"Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin"(1978)d/Chen Chi Hwa

Here's one of the more likable Chan efforts while under Lo Wei, around the time the uber-serious Dragon Fist(1978) was completed and utilizing much of the same cast, though this production doesn't take itself nearly as seriously, a plus, in this case.With Chan handling much of the fight choreography in tonight's period gung fu mystery that plays like Hercule Poirot with crane beak strikes, the action is mostly top notch, save for a few less-than-stellar contests between the so-called clan grandmasters.The original English dub as featured on the VHS(the longest cut of the movie available to date, thus far) or the early Simitar dvd is a real fuckin' hoot, with some of the most memorable martial one-liners you're liable to encounter on your genre travels.Regardless of the format you can track it down on, it's definitely a title that'd benefit from an exhaustive treatment from Dragon Dynasty or the like in future.The cast showcases the talents of Bruce Lee regular Nora Miao, who previously shared the screen with Chan in Wei's New Fist of Fury(1976), and looks good here, Kam Kong, a student of leg fighter Tan Tao Liang who appeared in sixty less-than-amazing titles imho, the best of which were his Chan works, and Tung Lam, a familiar face in the Shaw epics of the early seventies.It should be duly noted that, though Jackie's a cocky wiseass throughout here, most of the humor, or Lo Wei-flavored attempts at such, comes from Korean pipsqueak Kim Jeong-Nam and Lee Man-Tai, who plays one of those familiar dusty beggar-types.Did I mention the film begins with a dramatic form sequence?This one's right up there for those panning for early Chan-man gold; there may not be enough to scrape into an ingot here, but you'll score a little brilliant flake, none-the-less.Onwards.

"It's fun to stay at the...wait, where are C and A?!!?"
Some time ago, the top eight Shaolin masters of their respective gung fu styles got together and created the ultimate technique, The Eight Steps of the Snake and Crane, and managed to document the movements in a training manual, which disappeared, as did the martial artists responsible for it.Enter Hsu Yin-Feng(Jackie Chan), a mysterious stranger in town, who cockily flaunts the knowledge that he possesses the book, when he isn't dispatching opponents with brief and vulgar displays of martial power.The local clan heads seek out Hsu to try and test the Snake/Crane style against their own skills, believing he has personally killed off all the grandmasters in gaining the book for himself.Among the folks constantly pestering Hsu is one Tang Ping-Er(Nora Miao), who's looking for her missing father, and who offers him her fleshy wares for access to the manual, to which he responds, "Women are just like children. Too vague and indecisive." Amen, brother.Also perpetually on Hsu's jock is the miniature Hung Chu(Kim Jeong-Nam), a daughter to a local clan leader who's taken to gearing up like an unconvincing beggar and nagging Hsu about the book herself.Hsu offers very little information to the interested parties, instead lambasting anybody who's fool enough to challenge him along his travels, and the fights keep mounting.He defeats all comers with a cocky finesse and economy of movement(only displaying the Snake/Crane technique towards the end of the fights, after he's well perturbed by the challenges), haughtily remarking, "Having that book gives me a certain charm, though.", all the while searching for an elusively mysterious scar on the bodies of his opponents...The plot thickens.

"Just you nine lousy bastards? You must be tired of living!", says Hsu(Jackie Chan).
After much backstabbery, where clans flip sides quicker than an orangish Jersey Shore terrone baking under a sun lamp, eventually, Hsu reveals that he's been trained in the secret style by the eight grandmasters in question, one of which, Master Huang(Tung Lam) having survived the attack, sends Hsu out into the martial world with a fake manual to lure out the real killer of his colleagues, equipped with the knowledge that said killer bore a unique scar on his body.It turns out that Master Chien(Kam Kong), the head of the Black Dragon clan, has just such an identifying mark, and what's more, is the very unscrupulous sonuvabitch that Hsu has been seeking all along.The local clans band together with Hsu, and Tang follows suit as well, after the Black Dragons manage to kill off waif-esque little Hung.What unbridled unscrupulosity.Driven by a desire for revenge and to save face for his honorable teachers(and anyone who's lost it to this point, really), Hsu goes toe-to-toe with Chien, who seeks to gain the manual, and ruthlessly rule the world of pugilism with an iron fist(what else would he want the damned thing for, I ask you).Hsu comes out on top, of course, after a lengthy final battle, restoring harmony, justice, and gung fu for all practitioners everywhere.Freeze frame, please.

"Hung Chu(Kim Jeong-Nam), who dressed you, the Manson girls?"
Chan also helped coordinate stunts for this one; a well-trained eye will detect slight flares of vintage Jackie in the multitude of fights that pass before the lens during the film.I can only imagine old Lo visiting the set and schitzing out over all the film being wasted on fight choreography.Chan'd follow this entry up with the 3D period flop, Magnificent Bodyguards(1978), before embarking on his historic loan to Seasonal Films the same year.Kong also appeared in villainous garb in Jackie's Shaolin Wooden Men(1976) and Half a Loaf of Kung Fu(1978), as well as generic kung foolerly like Shaolin Kung Fu Mystagogue(1976), The 18 Bronze Girls of Shaolin(1978), and Shaolin Invincible Sticks(1979).Besides her co-starring roles in Bruce Lee's first three movies, Nora Miao also scored credits in Bruce's Deadly Fingers(1976), To Kill a Jaguar(1977), and The Kung Fu Kid(1977), later appearing in Jackie Chan's Dragon Lord(1982), as well.After directing Chan in Half a Loaf of Kung Fu(1978) also, Chen would later go on to become executive director on such epic martial fare as titles like Police Story(1984), Project A II(1987), and Police Story Part II(1988) with the actor.Like I said, this is about as solid a Lo Wei Chan-man feature as you're liable to find, though nowhere near as entertaining as Jackie's later efforts.On the scale, two Wops.Worth a look.

"Here is my handle and here is my spout!"

"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!

Don't you love when guys call out what they're hitting you repeatedly with?In this case it'd be...dragon fist!Dragonfistdragonfistdragonfist!