If Poppy Hill sounds like it doesn’t have enough grimy warriors in armour and, well, decapitation for you, then there’s another Asian film in cinemas this week that ticks those particular boxes.
HK director Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs, Legend of the Fist) has shown over the last decade or two that he turn out solid (and generally great-looking) genre films, spanning a variety of different styles and settings.
In Guillotines, Lau breathes new life into the apocryphal legendary Chinese weapon, the flying guillotine supposedly used by mysterious assassins during the Qing dynasty. Gone is the spiky-hat-on-a-chain apparatus from the Shaw Brothers films of the 1970s — here, it’s been updated with modern CGI to resemble what can only be described as an extremely sharp frisbee.
The film stars Huang Xiaoming, Ethan Juan, Li Yuchun and Shawn Yue, and it opened yesterday nationwide in 3D. More details are available on Icon’s page for the film.
Here’s a trailer: