Wopsploitation: "Spiritual Kung Fu"(1978)d/Lo Wei

The screenshots for tonight's review come from my dvd burned from an original Chinese language print, letterboxed VHS original I snagged out in Manhattan's Chinatown in the early eighties, though I'd never hold such trivia over anybody's head.But I suppose you could say I was a hardcore Chan-man fanatic while you were somehow impressed by Chuck Norris' non-acting and clunky fight choreography on a cable box in your parlor with a bag of Taco-flavored Doritos sitting on your belly and a two liter of 7Up resting against one of your Nike Cortez.And you'd probably be right.Watching Jackie in any of his pre-Yuen Woo Ping movies, while he was under contract to Lo Wei's production studio, is tantamount to seeing Clint Eastwood in Tarantula(1955) or Lee Van Cleef in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953), in that you can sense bigger and better things on his horizon with untapped skill and presence beginning to shine through.This and 1979's Dragon Fist are probably his best efforts under the old man, who was also responsible for Bruce Lee's earliest successes in the early part of the decade.Chan also provides the fight choreography here, which was fairly innovative at the time, but compared to the rollercoaster ride movies he would later produce, it wouldn't be outrageous to hear people call this boring stuff.As it stands, there's a helluva lot of Jackass-style buffoonery, dime store skeletons, poverty-level special ghost effects, and surprisingly good fights on board here, enough to keep you from crashing the fuck out midway through at least, I'd ponder.

This unsuspecting poultry is about to become an ingredient for a Hungry-Chan dinner.
Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) is a mischievous student at the Shaolin temple; when he isn't being naughty, he's being punished for being naughty.The peace-loving monks usually come up with tasks for the young man to do that border on sadistic, whether its balancing a bench with a bowl of water on the end around his neck and two bowls full in his hands while his equally naughty classmates throw him food on the sneak-sneak, or wielding a giant calligraphy brush to stroke tiny, intricate characters on paper.When he's given temple guard duty, a mysterious man in ninjutsu threads breaks in and steals the "seven deadly fists" manual, with every intention of mastering it and using it for evil, as is usually par for the course.Ye-lang is appropriately punished for not performing his job along with the other students who allowed the unspeakable theft, which, it would seem, knocks the yin and yang of the universe off balance, causing a cosmic counter-occurence, where an ancient lost training manual for "five style fist" is unwittingly stumbled upon by...yeah, you know who.The book is protected by five pasty-faced ghosts with magenta wigs, each topped by a toy rubber animal that coincides with the forgotten style kung fu that they've mastered, and white leotards and hula skirts(like some experimental Chinese jazz musical off-off-Broadway or something), who manage to frighten the bejeezus out of just about everyone in the temple with some pretty low-brow holy x-ray paper and plastic skeletons, save for Ye, who's graduated from catching live frogs, snakes, chickens, and eels for a stew and stuffing them into his drawers for safe keeping, loosens his sash and takes a hearty piss(!) on the spirits as they're hiding behind a bookcase in the corner.After being wedgied and grab-assed like a Riker's Island blow up doll by the gaudy-looking ghosts, he bullies them into teaching him their potent styles of kung fu, by apparently tearing open his frog buttons to reveal the manual, the home of the ghosts themselves, tied to his chest.I'm warning you, I'll sweat all over it, guys...you know I will...Come to think of it, that'll probably come in handy later in the film, because...

Better to be pissed off than pissed on:Movement number one, novice Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) pisses on Five Style Fist ghost sifus.
The stolen seven deadly fist manual turns up in the mitts of the diabolical Luk(James Tien), who's perfected the style with full intention of restoring dignity to his family's name by becoming the master of the martial world.Naturally, Luk cannot achieve this without handing out some serious martial beatdowns to the competition, so he does so, every chance he gets.Meanwhile, back at the temple, Ye offers himself as an escort for the hot-to-trot daughter(Mo Man Sau) of a visiting Wu Tang master.He questions whether she's really a girl(!!), then gets his monkey ass handed to him when he tries getting fresh with her.Embarrassed by the prospect of getting housed by a chick, he improves his technique further with the aid of the martial spectres, enough to defeat the fiesty girl and administer a hearty spanking to her wushu-proficient ass.Her father has the nerve to up and mysteriously die, when Ye suggests that he leave the temple to do some detective work on the unsolved murder.The head monk tells Ye that he cannot leave until he's proven his mettle with two tonfa batons against the eighteen lohan priests, all wielding bo staves(one of the better tonfa v. staff displays ever committed to celluloid, I'm here to tell you).Fifteen breath-taking minutes or so later, Ye is on the case.Luk challenges the orphaned girl to a pugilistic square off when Ye jumps in to help out, getting Pwnd instead.The monks recognize Luk's vicious style as the one from the stolen manual, and arrange more fisticuffs between the two, which Ye emerges victorious from, drawing Luk's father(!!!) out from behind his monk disguise and into the fray.With the help of the five ghosts released from the manual tied to his chest, mid-scrap, Ye is able to pulverize the old bastard into the afterlife with leopard fists as his unearthly sifus hold him in place.Afterwards, Ye mistakenly steps on the manual, causing the ghosts to attack him as he jumps into a mid-air freeze frame.We hear the "Goodbye....goodbye" lifted directly from the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1978).

Snake-style fist says, "Ssssssss.....sssssssss....ssssssss."
Stickler for detail I no doubt am, I added the original Cantonese trailers found at the beginning and end of several of my VHS as extras on my custom disc.There are previews for Fearless Hyena, Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, and an outrageous trailer for To Kill With Intrigue that incorporates a terrible dated pop soundtrack in a miserable pony-tailed period piece where Chan gets his face burned and his ass repeatedly kicked by a sadistic kung fu honey before barely outlasting his final opponent in the final reel.The misleadingly hip trailer is pretty amusing.Yeah, I'm a goober like that.I dug the hell outta this one growing up though Chan's propensity to consistently outdo himself once he'd achieved international superstar status sort of leaves it undeservedly buried in the back of the minor classics closet.Wei would follow this up with three more Chan vehicles(Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, Magnificent Bodyguards, and the silly, incoherent Half a Loaf of Kung Fu) all in the same year, and one in the next(Dragon Fist).James Tien, who co-starred in Bruce Lee fare early on, has never looked better than when he's been choreographed by the Chan-man here.On the scale, it merits two wops, and comes recommended for Jackie Chan completists and lovers of kung fu movies everywhere.Hunt it down!