Solid kung-fu film about about a marital arts tournament, which is a serviceable enough of vehicle for a series of well done fight sequences. Oh, and someone gets killed and then needs avenging by our hero. The story is nothing you haven't seen before, but this Shaw Brothers production of a Wong Fei-hung tale is satisfying enough.
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a_chinn17 September 2017
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Leofwine_draca7 January 2021THE MASTER OF KUNG FU is a Shaw Brothers movie looking at the career of Wong Fei Hung, as so memorably played by Jet Li in a series of 1990s-era spectaculars. This one stars the excellent character actor Ku Feng as the wise hero, here getting into a vendetta with various corrupt locals and foreigners out to bleed China of its rare antiquities. The cast is well chosen, and it's nice to see Chan Shen in a non-villainous role for once. Expect this to be more grounded in reality with none of the death-dealing found in Shaw's many "martial world" movies, but it still has plenty of satisfying action to recommend it.
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I am an absolute huge fan of Martial Art films (especially the early Hong Kong Shaw Bros releases...of which I have seen almost all of them). This is not one of my favourites though.
The martial Arts action sequences were always the important factor of Hong Kong Kung Fu flicks (which was just as well considering the acting was always chauvanistically wooden and made worse by bad editing). In this film - also known as 'DEATH KICK' - you see it at its worst. The main character, Huang Fei-Hung or Wong Fei Hung (as he is more commonly known as in the west) is a legendary Kung Fu master in Chinese history. He had an unstoppable, incredibly fast invincible kick called ' The Invisible Kick' (hence the secondary title of the film, Death Kick) and, when shown in this film it is embarrassing. Coupled with the rest of the second rate fight choreography it makes for a very poor film; unless you are a Kung Fu practioner which in the case of the very slow action moves, gives you the ability of studying the moves perfectly...especially the 3 sectioned staff sequence fight.
Its worth a watch as a Kung Fu fan but its the Jet Li films about Wong Fei-Hungs life that you should really watch. -
Minor but well-mounted Shaw Brothers production based on the exploits of Wong Fei-hung, the turn-of-the-century kung-fu instructor/acupuncturist/Cantonese folk hero. (Liu Chia-liang later directed two Shaw films--"Challenge of the Masters" and "Martial Club"--with the young Wong Fei-hung as the central character, but "The Master of Kung-Fu" is about Wong as an adult.) Here he's played by Hong Kong's greatest character actor, Ku Feng (you've seen him in everything from "The One-Armed Swordsman" to "The Heroic Ones" to "Bruce Le's Greatest Revenge"), and this role gives Ku the relatively rare opportunity to show off his considerable fighting skills--both barehanded and with a three-sectional staff. The plot revolves around stolen jade ornaments and an attempt to frame Wong Fei-hung for the murder of a fellow kung-fu teacher, a hot-tempered man who had argued with Wong. Beautiful attention to period detail and, of course, great fight choreography by Yuan Hsiang-jen and Yuen Woo-ping--but you shouldn't expect a lot of bloodshed, since Wong strove to avoid killing or seriously injuring his opponents! A compilation of fight scenes from "The Master of Kung-Fu" is available on YouTube.