Angela Mao seeks—you guessed it—vengeance as the blade- and scorpion-wielding heroine of BROKEN OATH.
showing where a hanging picture was taken down from the loca- tion used—and the enhancement also lends favor to the horror makeups and unbelievably red, gushing blood. Thinking back to this film’s early VHS presentation from All Seasons Entertainment, it’s remarkable to see how its image quality could be so vastly enriched.
As on the standard releases of these titles, the 5.1 English mixes push much too hard. The 2.0 option is preferable, though the dubbing on these is usually too vulgar and works against the experience. The 2.0 Castilian Spanish mixes are rendered with some sensitivity and are prefer- able. The Naschy introductions preceding each film are not in HD and default to letterboxed fullscreen proportions. The menu pages and supplementary items are especially well-served by Blu- ray, with the stills galleries look- ing far more brilliant than the standard presentation. All the extras of the standard issues (trailers, poster galleries, etc.) are included, with the exception of the informative liner note book- lets written by Mirek Lipinski— a considerable loss to devotees
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who demand a measure of scholarly attention with releases like this, but also to the aver- age consumer, who may find them less respectable without the support of Lipinski’s insights and historical perspective.
Imports BROKEN OATH
Poh gaai (Cantonese) Po jie (Mandarin) “Broken Buddhist Vows” 1977, Joy Sales Films and Video Distributors/HK Flix, DD-2.0/16:9/ LB/ST/+, $8.95, 92m 48s, DVD-0 By John Charles
This period kung fu thriller is constructed around the age-old revenge scenario dominating the genre, but the fighting is excel- lent and the beautiful Angela Mao Ying is beguiling in a role re- moved from her usual heroines. Following the brutal murder of her husband, noblewoman Liu Yee-mei is able to gouge out of the eye of one assailant (Chiu Hung). He turns out to be a cap- tain of the guards with great in- fluence in the court and she is
sent to a prison island for life. Before dying, she gives birth to a daughter and the baby is brought up by some female monks. Given the name Pure Lotus, the girl (who keeps deadly scorpions as pets) grows up to be an expert fighter but her violent nature and all-encompassing interest in kung fu soon gets her expelled from the monastery. After learning the details of her mother’s plight, Lotus (Mao) sets out to get re- venge. Working as a pickpocket for wily thief Thousand Hands (Wong Loi), she gradually hunts down the other men (including Michael Chan Wai-man and Fong Yau) responsible for her mother’s death twenty years earlier. After eliminating the first two, she has herself sold to a brothel, in order to kill the owner. However, things take an unexpected turn when Lotus is poisoned and needs the aid of the only man with the medical knowledge to save her. The identity of this man is not difficult to deduce, but there is also a military conspiracy at work behind-the-scenes.
Lotus is an unusual charac- ter for Mao because the girl pos- sesses a dark and violent streak even before revenge is revealed
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