You'd need to be an obsessive fan of Hong Kong martial arts films to have run across "Twins of Kung Fu" even by accident. I saw it under its alternate title, "Passage of the Dragon," in late 1986 or early '87 (i.e., the golden age of VHS). In his groundbreaking book "Martial Arts Movies: From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas," Richard Meyers reckoned this film to be among the twenty-five best kung fu flicks on videotape and synopsized it thusly: "The twins are a son and daughter team of a martial arts master who must defeat a mountain killer who is filling a village river with poison and the countryside with corpses." Apart from that, virtually nothing has been written about the film.
While I strenuously disagree that "Twins of Kung Fu" is among the best of *any* category, it does contain a couple of interesting moments. The film was co-directed by veteran stuntman Pasan Leung (credited here simply as Pasan), who also stars as the poison-unleashing killer. The twins are played by Liu Hung-yi (credited as Jackie Liu, which should give you some idea of when the movie was made and the tone it was trying to strike) and Michelle Yim. Jason Pai Piao (credited as Pak Piao) appears as the killer's ruthlessly loyal son, and many of the minor roles are performed by familiar Hong Kong character actors. It will come as no surprise to the seasoned viewer that this film is padded with insultingly idiotic slapstick, or that its low production values are often painfully evident. But things get better during the final half-hour, and your patience is finally rewarded with a lengthy, fairly well-choreographed outdoor battle. Long of face and prominent of tooth, Pasan squares off against Liu and Yim in a fight obviously modeled on the finale of Jackie Chan's "The Young Master."
I'm not sure how you'd see "Twins of Kung Fu" today; as far as I can determine, it's never been released on DVD and no one has uploaded it to YouTube. If you've got a functioning VCR, you might track down a copy on videotape (as "Passage of the Dragon," on the Congress Video label)...but you'll have to be a dedicated, semi-fanatical viewer of these films to even bother.
While I strenuously disagree that "Twins of Kung Fu" is among the best of *any* category, it does contain a couple of interesting moments. The film was co-directed by veteran stuntman Pasan Leung (credited here simply as Pasan), who also stars as the poison-unleashing killer. The twins are played by Liu Hung-yi (credited as Jackie Liu, which should give you some idea of when the movie was made and the tone it was trying to strike) and Michelle Yim. Jason Pai Piao (credited as Pak Piao) appears as the killer's ruthlessly loyal son, and many of the minor roles are performed by familiar Hong Kong character actors. It will come as no surprise to the seasoned viewer that this film is padded with insultingly idiotic slapstick, or that its low production values are often painfully evident. But things get better during the final half-hour, and your patience is finally rewarded with a lengthy, fairly well-choreographed outdoor battle. Long of face and prominent of tooth, Pasan squares off against Liu and Yim in a fight obviously modeled on the finale of Jackie Chan's "The Young Master."
I'm not sure how you'd see "Twins of Kung Fu" today; as far as I can determine, it's never been released on DVD and no one has uploaded it to YouTube. If you've got a functioning VCR, you might track down a copy on videotape (as "Passage of the Dragon," on the Congress Video label)...but you'll have to be a dedicated, semi-fanatical viewer of these films to even bother.