Things you don't know until you know—for me, that category now includes the flying guillotine, a (most likely) fantastical, mythic killing device supposedly invented during the Qing Dynasty that became the centerpiece of a brief spurt of 1970s martial arts films of increasingly decreasing quality. The absurdity of the device is matched only by its brutality: It looks like a metal helmet (or basket) attached to a long chain that the fighter throws at his adversary, landing it on his head at which point he pulls the chain to activate blades inside the helmet that neatly chop the guy's head off.

Common sense suggests that such a device would be all but useless on the battlefield (although the MythBusters did build a functional flying guillotine back in 2011 and proved that it could be used to chop a victim's head off, with the proviso that said victim stood perfectly still). Nevertheless, the sheer insanity of the idea was enough to propel it into its own kind of cult subgenre within martial arts films, beginning with The Flying Guillotine (Xue di zi, 1975), which was produced by the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio. Given that film's substantial box-office success, other producers quickly scrambled to churn out their own movies featuring the titular weapon, which gave us The Dragon Missile (Fei long zhan, 1976); Master of the Flying Guillotine (Du bi quan wang da po xue di zi, aka, One-Armed Boxer vs. the Flying Guillotine, 1976), a quickie sequel to One-Armed Boxer (Du bei chuan wang, 1972) and a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's; The Greatest Plot (Jiang Nan ba da xia, 1977); Shao Lin Kung Fu Mystogogue (Da mo mi zong, 1977); and The Deadly Silver Spear (Xue lian huan, 1977).

Most agree that the rear of this trend was brought up by Fatal Flying Guillotine (Yin yang xue di zi), which does indeed feature a flying guillotine (two, actually, which is why the title is sometimes plural) that is absolutely fatal. The screenplay, which was co-written by Sheng-Yu Hsu and director Raymond Lui, clumsily strings together two seemingly unrelated plotlines, each of which exists largely to justify fight scene after fight scene. (Of course, if kung-fu fisticuffs and whirling, decapitating blades are all you are looking for, then Fatal Flying Guillotine delivers in spades.)

The film opens in the Valley of No Return, a secluded meadow that we later learn is reachable only via a mountain tunnel, where we are introduced to Shen Mo Chao (Chan Sing), who an introductory crawl informs us has perfected a weapon known as "the Lightning Strike"—the film's version of a flying guillotine, which is here equipped with whirling blades powered by some magic source (I guess), which never misses its target and can kill within a hundred feet. The fourth son of the ruling monarch tried to get Shen Mo Chao to join him, but he refused and apparently settling into an isolated retreat, killing anyone who dared to approach him (which many, many do, all of whom lose their heads to the Lightning Strike). Meanwhile, in a seemingly completely unrelated plot, we have Shen Ping (Carter Wong), a fighter who takes on an entire monastery of kung-fu-trained monks in order to secure access to a medicinal book that he believes will heal his ailing mother (Ou-yang Sha-fei). For reasons that are not entirely clear, these two plotlines eventually converge, bringing Shen Ping into the Valley of No Return and direct conflict with the Shen Mo Chao and his flying guillotines.

Fatal Flying Guillotine is marred or enlivened, depending on your perspective, by all the hallmarks of cheap, low-budget kung-fu movies of its era. A Chinese/Taiwanese co-production, it looks like virtually all expenses were spared, from the slapdash wigs and paste-on beards, to the hokey means used to depict the flying guillotines (typically by running them along a wire that is kept mostly out of view). The plentiful fight scenes benefit substantially from the fact that Carter Wong was a genuine karate master with training in kung-fu, hapkido, and taekwondo (American viewers might recognize him as the heavy from John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China). A burly fighter with a concrete face, Wong doesn't make for the most interesting or expressive of protagonists, but he gets the job done when facing down a dozen armed monks (which he does multiple times). Director Raymond Lui had started as an actor and stunt coordinator, so it is not surprising that, this being only his second directorial effort, he leaned into what he knew. Shot in the 'Scope aspect ratio on a lot of existing historical locations, Fatal Flying Guillotine doesn't look half-bad, although it suffers from an overreliance on sudden zooms and jarring cuts that jerk us from one plotline to the next. It doesn't really make much sense, but there are whirling bladed weapons and lots of lost heads, so at least it delivers on the most rudimentary of promises.

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