Duel to the Death (Xian si jue), the directorial debut of martial-arts choreographer and stuntman Siu-Tung "Tony" Ching, is a glorious medieval fantasy that manages to be gravely serious and deliriously absurd at the same time. Duel to the Death didn't invent the art of so-called "wire fu," in which martial-arts stuntmen are given inexplicably superhuman, physics-defying abilities via complex cable systems and hidden trampolines, but I would be hard-pressed to think of a film that does it better. There is real chutzpah in Ching's approach, which varies wildly in terms of focus and tone, but somehow holds together in a way that is both hypnotizing and whiplash-inducing.

The screenplay, penned by Ching, David Lai, and Manfred Wong, revolves around an ancient contest that takes place every decade between China and Japan in which each country sends its best swordsman to compete in a (you guessed it) duel to the death. The Chinese swordsman, Bo Ching Wan (Damian Lau), has been trained by a Shaolin monk (Yeung Chak-Lam) and a goofball forest hermit (Kwok-Choi Hon), while the Japanese swordsman, Hashimoto (Norman Tsui), has been trained by a brutal samurai clan. Despite having similarly wavy, hard-rock locks, the two men are very different in their approach, although they share in common an abiding respect and sense of honor. While most Hong Kong films of this era cast the Japanese as simple villains, Duel to the Death aims to transcend such simplistic binaries, instead showing collusion and corruption on both sides while emphasizing the commitment to honor shared by Bo Ching Wan and Hashimoto.

Because the titular duel can't take place until the end of the film, much of the running time is taken up with a scheme by Kanji, Hashimoto's sensei (Eddie Ko), to rig the fight by kidnapping all of the Chinese warriors and stealing the secrets of the Shaolin monks. Kanji is aided and abetted by Master Han (Paul Chang Chung), the father of Sing Lam (Flora Cheung), a female warrior who becomes involved with Bo Ching Wan. Also crucial to the nefarious plot is a seemingly endless army of black-clad ninjas who are the most prominent defiers of the laws of physics. They run at superhuman speed, fly through the air, and turn their bodies into suicide bombs that spontaneously combust after they grab hold of a victim. They zip through forests high above the ground, flings thousands of shuriken at a time, instigate a sneak attack via kites, and in the film's most magnificently deranged sequence, assemble themselves into what appears to be one giant ninja before breaking apart into individual warriors (this sequence also involves a female ninja who disrobes midair to throw off the Shaolin monk she is battling, which is apparently an actual battle technique). The action sequences were expertly assembled by veteran Golden Harvest editor Peter Cheung, whose deft arrangements of rapid-fire motion coming from all angles and directions nevertheless makes constant visual sense (Cheung's career as a credited editor began with Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon in 1972, and he edited most of Jackie Chan's most notable films from the 1970s through the late 1990s, as well as nine of John Woo's 1970s and '80s films).

Scored by composer Siu-Tin Lai's combination of traditional Asian instruments and New Wave synths, Duel to the Death earns its dramatic gravitas despite its diversions into slapstick humor and fantasy battle sequences. Norman Tsui and Damian Lau, both of whom were known primarily for their work in television, convey their characters' intense dedication to their respective causes, which gives their final duel a real sense of weight and suspense. Fought on a jagged cliff above a raging sea, it is an utterly captivating stand-alone sequence, the conclusion of which is impossible to guess. Bloody, intense, and emotionally gripping, if the final 10 minutes of Duel to the Death were all it had to offer, it would still be close to a masterwork. Thankfully, the rest of it is almost as good.

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