This excellent revenge-themed Shaw Brothers epic is the kind of film they did so well. My favourite Chinese director, Chang Cheh, is on hand to choreograph the mayhem in this brutal tale of bloodshed and murder, set in 1920s Peking. In many ways this is a familiar film; we saw almost exactly the same type of antics in the later BOXER FROM SHANTUNG, but that doesn't stop this being thrilling.The film is headlined by two leading action stars of the day, David Chiang and Ti Lung. Lung has a small role here, playing a guy who falls foul of some gangster types and finds himself murdered in a particularly vicious fashion. His brother is Chiang, who isn't about to let things rest. As usual, our hero finds himself working his way through the enemy, starting off with lowly henchmen before facing the inner circle of tough crime bosses and a sniper thrown into the mix too.There isn't a slow moment in this movie, which really focuses on the lean, mean storyline. The cast are excellent: the bad guys slimy, the good guys stoic and stony-faced. Chiang has never been more stylish and stone-faced than he is here. The various chase and action sequences are all expertly staged, with a highlight being some fighting amid the high balconies above a theatre performance. Inevitably the movie is book-ended by a couple of huge one-vs-many fights, with the outcome pretty much inevitable in both; still, these are without a doubt the finest moments of the film and I'll never get tired of watching this sort of mayhem. A real classic, this.

VENGEANCE!, one of director Chang Cheh's earliest gangster movies, features two of his protégés, Ti Lung and David Chiang, as a pair of brothers who both happen to be Chinese opera stars. Ti Lung performs in a troupe headed by the unscrupulous Ku Feng, who lusts after Lung's wife. While SHE doesn't seem to mind the attention, Lung DOES and lets his Boss know it. This turns out to be a fatal mistake: Feng makes nefarious plans with the other members of his gang and Lung's character is murdered (in a particularly brutal way, too: his eyes are gouged out before he's finished off). Enter his brother, played by David Chiang. He has only one thing on his mind: VENGEANCE! And he gets it, too, decimating the Bad Guys in bloodthirsty fashion. He finds time between killings to fall for a young lady, but nothing can stand in the way of his VENGEANCE! Superbly directed (as usual), VENGEANCE! is worth a look for Chang Cheh, Ti Lung or David Chiang fans- or fans of gangster cinema.

I can understand younger brother's distress at the loss of older brother by way of murder, but it was almost impossible to keep track of all the bodies that piled up on the way towards killing the parties responsible.So many goons biting the dust, their only crime choosing the wrong guy for whom to be a goon. Is there a Goon's Widows & Orphans Society? I hope there is.This is not to say I disliked the movie, far from it. It is very dark, certainly not something to see on a down day. I had a pretty good idea how things would end, given that every David Chiang movie I've watched recently his characters croak, but they take a LOT of killing from a lot of bad guys before they actually die.Blood flows, spurts, seeps through clothing, furniture is broken, bad guys get zorched [& they don't always see it coming -- are they ever surprised!], guys crash through railings--it's all there.

VENGEANCE (aka KUNG FU VENGEANCE, 1970) was one of the earliest collaborative efforts of director Chang Cheh and his star team of David Chiang and Ti Lung. It is more of a traditional gangster film than a kung fu film and offers a dark, atmospheric feel closer to Hollywood film noir than to similarly themed Hong Kong crime films. The film is, in fact, a loose remake of John Boorman's crime thriller POINT BLANK (1967), itself an adaptation of Richard Stark's novel, 'The Hunter.'In 1920s-era Peking, Chinese Opera performer Ti Lung confronts his boss (Ku Feng) over the boss's attentions to his straying wife and takes on a room full of hatchet-wielding henchmen before dying a bloody death after a valiant fight. As Ti's brother, David Chiang, who shares no scenes with his frequent co-star (other than a brief flashback), comes to town seeking revenge and eventually fights it out with all the crime bosses and their minions, culminating in a big fight in which David helps one gang beat another only to have the winning gang turn on him. Although the film is generally slow-moving, it has a number of compelling scenes and expert use of cramped interiors in well-designed period settings.The film has little in the way of actual kung fu, with more of an emphasis on knife fighting, slashing and judo flips in its three major fight scenes than on hand-to-hand Chinese boxing, yet it is clearly a lead-in to subsequent gangster-style kung fu films by Chang Cheh such as DUEL OF THE IRON FIST, which also starred David Chiang and Ti Lung, and BOXER FROM SHANTUNG, which starred Chen Kuan Tai, who appears in a bit part in VENGEANCE.