Lightning Fists of Shaolin

I'm going to be writing about lesser-known martial arts movies for work soon, and though I've seen enough to talk about, I thought it gave me a good excuse to catch up on a few lesser-known ones I've yet to see. I've been pretty happy with the whole run so far, seeing a couple of cool Jackie Chan films, King Hu's The Fate of Lee Khan, and now a couple of Shaw Brothers movies tonight: Human Lantern and then Opium and the Kung Fu Master.

The latter was particularly good. Not perfect, and not quite top-tier Shaw Brothers, but quite good, and I'm glad to say it qualifies as under-appreciated. It has a little bit of an odd tone at first, feeling like a goofy comedy with some occasional martial arts, having more laughs than your average "competing martial arts schools" plotline.

But then opium works its way into the plot, one school wants to corrupt the town of another school by making them all addicts, and the drug is shown to start ruining lives. It doesn't handle addiction with care or in a particularly believable way, but maybe points for effort? It does end up pushing the film into more serious territory, and while that was jarring, I think it was for the best. The action - while good before - started to get even more exciting once the stakes were raised.

And it's always cool to see two well-known Shaw Brothers lead actors - Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-Tai, who were also both in Human Lanterns - face off against each other. I always forget how good of a bad guy the latter made, and when they go head-to-head, things get awesome.

It's a bit of a messy film, and some wild tonal shifts are contained within, but I generally liked what it was going for, mostly liked what the story ended up being, and found the action very entertaining.