So, how did all this time treat the players?
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon
This is kind of a weird one, especially the first time through, as the filmmakers make some abrupt transitions and tone shifts, like they've got a good outline that doesn't always work in detail, but you can see the ambition there. A second time through, it works a bit better, especially after watching some of the Shaw Brothers films this evolved from. The comedy's goofier, but the greater themes are closer to the surface.
The man of the title is Leung Chang (Yuen Biao), the son of a wealthy merchant whose father pays martial artists to lose to him in street brawls, lest he get injured; he doesn't find out he's really bad at kung fu until friends ask him to take on Leung Yee-Tai (Lam Ching-Ying), an opera singer in female roles who is actually a master. Chang finagles his way into the troupe to attempt to learn from him, but winds up revealing Tai to Ngai Fei (Frankie Chan Fan-Kei), another enthusiast looking for a fight, eventually requiring a retreat to heal and train with Tai old friend and rival Wong Wa-po (Sammo Hung Kam=Bo).
I spent a bit of time looking up what the "home video cut" on this disc was (apparently, the same thing except with actor credits up front rather than as they appear), which was how I learned that it was apparently a prequel to Warriors Two; I suspect may explain the big weird jump in the middle where Leung and Ngai flee the circus and wind up at the home of Wong Wah-bo without much in-film work to connect them at all. I thought it was cut for time, but apparently it just wouldn't have been necessary for the Hong Kong audience. It's an odd and unusual shift - the film had just finished ramping up from mostly-comic to deadly-serious, and then it's getting slapstick and goofy again.
Sammo Hung and company do an impressive job of balancing whimsy and cruel violence here, though, better than should be possible. It's an especially nice showcase for Yuen Biao, who gets to play comic and earnest to start and shift his fighting to match. Biao never became quite so famous in the West as schoolmates Jackie Chan and Sammo, but his physicality here is impressive - he doesn't pratfall as the inexperienced student who doesn't really know kung fu, but he's a bit sloppy, and one can see him tightening that up as the film proceeds to its final confrontation. The last act nicely underlines the parallels between Chang and Ngai, both scions of rich families whose patriarchs take pains to insulate them from defeat. There's maybe not a particular lesson in this, but it's something that gives a little extra heft to a situation where both the comedy and violence could be hollow.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
Every once in a while, I wonder what Wong Fei-Hung's defendants think of his status as a folk hero, his life being rewritten to fit a story's needs, perhaps because you can't tell a story in this era without referring to him. He's such a legend that every martial arts movie in the mid-1800s must be a Wong Fei-Hung movie, even if they're not really Wong Fei-Hung movies.
In this one, Wong Fei-Hung (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) is presented as a teenager who loves martial arts despite his father's refusal to teach him, especially the annual "Pau Battle", an annual free-for-all where the various schools compete to collect tokens launched from fireworks. But there's more going on, as Yuan Ching (Lau Kar-Leung), who studied under the same master as Fei-Hung's father Kay-Ying (Chiang Yang), Lu Ah Tsai (Che Kuan-Tai), has arrived in pursuit of a fugitive (Lau Kar-Leung) who has embedded himself in a rival school. He sees Fei-Hung's natural aptitude, but may not be prepared for how desperate and deadly his quarry is.
At its best, Challenge of the Masters contemplates the question of what martial arts is for and the journey to understanding it; Gordon Liu plays Won Fei-Hung as a shallow kid who only sees the respect and action, and his attempts to force himself into the Pau battles without the requisite training are immature and dangerous, though maybe not arrogantly so, but is later forged into a righteous weapon of justice and vengeance. If Liu is a bit stiffer at this point, it's fine; it plays like he's mastered his rage, an exclamation point to how his performance evolves over the long stretch of training.
Director Lau Kar-Leung's action is on point throughout; there's an edge to the violence, with the way that the Pau battles get out of control a warning about how dangerous undisciplined martial arts can be, and he imbues his villain with a nastiness that is both confident and cowardly. It's what makes the final duel between him and Liu's Wong Fei-Hung so satisfying; it's a fast-paced fight where we've see that both can do damage, but we can see the earnest purpose to what Wong has become. Lau's He Fu is too skilled to be afraid, but his vibe is different.
The story is thin as heck; the Pau contest feels a bit like stuffing, a great spectacle tied to the more substantive story, but it reinforces things well enough. Like a lot of Lau's output (and that of writer I Kuang), it's a movie built to show the action with other stuff going on, but it runs smoothly in doing so.
Hong Xi Guan (Executioners from Shaolin)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 19 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with Chang Cheh's Shaw Brothers Extended Shaolin Temple Universe, though it doesn't really matter that much, other than how one can't necessarily help but think of the timeline and history throughout.
