I've come across only a couple of Chang Cheh movies that failed to live up to the standard(s) that he himself set. One of them was THE NINE DEMONS, in which Halloween yard display-quality effects were sometimes literally thrown at the camera from the dark (maybe I'm being a bit too harsh, here; I'll have to go back and track it down and check it out again to be sure- but my impression the first time I saw it was that it wasn't one of his better efforts- by a mile); SHANGHAI 13 is the other. The protection of a government whistle-blower is the ostensible reason for the mayhem here, but it's quite literally assembly-line action (though, to be fair, some of it's good), with many of the biggest names in martial arts movies (including a very heavy Chiang Seng) jumping into and out of frame so quick it's hard to keep track of who's doing the jumping. SHANGHAI 13 only proves that even the greatest martial arts movie maker of all time had his off days.
Review of The Shanghai Thirteen
