Rating: ***
Director: Wilson Tong
Cast: Angela Mao, Philip Ko, Bolo Yeung, Yuen Biao, and a whole lot of
familiar kung fu faces whose names I don't know.
A kung fu classic in the vein of "Drunken Master" (1978) and "Snake In The Eagle's Shadow" (1978), but far more energetic and violent than either of those two. It's also utterly pointless - with all of the fighting, there's no room for a plot. Some nasty guy rapes some other guy's wife. He decides to get revenge by killing the bastard, but is defeated. Twenty years later he teaches the villain's son snake fist kung fu and there's a vicious free-for-all between the three of them at the climax of the film, which literally ends on a freeze frame of the young kid killing his teacher. Lots a really great fighting and some really beautiful forms work, but the highlight is a brief sword fight with a whorehouse madam (the ever fantastic Angela Mao). Yuen Biao and Bolo Yeung show up in the tiniest of cameos as travelling circus performers, and there's even some lobster fu training sequences.