ASSAULT OF FINAL RIVAL (1978) is a low-budget Taiwan-made kung fu film that offers a highly dramatic middle section that elevates it above most run-of-the-mill kung fu films of the era. The fact that the film goes for almost an hour without a fight scene would be fatal to most such films, but the relationships among the main characters here are so compelling that our attention never wavers.
The plot is a rather formulaic affair in which a kung fu champ has made powerful enemies who seek to neutralize him, apparently purely out of jealousy. The main character, Chen Wai (Wong Tao), incurs the wrath of a powerful lord (Lung Fei) who uses Chen's girlfriend Ah Ming (Eva Lin) to get at him. Paralleling the Samson-and-Delilah story, the villain uses threats of murder to force the girl to cut Chen's long hair, including one long lethal braid that constitutes his most powerful weapon. Chen runs away, weakened, to hide out at a temple to renew his strength and regrow his hair. Ah Ming gives birth to Chen's baby and then leaves the boy with Chen's friend, Par Kin, to take to Chen. Deeply ashamed of having betrayed Chen, Ah Ming becomes a Buddhist nun and joins a monastery.
Meanwhile, Chen raises his son and regains his strength, thanks in part to the efforts of Moon (Susan Tsang), a young widow who saved his life earlier in the film and to whom he returns for help in raising the boy. Eventually Chen has to defend himself from his former enemies after they track him down. There aren't that many fights, and only a few feature the star, Wong Tao. In one of these fights--in which he confronts Lung Fei--Wong is inexplicably doubled by another performer for the entire fight. Still, when Wong is seen in full fighting mode, he's always exciting to watch.
Wong was a superb kung fu star and is seen to better effect in such films as SECRET RIVALS, DEATH DUEL OF KUNG FU, FATAL NEEDLES FATAL FISTS, and CHALLENGE OF DEATH. He is quite good here, but mainly because he gets to emote a lot. He plays an interesting and complex character who is forced to confront the meaning and value of his skills as a fighter. But the real draw of this film is actress Eva Lin in the role of Ah Ming. She is seen in the act of childbirth, surely a rare sight in a kung fu film, and is plunged into deep anguish over the fate of the baby before she decides to give the infant to his father and go off to become a nun. Her scenes are sad and poignant and shot with such an air of austere, melancholic beauty that they seem to have been designed for a completely different movie and then dropped in the middle of this otherwise routine kung fu movie. There is one scene where the hero's best friend goes to call on Ah Ming at the monastery (all shot on location) that has such an emotional impact that it sustains the rest of the film, even though the subsequent scenes are not quite as compelling.
It helps that the film's moving middle section is scored with some very appropriate music cues and not the usual rip-offs of James Bond and Italian western themes that normally punctuate these films. In fact, the music is quite unlike the usual kung fu soundtrack. It doesn't sound like an original score (every scene boasts a completely different music cue) but it doesn't sound at all familiar, indicating that the cues probably came from a music library untouched by other producers of these films.
ASSAULT OF FINAL RIVAL is not the best kung fu movie ever made and the English dubbing is wildly uneven, with the actresses doing superb jobs while the villains sound awfully cartoonish. But it's got some great scenes, a handful of worthy fights, and better than average photography and is well worth a look.
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