Attempting to work the ophthalmology angle on the Kung Fu classic Master of the Flying Guillotine is a tall order, but I just had to direct some attention to this bizarrely entertaining movie. Some of you might remember my favorite TV show, Kung Fu Theater, where they would run these poorly dubbed martial arts movies after the Saturday morning cartoons finished up. I think I must have seen this movie repeat four times on Kung Fu Theater over the years.The central character is a blind master whose weapon of choice is the flying guillotine. This thing looks like a small salad bowl with sharp knives lining the edge, attached to a chain. The blind guys throws the bowl over the heads of his victims, yanks on the chain, and the blades close up and decapitate him. He seeks revenge on the one-armed boxer who killed his two students, lopping off several heads along the way.
The movie features an amazingly hip soundtrack (apparently with nonlicensed use of songs), exceptionally poor and erratic dubbing, a weird fighting tournament showcasing various fighting styles, and crazy fake facial hair and eyebrows.
Ophthalmology-related content includes a scene of bilateral eye gouging during the fighting tournament, and of course, the blind title character. Accurately tossing the flying guillotine without being able to see would sharply limit its lethality for most, but the Master skillfully relies on his other heightened senses of hearing and smell. At one point, he tracks the injured one-armed boxer by "smell[ing] blood."I tried running a quick PubMed search for articles on blindness and extrasensory recruitment, and glazed over at the murky hodgepodge of neuropsychology and developmental biology journals. I think the jury is still out, but it appears to be an area of active interest. Here's part of an abstract from a 2008 article from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School:
The loss of vision has been associated with enhanced performance in non-visual tasks such as tactile discrimination and sound localization. Current evidence suggests that these functional gains are linked to the recruitment of the occipital visual cortex for non-visual processing, but the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these crossmodal changes remain uncertain. One possible explanation is that visual deprivation is associated with an unmasking of non-visual input into visual cortex.This kind of verbiage never fails to make me sleepy, and I believe you can get pretty much the exact same information by just watching the amazing abilities of the Master of the Flying Guillotine.
