The other night I watched Clans of Intrigue! What a fantastic movie! It's a classic set-up where a hero is blamed for murders he didn't commit and so he has to solve the mystery to clear his name. It culminates in a truly insane final confrontation that actually stunned me and my friend!
This is a Shaw Bros movie, which I've learned means a couple of things: gorgeous technicolor sets, completely nonsensical plots, and really fun action setpieces. All that is true here. Also, boy howdy if you want your movies to be in focus go somewhere else. There's a bunch of closeup shots that are totally blurry and you can see a weird fisheye effect on shots where the camera moves. That being said, now that I know this is a running quirk of theirs, I find it charming. It makes me imagine how hectic and tight their filming schedule must have been.
I think my biggest criticism of this film is that a lot of the plot is hard to follow. I kind of have a vague understanding of what happened, but myself and my friend watching it both found ourselves asking why events were occuring. At least the individual scenes were fun to watch!
This movie also gets a lot of points by having Ti Lung as the star. He's so damn charming. And the movie knows it because they have at least a dozen cuts to him giving a big smile. I much prefer his performance here to the one in The Magic Blade.
I highly recommend this film if for the fights and set design alone. That being said, good luck finding a copy! I ended up having to obtain it through a "seed"y method that I don't normally like "peer"ing into. And even then it was a DVD rip. I would love to see a Blu-ray or other HD rip of this!
