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Though my girlfriend watched Master of the Flying Guillotine on Sunday, I didn’t get the chance. So rather than talk about the movie I haven’t seen in some years, I thought I’d discuss one of the more fun aspects of the movie. That is, of course, the handicapped fighters.

I think the idea of having… differently-abled martial artists started with the Japanese Zatoichi movies, which were about a blind swordsman. The idea was that he could hear well enough to find his enemies. The series was wildly successful in Japan and basically produced two movies a year from 1962 until 1974, with a TV series following from 1974 until 1979, and two revival movies in 1989 and 2003. The character was popular all over Asia, and you’ll see him referenced in Hong Kong movies.

In 1967 Shaw Brothers produced One-Armed Swordsman, a very popular movie about a, well, swordsman with only one arm. Jimmy Wang Yu played the character with his arm strapped behind his back, or sometimes a little too obviously stuffed inside the front of shirt if he needed to move around. The movie made Wang Yu a star, and for a few years he kept up the partially-armless schtick, first in a sequel to One-Armed Swordsman, and after he left Hong Kong in One Armed Boxer. In 1972 Wang Yu reprised the One-Armed Swordsman to fight the blind Zatoichi in Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman, which seemed to inspire a trend of having fighters with various handicaps square off with each other for our amusement. Master of the Flying Guillotine features Wang Yu as the One Armed Boxer again, being hunted by a blind Imperial executioner who uses the titular (awesome) weapon.

Surely the high watermark of handicapped fighter movies is Crippled Avengers (1976), also known as Mortal Combat, Return of the Five Deadly Venoms, and Deathfist of the Special Olympics. Directed by Chang Cheh, the movie is about an embittered would-be kung fu master who can never excel at the art because his hands were chopped off when he was kid. He’s been fitted with robot hands, which seem to be more than fully functional, but he still feels the need to go around crippling other people to make himself feel better. Eventually a bunch of his victims, included a blind guy, a deaf guy, an lobotomized guy, and a legless guy, gang up and get vengeance, getting vengeance being the number one occupation in 18th century China. Please do not confuse this movie with the tasteless Crippled Masters (1979), which featured actors with birth defects.

The handicapped fighter thing never really caught on in the West, unless you include the comic book character Daredevil. (Daredevil’s first appearance is within a couple of years of Zatoichi, long before anyone in the states is likely to have seen the movies, so the similarities are probably coincidence. I’m guessing both characters were the result of the popular-but-erroneous meme that blind people’s other senses were heightened. I think that belief started in the 1960s.) Spaghetti Westerns had been mining samurai movies for material since A Fistful of Dollars (1964), so it isn’t surprising that someone tried a blind gunfighter in 1971′s Blindman. Zatoichi was given another try as white guy in 1989′s Blind Fury. Perhaps by way of the aforementioned Spaghetti Westerns, the seminal Bollywood film Sholay features a man with no arms seeking revenge on the bandits that mutilated him.

(And no, Crippled Avengers was not actually known as “Deathfist of the Special Olympics.” But it should have been.)

He’s either scared of the flying guillotine, or that fake beard.

It’s best not to ask what’s happening here.

That hardly seems fair.

So brave. He fights on despite having one arm, and apparently being six months pregnant.