First of all, I doubt very much that this movie is from 1984 (Edit: Oh good! It's been corrected to 1980 now!), as the Kid in it is certainly not six years older than he was in the previous movie (Sleeping Fist, 1978). He's about 12 here, and couldn't have been much more than a year younger in the first.
Anyway, Thundering Mantis was yet another disappointment to me. It starts out as unbearably terrible happy-go-lucky comedy, which however admittedly grows on you a bit as it proceeds. But it remains exaggerated and never reaches a truly entertaining level. Also, several passages in the movie are so dull and cliché that you have to fast-forward past them. The quality of the fighting is okay, but nothing particularly impressive.
I love Eddy Ko, and was glad to see that he was in this movie as well. However, he once again plays some stupid evil guy (with silly lilac talcum powder on his face) with no motivation at all, and although he gets to put in some decent fighting here, his character remains nonsensical and undeveloped. The torture scenes, mercifully brief, are simply unpleasant.
Beardy's mad and bitin' fightin' in the end is the only thing serving to recommend the movie, and it's not much of a recommendation. It's kinda funny and all, but it doesn't succeed in raising the movie to a level higher than mediocrity.
I have to mention the horrid, disgusting English dubbing. Some of the accents are British, and others sound like 50-year-old cowboys. There's a lot of cringe-inducing shrill shrieking and some really idiotic sound effects. This was a digitally remastered DVD; where the hell is the sense in remastering the movie and then retaining the horrible original dubbing? Must be because anything else would be too expensive, but... one really wonders who the hell can find it in themselves to present us with this kind of crap dubbing in the age of the DVD. Un-Ac-Ceptable.
5 out of 10. (The first movie, Sleeping Fist, received a 6 rating from me.)