It's been forever since I watched Five Fingers of Death, also known as King Boxer. And this is the first time it hasn't been a dubbed, scratchy print -- though I have to admit that seeing a dubbed, scratchy print of Five Fingers of Death is a lot of fun. Makes you feel like your back in the grindhouse theaters of the 1970s where this film debuted and kicked off the American kungfu craze that reached its apex a short while later when Bruce Lee stormed the shores. I'm not gonna lie to ya and tell you I was there in the front row, with my Pro Keds propped up on the banged up metal seat in front of me, yelling at the screen and cheering whenever the bad-ass theme song kicked in and Lo Lieh made his hands glow red. No, when this hit screens in America, I was so young I hadn't even been born -- but just barely. I wasn't on the Five Fingers bandwagon until a few years later, but once I watched,it, there was no stopping me, and I was known to mimic the theme song as best I could and strike a Lo Lieh pose to intimidate those around me. This was probably, you know, like a year or so ago.

Besides having the coolest theme song this side of Master of the the Flying Guillotine (both themes showed up in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill), King Boxer is just an all-around bad-ass film. Mean, violent, brutal -- and Lo Lieh was only just beginning down his path toward being the ugliest Shaw Bros. star of the 1970s. The man was kind of dashing in all those 1960s swordsman films, but sometime around 1972 or 1973, someone convinced him to buy some of those sunglasses that start out dark yellow and fade to light yellow, then grow a sleazy moustache and rub bacon grease all over himself. Here he plays Chao Chi-Hao, the proverbial man of peace who will be pushed beyond the breaking point and explode in a fury of iron fists. Get him together with Chuck Bronson and Joe Don Baker as Buferd Pusser, and you have the meanest trio of men of peace ever assembled -- notice how I left Billy Jack out of the party?

King Boxer shares much with The Chinese Boxer, regarded by many as the first "modern" kungfu film, when "modern" meant like we all loved in the 1970s. That film starred Jimmy Wang Yu, who co-starred along with Lo Lieh in many of the Shaw Bros. best swordsman movies during the 1960s but never had a movie catch on the way King Boxer did -- at least not until the 1990s when people started rediscovering his classically deranged Master of the Flying Guillotine. Both King Boxer and The Chinese Boxer set the groundwork for all the films to come -- the man of peace pushed too far, the rival schools busting up each others' signs, a big kungfu tournament, esoteric fighting styles and training sequences, and increasingly outrageous and inventive fight scenes.

The main difference is that Chinese Boxer is pretty good; King Boxer is spectacular. It's stripped down, lean filmmaking at its finest. Not shallow or thrown together; not rushed; just straight-forward and to the point, like the iron fist technique that allows Lo Lieh to punch you so hard he can leave a gory handprint on your chest while the soundtrack sirens go "wheee waah wheee wah." Jimmy Wang Yu would just about match this film when he split from Shaw Bros. and made One-Armed Boxer, and he at least matched it with One-Armed Boxer II/Master of the Flying Guillotine, but King Boxer is really something special. Without a doubt one of my favorite of the 1970s kungfu films, along with the aforementioned trio of Jimmy Wang Yu films, some of the later Liu Chia-liang films, a good many Chu Yuan films, and of course, a lot of those Chang Cheh films where guys have their intestines and eyeballs hanging out but keep on fighting.