Clan of Amazons [秀花大盜 or 陸小鳳傳奇之一繡花大盜] (1978)
Starring Lau Wing, Ling Yun, Norman Chu Siu-Keung, Ching Li, Yueh Hua, Manor Chan Man-Na, Shih Szu, Ku Kuan-Chung, Cheung Ying, Chan Shen, Ngaai Fei, Lam Fai-Wong, Yang Chi-Ching, Teresa Ha Ping, Dik Boh-Laai, Lau Wai-Ling, Chong Lee, Kara Hui, Ou-Yang Sha-Fei, Yuen Wah
Directed by Chor Yuen
Expectations: I hope it lives up to previous Chor Yuen wuxias.
For Chor Yuen’s first film of 1978 (of five!), he once again returned to the fertile imagination of Gu Long. Clan of Amazons is based on the second novel in Gu’s Lu Xiaofeng series, The Embroidery Bandit (繡花大盜, Xiuhua Dadao), and the film shares the book’s title in Chinese. I’m guessing the Clan of Amazons English title refers to the all-female Red Shoe Organization in the film. Anyway, on the title screen there are also some characters identifying the film as a tale of Lu Xiaofeng, so perhaps this signals a hope to make many sequels. The film did well, hitting #16 at the year’s local box office, and TVB produced three TV series based on the novels (in 1976, 1977, and a few months after Clan of Amazons in 1978), but Shaw only produced a single sequel: 1981’s The Duel of the Century.
As for the film at hand, it is almost more of a mystery than anything else. It is, of course, a wuxia mystery, so it’s not without action or traditional martial clan intrigue. Whether you think Clan of Amazons has the goods necessary to offset all the talking, though, depends on your love of dense mystery stories. I love a good mystery, but I also love a rollicking action film so I found Clan of Amazons to be quite entertaining, while simultaneously a little too dry. It’s a hard film to dislike, though, as there are tons of great wuxia thrills packed into its 88-minute runtime.