All Men Are Brothers (1975)

[Drunk Monk]

Loosely based on the classic Water Margin, I remember seeing this movie before reading that epic and it didn't make a lick of sense. Now I've read it several times, mostly in chunks when doing research, and it still makes very little sense. It starts by depicting several of the major battle scenes, which is really just an orgy of violent fight scenes strung together with some uninformative narration. Then it picks up some of the storyline in pieces, focusing the heroic deaths. As it's based on a book with 108 heroes, the names are flashed on screen with that hero's first appearance - in Chinese of course, which doesn't really help either because there's only so many damn heroes that the minor ones get kind of lost. Everyone Shaw is in this, except Gordon Liu (maybe a few others). It is arguably the greatest role for Fan Mei-Sheng as Li Kui, a role he was born to play. Fan is thick like Sammo so is usually delegated to the fat tough guy role. He nails Li Kui and has a blast doing it (who can resist a berzerker with double black whirlwind axes?) Chen Kuan-Tai is also superb as tattoed Shi Jin and David Chiang makes a fine Yan Qing. There are some big costume crowd panoramic scenes which are impressive when you remember this predates any sort of CGI. Lots of crazy weapons. Lots of fight scenes. In fact, it's almost completely fight scenes with very little effort given to forwarding the story as most Chinese audiences are familiar with Water Margin.

But never mind all that - I can describe this film in one word: SANGUINEOUS.

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