Director: Liao Chiang-lin
Year: 1977
Rating: 5.0
I had no idea that kung-fu films could be so complex
and confusing. This film is filled with a myriad of characters coming and
going and I never am able to quite connect it all up. Still this film has
a lot going for it primarily in the form of Angela Mao. Angela is the main
character in the film and has quite a few action scenes with a couple of
them being quite good. In fact of all the Angela films that I have seen she
definitely causes the biggest body count yet. She shows no mercy and no hesitation
in going for the kill. She also looks fabulous here. A new hairdo and well-applied
makeup show her feminine side – even when she is in the middle of killing
and maiming.
Angela shows up at a small town looking for the brother of her master. He
has been missing for a few months and Angela needs to talk to him because
only he knows who killed her parents many years previously. It almost
turns into an Agatha Christie mystery as Angela tries to uncover a town’s
dirty secrets and all the witnesses start to get killed off one by one. Slowly,
she gets to the bottom of the mystery leaving many corpses in her wake.
Much of the fighting is only so-so but there were two nice scenes with Angela.
One is a duel with a friendly adversary in which they use dumplings, tea cups
and chop sticks to test each others abilities. The other one is a ten-minute
extended scene that has Angela facing off against a group of guys with exploding
balloons and then dodging various booby traps. For the most part an enjoyable
film, but either due to poor dubbing or editing it is near impossible to understand
what all the characters are up to and what their relationships are. Don Wong
and Doris Lung also appear.
