Feng shi guai tu (1979) User Reviews

Below average kung fu comedy with very familiar characters

[ckormos1 · 5/10 · 10 December 2016]

Two girls fight over a small statue. Kam Kong enters and in one blow ends the fight. The masked girl is injured and escapes. Cut to two guys on the road. One pretends to have fleas to pick the other's pocket. They scrap at each other a bit and the Beggar Su clone enters. Cut to Got Siu-Bo needs a bride. The pickpocket tries to pay him off. The beggar insists the two become his students though they are really too lazy.

The story falls apart when the two unlikeable leads are forced to practice martial arts when they only have to just leave. Why does he even want students? The backstory eventually comes out and it is all about revenge. The reveal was melodramatic and felt awkward. Maybe if edited differently it would have worked. As it stands, it failed for me. The fight choreography tries to be comedic for the most part and always fails to be anything other than bland and repetitive.

There was a high point - the training sequence on the parallel bars, but it was too little too late.

Bottom line, I watched this movie once to write a review and I cannot imagine ever watching it again.

Familiar story...

[poe-48833 · 6/10 · 6 January 2016]

The beautiful Miss Jin dresses up like a ninja and slips into the headquarters of a den of thieves who have stolen a statue of a Golden Tiger from her father's brother years before. She fails in her quest. Elsewhere, pickpocket Pai Chi is trying to get his hands on enough money to free a young lady from a brothel (as in many of these movies, one must BUY the victim's freedom), but he has no better luck than the aforementioned Miss Jin in HER quest- at first. "There's no man alive who's above the law," he states matter-of-factly, in an effort to convince the hard-headed Ko Tung that he's an honest man at heart... even though he's just lifted Tung's purse and gotten caught at it. Chi is aided by Tung and an elderly drunk (Miss Jin's father), who becomes their Master. (At one point, he rigs up a method whereby his two students can "power" his rocking chair: they are doing handstands on benches and ropes tied around their ankles are draped over limbs and tied to the legs of his chair so that their constant up and down pushups provide the rocking motion he desires.) It turns out, of course, that the old man wants revenge against the men who killed his brother... the men who now own the Golden Tiger... It's hard to give these movies less than a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 because of the level of the action (which is more often than not GENUINE, as opposed to being just slack wirework), but the version of this one that I saw was a badly dubbed pan and scan version- and the story was all too familiar. It is what it is.

Tai Chi Shadow Boxing

[jddog130 · 10/10 · 23 March 2015]

Tai Chi Shadow Boxing 1979 (aka Tai Chi Devil Dragons)

An old beggar (Yu Chung-Chiu aka Chui Chung Hei) convinces two young troublemakers (Jackie Chen and Heung Wan-Pang) to be his kung fu students to learn Tai Chi Shadow Boxing and help him get revenge on a monk (Kam Kong aka Kang Chin) who killed his brother many years ago.

The beggar is who first recruits the two as students by force and later pleads with them to continue their training. But not even the presence of his pretty daughter (Chow Shui-Fong) is enough to keep them around, until he breaks down and tells them why.

The beggar puts the them through some tough training (you know the usual, with comedy thrown in) but no real mention of styles apart from some hilarious names for stances being shouted out and you wont find any good examples of Tai Chi boxing, regardless of the title.

Kam Kong states his intention to take care of the beggar himself and a second later he's facing the beggar out in the open and results in a fight that's choreographed good. The two use combined tactics to take on Kam.

Tai Chi Shadow Boxing has some decent fu but has cheap production, acting, editing and not enough creativity in choreography. It seems to drag at times until the last 20 minutes. Overall I liked it. Half good, half bad... I give it a 5....