General Stone
Watching Polly Shang Kwan weave her way through
a group of bad guys like a reaper though a wheat field is truly a pleasure.
With a short sword in each hand she makes quick work of a number of her
enemies in this one and shows no mercy whatsoever. It was kind of enjoyable
seeing this side to her – often her characters tend to be light hearted
– but here she is all business.
Wing Chow has taken away the throne from Polly’s
clan – the Tangs – and she is assisting them in regaining power. In an
early scene Wing Chow’s soldiers are cruelly slaughtering the inhabitants
of a village sympathetic to the Tang’s and Polly leaps down from a building
and just rips through them. In one lovely moment she thrusts her sword
through a guy coming up behind her – simultaneously grabbing his sword
and throws it into the chest of an oncoming fellow. When she is finally
surrounded by too many of them – she simply does a backward flip on to
the roof of the building leaving them open mouthed down below.
Another thread of the film left me a bit confused
– but it seems that a stone statue fathered a Tang follower – and all these
statues in a tomb teach him kung fu to fight Wing Chow. I don’t know what
that was all about but there are a few cool scenes. Of course this was
done in the days before computer graphics and the statues are simply men
made to look like statues. Today they would spend a ton of money to provide
the same effect.
This was a pretty good flick for this kind of
thing and had a lot of things going on. Wing Chow hires a group of expert
killers – all with different killing M.O.s - to deal with Polly and she
has to take them on one by one.
My rating for this film: 7.5