Eureka Blu-ray Film Review

Beach of the War Gods (1973) • Blu-ray [Eureka Classics] — tepid storytelling with a feast of fights

Famous swordsman Xiao Feng gathers five fierce fighters and rallies the local fishermen to fight off a band of Japanese pirates.

Beach of the War Gods / Zhan shen tan is a great example of what Golden Harvest was doing in the 1970s: spectacular action movies with amazing martial arts fight choreography. The legendary production company was set-up by Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho, both renegades from the seminal Shaw Brothers Studios where they helped establish the martial arts genre in Chinese cinema. Shaw Brothers Studios dominated the domestic box office throughout the 1960s and 1970s and forged a fresh foreign market for kung fu films. Chow and Ho wanted to build on this while freeing themselves of the restrictive studio systems and, in 1970, they founded Golden Harvest in Hong Kong.

They offered lucrative production deals and attractive fees to court new, independent talent and lure some stalwarts away from Shaw Brothers. Just…