Bringing his sense for the ridiculous and celebrating the uncelebratable, writer, curator and educator Zak Hepburn has come to Cinema Nova with a program of cult classics for your late Friday night enjoyment. Beginning on Friday May 24th with the “bona fide Kung Fu classic” The Master of the Flying Guillotine, Cultastrophe will deliver a program of undiscovered or recently uncovered cinematic gems from throughout cinemas history, presented with a reel of retro advertisements, trailers for some of the worst looking films of all time, and film posters of films that should never have been made, every Friday night at 9.45pm, movie goers are in for a rare treat.
The Master of the Flying Guillotine is often cited as one of Tarantino’s favourite films. A real tournament film, Flying Guillotine is the sequel to director Jimmy Wu Yang’s Hong Kong martial arts film One Armed Boxer. Our hero, the One Armed Boxer, is a martial arts specialist who runs a school for mastering martial arts. When he is invited to compete in a martial arts tournament, which has drawn specialists from all disciplines from all over the world, a rival master at arms decides to exact his revenge on the one armed boxer and heads off to the tournament to find his one armed nemesis and using his flying guillotine to decapitate our hero, decimating every one armed man along the way.
This is the perfect martial arts film with a lackluster plot, over the top set ups for ridiculous fight scenes and wacky zany characters such as a Yoga master who can extend his arms to achieve great reach, a young Taiwanese boxer who dances before he fights, and a monkey boxer, who becomes like a monkey when he fights. The film is ridiculous but hilarious, though it probably wasn’t supposed to be. The final fight scene is pretty incredible, as the Master of the Flying Guillotine is blind, but his other senses are much heightened and the One Armed Boxer must use all of his strength and cunning to defeat him.
The program will include such classics as Cronenberg’s dystopian 80s Sci-fi Scanners, the original Repo Man starring Emilio Estevez, and self-funded Australian Outback Ozploitation The Nullarbor Nymph. So if you’re a fan of paranormal zombies, killer cars and the Angel of Death then check out Cultastrophe at Nova every Friday at 9.45pm.
And here’s a little portal that will tell you more!
