Chan or Hung or Biao, but Korean Dorian Tan (Tao-liang Tan), a Tae Kwon Do champion with impressively powerful leg kicks. For a time billed as Bruce Liang, he was one of the legions of Bruce Lee imitators, and obviously never soared to the heights of his three co-stars. But he has a decent enough screen presence and is generally quite likeable.

Here Tan is Yunfei, a talented martial arts student given the weighty task of avenging the death of a Shaolin master by killing disciple-turned-traitor Shih Shao-Feng (James Tien, in a bad wig and especially phony mustache). He's also assigned to find and help escort scholar Zhang Yi (John Woo), who's carrying military secrets that will help the rebellion overthrow the Qing government.

Along the way, Yunfei meets uneducated but kindly woodsman/blacksmith Tan (Jackie Chan, with a wisp of mustache, real this time), as well as The Wanderer (Yang Wei), an expert swordsman, both of whom are eventually recruited to fight Shih, his eight master bodyguards, and henchmen Du (Sammo Hung). Hung's fat villain, complete with an alarming overbite, seems fashioned after Daisuke Kato's piggish Inokichi in Yojimbo (1961).

The Hand of Death (original Mandarin title: Shaolin Men) is standard action fare; the same script with different names might easily have been an early-'60s peplum. As was a genre standard, body blows boom like thunderclaps, flying kicks whoosh like whirling helicopter blades, and Shih's deadly sword pierces the air with what sounds like the bark of a medium-sized dog. If you're not willing to suspend belief, you're in the wrong genre. The fights are elaborately choreographed but not realistic in the Hollywood or western-world sense. They bear little resemblance to Woo's later films, or Jackie Chan's for that matter.

During this period Chan, like Tan, was seen as a possible heir to Bruce Lee's throne, and Chan was cast in several vehicles that unwisely tried to mold him in that direction. The Hand of Death is somewhat better. As a man plotting to avenge his brother's death, Jackie's character plays the fool most of the time and is more relaxed onscreen that he usually was at this time. Made well before his plastic surgery, casual fans suckered into renting this because New Police Story is checked-out might not even recognize him at first, but his moves are unmistakable. Tellingly, he's least interesting when required to do standard martial arts action.

About the only bit of action that really stands out is Yunfei's neat escape despite hanging upside-down and tied at the ankles: Shaolin master that he is, Yunfei uses his great body strength to twist his body like a snake, reaching up to untie the knots with his teeth.

One side note: the film bears an MPAA of "R," an especially ludicrous rating. Except for a single exposed breast, briefly glimpsed, there's nothing in this film, certainly not in its violence, that couldn't be (and isn't) shown on Saturday afternoon television.

Video & Audio

The Hand of Death is presented in an okay 16:9 anamorphic wide screen transfer preserving the original 'scope (not Panavision) aspect ratio. The transfer is flawed in minor ways, both in the encoding and in the film elements used (which includes weird, distorting for several frames around the 1:24:21 mark), but undoubtedly it looks better than it has since its original release. Most of the time the image is clean with good color, with little obvious wear, dirt, or splices. For such a minor, budget title, The Hand of Death is loaded with audio options, which include both English and Mandarin audio (the latter with optional English subtitles) in both 5.1 Dolby Surround and DTS. Ironically enough, I found them inferior to the fifth option, the original mono Mandarin track. For all the high-tech remixes, their directional wizardry and range, they don't jibe at all well with the original music/dialogue/effects tracks. The original mono track is certainly no masterpiece of high fidelity, but at least the levels are balanced and not distracting in the way the modern mixes are.

Extra Features

Supplements are limited to a batch of trailers. The Original Movie Trailer is in English, but apparently exhibited in Hong Kong. The Australian narrator hilariously imitates the style of Lowell Thomas, and producers Golden Harvest generously include all the film's nudity intact in this short preview. A New Edit Movie Trailer is an exercise in extreme pointlessness, and what was obviously someone's pet project is extravagantly overdone. Both are 16:9, as are the four additional trailers for other martial arts titles.

Parting Thoughts

The Hand of Death is misleadingly packaged and this will surely annoy some, but on its own terms this early offering from John Woo and "the three brothers" is reasonably good for its era.

**Never released to home video in any format, the 1962 Hand of Death is long overdue for a DVD release. How about it, Fox?

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.