The Blade
While he was as it long before the American upstart came on the scene, Tsui Hark definitely shares something with Tarantino in his contemporary retooling of genre cinema to his own singular specifications. The Blade is his grimy, brutal update of Chang Cheh’s One-armed Swordsman, clearly made in a bid to reclaim his wuxia crown from Wong Kar-wai in the wake of Ashes of Time.
Moonlit battles are fought with nightmarish abstraction through Tsui’s expressive lighting schemes, his free-wheeling camera and inventive PoV shots effecting something akin to a Raimi/Argento visual smoothie. Much like his earlier hat-tip to King Hu, it’s a world-view that The Blade borrows from Chang Cheh. The cynicism may belong to Chang, but the furious kineticism and blood-drenched insanity of the choreography are entirely Tsui’s.