It picks up as the Temple burns, and Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) sends the governor's forces to ideally capture the fleeing monks, hoping they can be tortured into revealing the locations of others. After Tong Qianjin (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) buys them some time to escape, Hong Xiguan (Chen Kuan-Tai) and his friend Xiaohu (Cheng Kang-Yeh) are among those taking refuge on the red boats, disguised as opera troupes. In one village, street performer Fang Yung Chun ("Lily" Li Li-Li) objects to their arrogance, but soon she and Hong are spending all their time together. But while they travel and perform, Pai Mei is consolidating his power, and it's not long after the couple marry that soldiers mount an attack on the red boats, sending them further into hiding.
Executioners has the feel of something that is based around history and/or legends and has been sort of messily cobbled together and then pushed to be irreverent, and I sometimes wonder if the legends retold in these martial-arts epics need an environment where both they and the creators can breathe. It's one thing to say someone trains for years in anticipation of a decisive fight in a serialized novel, but another when two or ten years occur between shots but only one character is being recast and the visual changes are too minor to really feel like time has passed. Often, "he trained for years" is used as a shorthand for it being very important but the other impact isn't felt on screen. Warrior monks seemingly only get more powerful and skilled, as opposed to a trade-off between one's technique improving but the body starting to turn.
So against this background, the romance between Xiguan and Yung-Chun is just kind of there, necessary but not passionate, the "comedy" is mostly abrasive, and the preparations for/fights against Pai Mei tend to be about hitting specific weak spots rather than strategy: The finale could be about the value of knowing multiple styles versus attempting to hone one to perfection, but that's mostly mentioned in passing. The big fights are, of course, good stuff, even if Pai Mei's signature move is apparently to let people kick him in the nuts so that he can grasp their foot with his groin and drag them around. The fights are good, of course, although the early ones with their desperation top the later ones with their silly rules
Zhong hua zhang fu (Heroes of the East)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 September2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
This and the other Lau Kar-Leung movie on the second disc of the box set are kung fu comedies that feel like they were completely dispensing with any pretense that the kung fu was just part of these movies' appeal or a way of telling the story. Here are guys who know how to fight, this story says, some wacky situations, and then let's go.
In this case, the wacky situation has Ho Tao (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) objecting to an arranged marriage with a childhood friend - the daughter of one of his father's Japanese business associates - until he sees that Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno) is gorgeous. It turns out she shares his interest in martial arts, though her studies have naturally tended toward Japanese forms, and she quickly moves to monopolize the estate's training grounds. Eventually, Yumiko returns to Japan, where she reacquaints herself with old friend (and ninjutsu expert) Takeno (Yasuaki Kurata), who brings an entire brace of Japanese martial artists to challenge Tao.
The back half especially is one duel after another, more or less completely arbitrary, without much in the way of dramatic stakes once one sees that Tao and Yumiko have more or less put their issues behind them. But, hey, it works; the movie's a ton of fun. I wish that I knew a bit more about Hong Kong/Japan relations in the late 1970s, because in some ways this movie has a weird tension underneath: The arranged marriage eventually becomes reasonably warm, but while Ho Tao is initially described as just being pretty good at martial arts, he defeats a whole bunch of masters of various Japanese disciplines. Lots of movies and other bits of pop culture will try and walk a line where one is earnestly interested in and admiring of a foreign culture but with the unspoken assumption that one's own is better, although, hey, some of these folks are old enough to be WWII vets (and I've seen a lot of recent Chinese movies very focused on Japan as a sadistic occupying army), and one can't help but wonder what the thinking is here.
The long string of duels kind of overwhelms anything going on between Tao and Kumiko, which is a bit of a shame; one can see how the couple can be fun once they're a bit less at odds, and Cheng Kang-Yeh is kind of obnoxious fun as the servant who enjoys stirring the pot. The various Japanese martial-arts masters are kind of one-note aside from Yasuaki Kurata's Takeno, but they're generally entertaining notes. I'm a bit surprised that Yuka Mizuno seems to have had quite a short career - only two other films after this one - and while she's sort of rough as an actress, one can see potential enough to make one wonder what her story is.
Heroes of the East could be a really fun kung fu romantic comedy, but it's just focused on the fights. It's a very entertaining fight movie, and that's enough.
Lan tou He (Dirty Ho)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
Treating this as a bonus, since I have seen the film before, though it's been nearly 20 years since it played on film at Fantasia. I reviewed it at the time, although, yikes, is my writing and general familiarity with Asian genre film rough. Can't claim to be too much of a kid, either, at 32.
Ah, well. It was still a real kick to revisit . For all that "Dirty Ho" probably didn't have the same meaning at the time, it's full of winking innuendo to start, and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui is a real delight as the jewel merchant who is eventually revealed as more, cool and confident but eventually revealing the burden of his position - too decent, really, to want to be king, which ultimately makes him the only acceptable choice. He's a fun pairing with Wong Yu's title character - it's not quite a buddy movie, as it winds up too much a master-student situation - but Wong really finds a nice comic groove as someone half scammer, half put-upon, and manages to keep it even as the stakes get higher.
Good fun.
Not counting Dirty Ho because it's a re-watch, that gets both our players up to six movies, and nearly tied:
Dale Evans: 17 ¾ stars
Centipede: 17 ½ stars
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