Shatter carries out his opening assassination with a bullet-firing camera, but the rest of the film never rises to that level of invention, despite a few humorous moments, like Shatter eyeing up a Chinese woman in a car and a man in the car shooting at him. Whitman, not an actor I’m familiar with, is a rather dull lead, not even really selling the scenes in which he seems to be brooding about stuff, though no film with both Peter Cushing and Anton Diffring in sinister roles can be a total loss and Cushing even puts on a subtle but quite effective American accent. It’s just an average action thriller with a storyline that certainly provides a few twists but which also seems to have some gaps in logic, such as why on earth Tai Pah decides to help Shatter in the first place, and has some very poorly written aspects, like the relationship between Shatter and his love interest Mai-Mee which seems to jump all over the place. The resulting film isn’t anywhere near as uneven as you would expect, but I can’t really say that all the effort was worth it. Three different cinematographers worked on the film, while star Stuart Whitman was constantly ill, largely due to his excessive boozing. Monte Hellman was the director for three weeks until being fired by either being behind schedule, shooting “ incomprehensible rushes”, or having his girlfriend do most of the directing depending on what source you read, and being replaced by Michael Carreras, while screenwriter Don Houghton was brought in to produce and was then also fired due to “creative differences”. The second of Hammer’s collaborations with Shaw Brothers, made immediately after The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires, had an even more prolonged production. Being pursued by various government agencies and gangsters, Shatter seeks help from a master martial artist Tai Pah and promises to share half of his fee in exchange for Tai Pah’s protection and assistance to recovering his fee…. He completes his assignment and returns to Hong Kong to collect his fee, only to learn that he himself is the next target of the assassination because he was intended to be used as a scapegoat by his client for a larger political agenda.
Shatter is a hitman contracted to kill a dictator in the African country of Badawi. REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic Starring: Lily Li, Lung Ti, Peter Cushing, Stuart WhitmanĪVAILABLE ON DVD Directed by: Michael Carreras, Monte Hellman
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