Directed by Mei-Chun Chang
Written by Terry Chambers, Huang-Kun Lin
Starring Hsiu-Shen Liang, Hsiang-Chin Han, Ying Bai
Running time 1 hour 38 minutes
Rated R for violence, subject matter
Available - in 3D! - from Kino Lorber December 14

by “Doc” Hunter Bush, Staff Writer

I love a good gimmick and 3D is nothing if not that. When I was a kid I was genuinely upset that 3D seemed to have come and gone from movie theaters for the most part. Then, in one of the many “be careful what you wish for” teachable moments of my life, 3D made a comeback. And for the most part, it sucked. I’ll go on record as saying that Avatar is the only modern film to ever live up to the promise of the concept of 3D because, no surprise, Jim Cameron has enough money to do it right. Most quote/unquote 3D films were much less successful. Captain America: The First Avenger’s 3D gave it the weird, planar appearance of those Motion Comics (if you know, you know) that actually added to my enjoyment of it, given the character’s origins, but a lot of titles were never intended to be released in 3D, so they lacked the forethought to include anything that would expressly be improved by the additional visual dimension.

Movies that were made to be released in 3D, which includes Revenge of the Shogun Women (a.k.a. 13 Golden Nuns), knowingly play with the format. They have characters gesticulate directly down the barrel of the lens, set characters on both sides of some decorative feature of the locale, and frequently have characters swinging objects shockingly close to the audience’s POV. Depending on your personal tastes, this can be a good or bad thing. Deliberately breaking the 4th wall via 3D is an act of metatextual awareness and those things will never be everyone’s bag.

Shogun Women starts off by firing flaming arrows directly into the audience’s eyes; a bold declaration of exactly how delicately they will handle the 3D-ness of itself during its run time. I kept a loose count of types and ways that 3D was actively utilized (which discounts things just casually being in the foreground or background, etc) and it should not surprise you that “getting weapons jabbed in your face” is the clear leader. In fact the filmmakers repeatedly find creative excuses to do it, like having a bandit poking a haystack (the audience experiencing haystack POV) looking for a hidden victim, or another bandit collecting villagers’ bracelets and bangles on a spear stuck straight into the camera.

There are other, gentler approaches to 3D that border on, dare I say, pure cinema. Two characters conversing on either side of a beaded curtain is stunningly textural in 3D, and in watching the lady monks’ synchronized exercises in their monastery courtyard, the 3D highlights the poetry of their motions and the skill in the synchronization. It’s excellent and unshowy film craft. On the other side of the coin (or beaded curtain, as you’ll see) there is the fact that, in that beaded curtain scene mentioned above, the beads are entirely different between the shot and reverse shots.

There’s a certain amount of flubs, tricks, and hucksterism that I not only expect but actively desire in my kung-fu flicks. Crazy vocal dubs, recycling stock sounds like screams, reverse action, day becoming night, outlandish and improbable weapons, hidden trampolines, looped footage; they’re all staples of the genre and coming across them here filled me with a deep sense of nostalgia. As a genre exercise, Shogun Women is extremely fulfilling. Where it stumbles a little for me is the story itself.

The countryside is beset by raiding parties of bandits who kill, rob, and sexually assault the unsuspecting and largely defenseless villagers. Early on we follow some women as they survive the bandits but, as text on screen explains, no longer being marriable virgins are sent to the local monastery to learn Buddhist teachings and martial arts; to become the titular Shogun Women. Soon after, another village is attacked, sending their women & children to the safety of the monastery and the protection of the women. The bandits and the lady monks will, of course, have a creative and violent showdown in the finale, but honestly there isn’t enough attention paid to the women as characters for the film to title itself in their honor. Instead we focus more on Dr. Choa (Hsui-Shen Liang), the village doctor whose wedding to the daughter of the town patriarch was interrupted by the bandit raiders.

The big trouble in standard-size China all falls on the Doc’s shoulders. Being a doctor, Choa is apparently the only man in the town unable to pose any sort of physical threat, so he’s sent along with the women & children into the countryside. This ends up being a mixed blessing because a turncoat in the town reveals to Ping the bandit chief (Ying Bai) that Choa has invented explosives. Ping of course realizes that his bandit horde would be unstoppable if they also had bomb power, so now they’re somehow even MORE committed to chasing down the survivors.

A revenge tale that manages to make the revenge feel somewhat perfunctory, Shogun Women is still completely satisfying due entirely to the experience of watching it. The Kino Lorber blu-ray includes three versions of the film: standard 2D, anaglyph 3D (red lens/blue lens), and polarized 3D (for appropriately formatted televisions and those glasses popular in recent theatrical 3D). I watched the anaglyph version because a) Kino includes a set of the glasses in the blu-ray packaging, and b) it seemed most appropriate to the era. Similarly, the blu starts with a small disclaimer about some unavoidable wear and tear to the film that was unfixable, but the occasional scratch here or there only more fully immersed me in the spell of this late ’70s revenge fest!

I cannot overemphasize how on-board I was from the jump; those flaming arrows had me saying “Let’s f***ing goooo!” from the opening moments! Long ago I stocked up on a jumbo pack of the anaglyph glasses (I own my fair share of 3D dvds/blu-rays and I like to entertain, so…) and I fully intend on showing this flick to my house, Mt. Mausoleum. Though there IS that element of sexual violence, it’s handled fairly delicately and not dwelled upon in an exploitative way, leaving plenty of time to revel in the kung fu violence, which is why we’re all here after all.

Revenge of the Shogun Women is extremely satisfying on the micro level of genre-appropriate popcorn thrills, but ultimately lacks somewhat on the macro, storytelling level. Your enjoyment will depend on which one you personally are more interested in I guess, but it’s hard not to fall for a film that commits to a gimmick as thoroughly and immediately as this one.

Stand Out Scene: A sequence between my favorite bandit - whom I have dubbed Ax-Guy because of his enormous ax - and some of the royal guardsmen (?) where Ax-Guy bats rocks back at them with his axe, then detaches the head from the handle and swings it around on a chain like a mace! That dude rules, despite being one of the bad guys and deserving whatever end he comes to.

Doc’s 3D Tally:

• Weapons Waggled in Your Face: numerous (though spears are the most frequent)

• Body Part POV (spear goes into the camera, reverse shot reveals you were seeing from someone’s chest POV, which now has a spear in it)

• Haystack POV

• Bandits Collecting Baubles

• Flying Bread Roll

• Beaded Curtain Scenes

• Monks Training

• Roadside Cobra

• Brief Aside Featuring Circus Performers (fire breathing, dart tossing)

• Cutting to Establishing Shot with a Surprise Object in Your Face (a lot of overlap with Weapons in Your Face, but the Wagon Handle is another good one)

• Crushing a Guy’s Head with a Millstone