The Flying Guillotine, part 2

Today’s episode: The Tournament Begins! And Ends!

This segment begins with the governor, who looks like your stereotypical Chinese kung-fu governor, making the final arrangements for his tournament. He watches a demonstration of a group of stick-and-shield warriors go through their routing, then is introduced to “a foreigner”, by which I understood them to mean a Japanese guy. The Jap is pissed because the governor won’t let him enter the tourney, so the governor tells him he can be in it if he can defeat the stick-and-shield warriors, which, of course, it doesn’t take him long to do. Then the governor’s daughter wants a piece of the Jap and they fight for a little while but, just when Jap is getting the upper hand, the governor stops the fight and lets the Jap in the tourney.

In the meantime, a guy with one arm (not, incidentally, TOAB) is having a meal at a restaurant (stop me if you’ve heard this before). As he is eating, he sees some flies on the table and slaps them, then astounds himself by discovering that he has killed all seven with one blow (which is what I suspected was the root of his boast when Steve told me about this scene). After he finishes eating, he realizes that he has forgotten to bring his money and tries to sneak out. This, of course, leads to the infamous Steve scene which was pleasantly similar to how he described it. After he tells the waiter that he killed “seven with one blow”, he admits that they were seven flies, and everyone laughs until TFG appears and chops off his head.

Cut back to the governor’s tournament, where things are getting under way. I really enjoyed this part of the movie because it didn’t cut away to other scenes or do some sort of kung-fu medley, showing just the finishes of some of the meaningless bouts, or any other stupid thing. It started at the first fight, kept going until it ended, then moved on to the next. Some of the fights had people crucial to the plot; some didn’t. They all got equal time. It was also cool because the opponents were all pretty much evenly matched and used a variety of styles.

Now that I’ve said all that, I’m afraid I’m going to have to do the medley thing to you, because I don’t remember every fight. Some winners of consequence: a guy with a black Chinese-style hat (looks like a straw sombrero, or perhaps more like an extremely wide lampshade) who fought with a pair of those nightsticks that today’s police carry, except his had retractable blades in the tips; the governor’s daughter, who used her sharpened nails as her weapons and won when her opponent ran away when his clothes got ripped off; Jap, who killed his guy after kicking dirt in his eyes; an Indian (that is, a guy from India) who had the ability to extend his arms to about three times their normal length; and, last, a one-armed fighter (not TOAB) who won but then got decapitated by TFG as described yesterday. Speaking of TOAB, he was there for awhile, and every now and then it would show him making comments about the bouts (“He lost his balance when his eyes got poked out. That’s why he lost.”), but he left after the governor spotted him and sent him a note inviting him to join. Therefore he was not around to witness TFG in action.

Back to present tense: The governor gets mad at having his tournament interrupted so rudely and confronts TFG, who kills him, injures his daughter, and sets fire to the entire area before leaving. Someone (I assumed it was TFG, but I found out later it wasn’t) picks up the daughter and carries her away.

I could see where the movie was going: the winners of the duels would band together with TOAB to fight and defeat TFG.

Just so you know, this all took longer than twenty minutes; I snuck in some viewing during the day when no one else was around.

Tune in next time for more exciting Flying Guillotine action!!