Moonlight Sword and Jade
Lion
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.
