The Blazing Temple (1976)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Rated: NR, suitable for audiences 13+

Anamorphic: No

My advice: Find a Jet Li movie

A corrupt Chinese government drives dozens of young men into training at the Shaolin Temple. The Emperor, suspecting that the temple is going to produce enough arse-whupping malcontents to lead a revolution that threatens the government, gives his soldiers the order to slay Shaolin monks whever they can be found. Ultimately, this proves insufficient to appease the Emperor’s paranoia, and he orders the temple itself destroyed.

The story of The Blazing Temple holds promise, but never really delivers. The storyline barely gets developed, and is further complicated by an opening scene that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever until over an hour into the film. Carter Wong eventually gets around to leading some Shaolin survivors against the Emperor, but it all feels kind of rushed (largely because the dramatic “escape from the burning Shaolin Temple” scene takes up nearly half an hour of the movie’s 90-minute running time).

Once Upon a Time in China this ain’t, folks. I’ve seen worse kung fu movies, but not many. It’s just a disjointed jumble of a film, with mediocre fight choreography and the aforementioned tedious escape sequence (lots of close-ups of young monks jumping through cheesy obstacles while the temple burns) dragging the whole affair down into the depths. By the time I’d watched the first fifteen minutes of the escape, I was ready for the walls to collapse and put us all out of our misery.

The film quality is pretty bad, too. Lots of pops, scratches, and blips on the video, and the audio is a muffled mono mix-down of the original sound with dubbing on top. The voice actors suffer whatever bizarre ailment inflicted everybody that worked on kung fu dubs in the 70s and early 80s (I suspect the ailment was “complete lack of talent as a voice actor”).

The DVD doesn’t do anything to further recommend the film for even the most die-hard kung fu completist. With a bad transfer of bad film, terrible audio, and no extras whatsoever, I can’t imagine what would possess anyone to own this film, unless they have some strange desire to own every Carter Wong film ever made (though for my money, he’s at his best in Big Trouble in Little China).

Give this one a miss. Believe me, you should all be thanking me for taking this one for the team. Go find some Jet Li or Jackie Chan or classic Bruce Lee films, and forget I even mentioned this one.