Land of the Brave
1974; directed by Stanley Siu

Over his twenty-five-odd year long career as a director, Stanley Siu's releases, for the most part, flew under the radar of many Hong Kong movie fans, with only a handful of cult favorites like The Avenging Quartet garnering any lasting attention. One of his first efforts behind the lens, 1974's Land of the Brave, still wallows in the shallow kiddie pool that is your average period kung fu film, but this one may be able to garner a few more eyeballs on it due to the upped quotient of naked body parts and unconventional sexual shenanigans.

Land of the Brave takes place during the second Sino-Japanese war, and uses the well-worn motif of the Chinese trying to get rid of the evil occupying Japanese from their town. The hero in this case is the plucky Tien Chi-Ko (Cheung Lik) who decides to take action via his fists of fury after the factory he works at is taken over by the Japanese so that they can start making weapons in it. Furthering the rage is the local Japanese commander's penchant for capturing local women and then subjecting them to his nefarious S&M-tinged whims.

Really, the only distinguishing feature of Land of the Brave are its' T&A scenes. This movie did push the envelope (at least a small distance) in terms of presenting sexual themes in the realm of mainstream kung fu movies back upon its' initial release, and is most likely something you're not going down with the whole family and a bowl of popcorn to watch. However, for an audience that has probably seen much more explicit antics in any number of modern Category III films, the naughty bits probably aren't going to be all that exciting, and may even go so far as to turn you off a bit, given your penchant for seeing 70's style unexempt pubic regions.

The rest of Land of the Brave is the sort of stuff most of you out there have seen many times before, especially if you are a fan of old-school kung fu pictures. The acting (at least what can be interpreted through the terrible dubbing) is average at best and the technical aspects of the film (such as cinematography and editing) are the stuff of C-level film students. Most damningly for a lot of you readers out there, the fights are just kind of there. They're not bad, but they're nothing special, either. There's little, if anything, in the way of innovation or originality displayed during the action scenes, especially when compared to the ground-breaking releases of the time, specifically the movies of Bruce Lee.

RATING: 5