Ming jian feng liu (1981) User Reviews

Masks make anything possible in movies

[ckormos1 · 5/10 · 1 January 2017]

It starts with poison. This time it is contact poison. (As a medical professional I must add this - Poison in reality is nothing like you see in the movies. I just pretend it is magic not poison.) The assassin also dies but he kills his target Wong Goon-Hung's father. Crazy thing is the next morning guests arrive and father walks past them. The son is perplexed and goes off wandering. He soon meets a singing character. Everything weird that can happen happens. The explanation at the end is "masks".

Wong Goon-Hung started appearing in these movies in 1972 and was a leading man soon after. His most well known movie might be "Big Land, Flying Eagles." This movie seems to have been a big budget attempt to duplicate or at least recapture the look and feel of the early Taiwan martial arts classics. It fails because it is just too weird and the twist at the end is not realistic.

The fights are as unreal as the story. Would it have been better with realistic fights in a surreal movie? No, but the fights still have to have focus and power both of which were lacking.

Lesser Ku Lung adaptation

[Leofwine_draca · 4/10 · 20 November 2017]

SWORD OF JUSTICE, aka A SWORD NAMED REVENGE, is one of many Chinese films based on the writings of the extraordinarily prolific Ku Lung. Sadly, this Taiwanese outing is rather cheap and muddled, lacking the same kind of finesse that Shaw Brothers director Chor Yuen brought to the screen in his own adaptations of the writer's work. The opening sequence sees a family murdered by poison, but soon the father returns from the grave and his son has to work out just exactly what's going on. It's a convoluted tale for sure, with hidden identities and ghostly touches, but the fight choreography is pretty slapdash and there isn't really enough here to reward a loyal viewer.

Second-rate martial arts...no, third-rate.

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 1 December 2010]

Like so many martial arts films imported to the US in the 1970s and 80s, this film is horribly dubbed--using voices that are just inappropriate for the film. However, oddly, the DVD also features captions directly on the print--both in English and a Chinese dialect. The dubbing is not exactly what the captions say and while you might want to try turning off either the captions or the dubbing, you CAN'T! This simply isn't an option and you must watch the film this way.

The film begins with the slaughter of the master and most of his household. If you are familiar with martial arts film, you'll realize that this is a very typical sort of plot--though how it occurs is a bit differently--with some weird contact poison. Just a bit later, the dead master somehow has come back to life and his surviving student is naturally surprised!! It can't be him, but he DOES seem to have all his old kung fu skills. What gives?! Is he some sort of evil zombie?! Yep...of sorts. And it's up to this lone student to get the the bottom of this odd and mystical plot. And, yes, the plot gets very, very weird--too weird to adequately explain. You have midget kung fu, ghosts and dead folks keep seem to be coming back to life! Trippy! When the hero falls downs a hole, my wife exclaimed "It's Alice in Wonderland with that rabbit hole"--but this was not to be the case! It's just weird and...weird! Did I mention that it's weird??!! It's like kung fu and LSD combined and it only gets weirder as the film progresses--to the point of absurdity later on in the movie.

As far as martial arts action goes, this is a second-rate film. While the actors are very good with gymnastics (with LOTS of backflips and the like), their blows never come close to landing--in fact, it's less like they are fighting but more like the antagonists are dancing with each other! It's a shame, as I could see wading through a relatively poor plot because the fighting is so good, but this simply isn't the case with this one. Here, the plot is a bit weak (but never dull) and the fighting just isn't great...and the editing quite poor, as the film jumps about very abruptly (owch, that hurt my brain). On top of that, the poor print and odd captioning/dubbing issue is disconcerting. So, unless you are a big fan of martial arts films and have already seen a bunch, I advise you to try starting with a better film of the genre to see just how good they can be. Try a Sonny Chiba or Shaw Brothers film instead--they are simply much better movies. On the other hand, bad movie buffs might just enjoy it because it really gets bad about midway through the film...REEAAALLY bad! But, I don't give it a lower score because although bad, it's rarely dull! "He's short, impotent...and a bad dresser!"--my favorite line from this bizarre film!