Shaw Brothers Extravaganza

On Saturday night I spend the whole night at the Curzon cinema in Soho watching four of the more unusual films from the Shaw Brothers back catalogue. Though Shaw is known in the west for kung-fu flicks, it actually had a wide ranging output. I got to see:

• Super Infra Man - a Jet Jaguar/Power Ranger type super hero battling demons from beneath the earth's crust
• The Mighty Peking Man - King Kong in Hong Kong complete with a blonde She Ra type character
• The Oily Maniac - a Hammer horror type tale of supernatural revenge killings
• Monkey Goes West - a retelling of part of The Journey West, a famous Chinese folk story about the adventures of travellers from China looking for scrolls belonging to Lord Buddha, best known in the West from the the Japanese TV series Monkey

Shaw Studio owned by Shaw Brothers (HK) Limited is the best known Chinese language film studio and has a back catalogue of almost a 1,000 films prior to stopping film making in 1987. It was founded by Sir Run Run Shaw and his brother Runme as South Sea Film in 1930. Celestial Pictures, a film satellite channel owns the rights to the back catalogue and have been issuing it on DVD. Thought Shaw is best known for kung fu flicks and acted as a training school for the likes of John Woo. Shaw are the largest cinema distributors in Singapore and have been heavily involved in building a new film studio in Hong Kong.

The Shaw Brothers allnighter was organised as part of the Sci-Fi-London film festival.