The first ten minutes of Vahsi Kan are perhaps the purest and most potent distillation in existence of the Turkish action film as interpreted by exploitation kingpin Cetin Inanc. They are also ten of the seediest, sleaziest, most hilariously lascivious and violent ten minutes you’re likely to see this side of the opening montage from Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive. It’s made even sleazier by the fact that, due to a crackdown on nudity by Turkish film censors — who had previously tolerated a surprisingly vast amount of perversion and decadence in the 1970s — there’s no actual nudity on display. Somehow, the simple honesty of a bit of gratuitous nudity would have made the opening minutes of Vahsi Kan substantially less dirty.

It is after one of Kara Murat’s especially prolific episodes of Byzantine bashing that Nikol (Kenan Pars), the Emperor’s unscrupulous Commander-in-Chief, suggests that a village of Turkish civilians be massacred in retaliation. The Emperor, still hoping to effect a truce with the Turks, forbids this, so Nikol and his men just go ahead and do it anyway behind his back. Sadly, the village they choose is the one in which Kara Murat’s gray haired old mom lives, and what’s worse, she ends up being dispatched by Nikol himself, who takes as a prize a necklace that we have just seen Kara Murat give to her. Soon after, Kara Murat comes upon her lifeless body. Heartbroken, he nonetheless realizes that continuing the cycle of violence won’t accomplish anything constructive, and instead pledges to seek grief counseling and move on with his life as best he can. The end.

Oh, I’m totally kidding. Of course he vows to get revenge.

Look at all the promotional materials for The World Of Drunken Master and you’ll see the Drunken Master himself, Simon Yuen Siu-tien, all over them. The main selling point of the film is that Yuen, star of the original movie, is in it. And it’s true, he is, for exactly 1 minute and 14 seconds. Yes, we’re at the mercy of the Hong Kong movie hype machine here, something that managed to sell at least 10 times more ‘Bruce Lee’ movies after Bruce’s death than he ever appeared in while alive. So the only place you’ll see the elder Yuen as Beggar So in this film is during a short opening credits sequence, practicing his drunken boxing on a beach somewhere.

At the time, though my friends and I were voracious consumers of any and every kungfu movie on which we could get our hands, we were also operating more or less in a vacuum. Pre-internet days, you know. So while I wanted to know more about the movies I was watching, there simply didn’t exist the resources that would help me complete the task. I learned to recognize various stars and directors, I didn’t have much historical context beyond that I could paste together based solely on movies I’d seen. There was no way for me to tell a Hong Kong film from a Taiwanese film, and no way for me to understand that I should know the difference — I didn’t suspect that the most bizarre kungfu films we were renting were the product of a Taiwanese film industry that seemed to think acid-fueled fever dreams were the best source material for kungfu movie scripts.