Shaw Brothers Studio

This is Rob Lamb, and oh, we have a weird one for you here today.

This is gonna be last year's episode from 9/19/2025 on the deliriously weird Shaw Brothers film, The Boxer's Omen, uh, full of just grotesque black magic and, uh, just so many mind-bending shenanigans.

Let's go ahead and jump right into it

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It's like a revenge thing, and it never, it never finishes.

We never get the final showdown.

Yeah, we were, we were joking about this off mic, uh, that, uh, perhaps Shaw Brothers came to, uh, uh, to the director, uh, Kwai Cheong, and said, "Hey, we want you to make a kickboxing movie." And he's like, "Got it." [laughs]

[laughs] Yeah.

It's Quentin Tarantino's monster of influences.

Shaw Brothers Kung Fu, Japanese Samurai Cinema, Sergio Leone.

You know, that's huge.

Blaxploitation, even a little bit of anime's in there.

This is the hardest one to talk about, I found, too.

Like, I had kind of least to say because these movies rely completely on kind of the choreography and the violence, you know? I did a Shaw Brothers film I'd never heard of.

I was just researching stuff and came across one called The Black Tavern.

Do you know this one?

And then you finally kind of get someone who's a little better, and you get some really cool female action stars, too.

It has a bit of a Hitchcock setup, but then, you know, just goes all in on the crazy Whip stuff.

And the Whip's choreography of this stuff and the sound effects, this is Shaw Brothers.

Jackie Chan is in the sides that you wouldn't even recognize that he was in the movie because he was so early in his career but he's like one of the thugs who's helping the guys but this is like multiple body parts being hacked off by whips and swords and true carnage and it really impressed me because it was also atmospheric because it's in the snow and it's all in the place so obviously I just don't recall this one ever coming up but I absolutely know that this is probably one that uh quentin's a fan of and probably was partially you know one of the things he might have been drawing on for that movie because i'd be shocked if it wasn't uh highest rec i watched this one on amazon prime so it's obviously around to see but it was you know it's always a nice surprise when it's one that just i wasn't i was looking at other things for slash i wasn't thinking i was going to be using a whip for hack slash but then it ended up being this perfect tool so a fun curveball there nice slash black tavern i like black tavern yes so our next category is

I don't know, I like these Shaw Scope ones.

We're getting a lot of Shaw Brothers, Shaw Scope type of stuff.

And I'm not mad at it, because every single one that I've seen, I have enjoyed.

I haven't seen any of these movies yet, though, so we'll be happy to finally crack into those.

As far as kind of like if you want the bigger, what got me into martial arts, that type of thing.

the two biggest things were, like most people who got into Kung Fu, at least at my age and stuff, we grew up on the old Kung Fu movies, the chop sake movies where the mouth doesn't match the words, you know, Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, and I love these things to this day.

My girlfriend, shout out to Blair, she tolerates me watching Kung Fu movies, but she probably wishes I watched a little less of them, you know, here or there.

So I, I try to be conscious of that.