THE DEADLY FISTS is a fun little martial arts story from Taiwan, featuring a memorable heroine in the shape of a semi-feral mountain girl with a ferocious fighting style. When the girl's father is murdered by a nefarious villain, she arrives in town looking for revenge. The film offers plentiful action with a violent edge, with certain familiar faces like Lung Fei popping up to supply devious cameos. The locations are well utilised here and the final action sequence that takes place on a little bridge on a mountain side is very well shot.
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Leofwine_draca5 December 2017
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ckormos120 June 2015This movie is not just average - it writes the book on average. From start to finish there are no surprises, everything goes exactly as expected. The two lead characters are for one purpose. When one is about to get killed the other steps in to save, then vice versa. The girl sent to deceive the hero, as expected, falls in love with him. If the bad guys fail to kill the hero, as expected, hire a Japanese. There are a fair amount of fights and they are all strictly standard, competent, nothing below and nothing above the middle line of average. As usual in martial arts movies the title is not necessarily descriptive of anything in the movie. There is a girl looking for revenge but she is only on screen less than half the time. There is also the matter of a lost treasure map and that plot line takes up more than the revenge plot line. I usually have a beer with my martial arts movies but even a watered down light beer would be too flavorful here. Better to enjoy this movie with toast no butter and a tepid glass of tap water.
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There are a few very minor spoilers in this.
I bought the video for its English title (there was no review, even on IMDb) 'Revenge of the Iron Fist Maiden'. Obviously I was hoping for a maiden using her iron fists to take some revenge, and the opening is promising: Chie finds her father dying and goes looking for the mysterious Yuan, who killed him. Calling in on the local white-bearded monk for advice, she's told to find out why her father was killed, and to avoid bloodshed. How much she actually finds out, I'm not that sure: it's a complicated story, there are lots of characters with confusingly similar Chinese names and since 70% of the film is fight scenes, there's not much time for explanations. But the other sage advice goes straight out the window this movie has a big enough body count to earn it an 18 rating back then (though it would be about 12 nowadays).
Soon enough Chie is set upon by a mob of heavies. She's tall, athletic and obviously knows how to fight, but this is where it all goes wrong, for me at least. She's quickly overpowered, has to be rescued by a timely stranger, then disappears for the next half hour as we discover that he, not she, is the hero of this tale. Since his kung fu is no more convincing than hers (and he doesn't look half as good doing it) this is a big disappointment. Chie does return for some longer fights and a hilarious scene, where she rescues the unconscious hero by tucking him under her arm and running up a ladder, but she's again sidelined for the last 15 minutes, while the hero faces the main bad guys alone. In the Iron Fist Maiden department, this movie just doesn't deliver.
Really the acting, plot and direction aren't that important in a movie like this. It's all about the kung fu, which is competent rather than brilliant, with a variety of weapons used as well as fists and feet. At first it's rather dull and repetitive, later a water-wheel and some floating logs are introduced, and once the bad guys call in 'Ho and his brother' as reinforcements it becomes a bit more fun.
If you're not a fan of kung fu movies, this isn't the best place to start. If you are and you come across this now very rare movie (if you're reading this, maybe you already have) or it comes on TV then you'll probably enjoy it.