The Deadly Duo
A fairly shameless copy & paste of The Rescue, with all of that film’s complicated plotting replaced by Chang Cheh-core speeches about how honorable it is to die for a cause and many, many shots of dudes putting those speeches into action by being impaled.
Where Shen Chiang’s earlier film strained against its trim 79 minute runtime, Chang Cheh’s sparse outline of a movie struggles to fill its 78 minutes.fn1 My usual complaints about the pairing of Chang Cheh and editor Kwok Ting Hung apply here. So many shots start too early and end too late. Though this padding is nothing compared to the 10 minute flashback, which explains things we already know before eventually circling back to replaying the start of the film again.
Beyond the repeated exhortations that we should be willing to die for a good cause there’s not much here in terms of character, plot or theme.
It’s not a rich text. But it is meaty with dudes and fights. There are so many dudes in this. The film gets one mention in Chang Cheh’s memoir, and that’s an offhand statement that the film, “has no female leads.” It has no women at all, from what I saw. They must have gathered up every semi-buff dude in all of Hong Kong to make this movie. Even Stanley Fung’s in there, in one of his two Shaw Brothers appearances.
Action directors Tong Kai and Lau Kar-Leung puts this sea of dudes to good use in tons of large-scale fights with a bunch of weird effects. One guy has a crossbow that shoots massive metal balls, another one shoots fire, Bolo Yeung apparently lives underwater with a giant mallet. All of the creativity that clearly didn’t go into the movie’s plot went into the fights.
And somewhere behind the camera helping to make all of this come together was a 22 year old Godfrey Ho working his first credited film job as one of the movie’s many Assistant Directors. He would go on to assist Chang on about 10 movies before starting his own directing career that mostly involved him taking two unrelated movies and stitching them together. Ninja Terminator is probably the best known of his franken-movies. But he also made some good films during his very long career.
fn1: Letterboxd and IMDB both list a 94 minute runtime. But both the original DVD and official YouTube version have a runtime of 78 minutes. The DVDs weren’t edited for content, so I think that 78 minute runtime is correct.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2026-09-13