10 Brothers of Shaolin (1977)

Very cheap production, mostly costumes in the woods. The saving grace is the plentiful fights and a large number of characters to prevent boredom.

Typical ho-hum about Chings oppressing innocent Hans and the Shaolin running about. What I found notable was the different number of actual Kung Fu styles being represented here. Many of the characters fight with a specific style that actually contains moves from the style. You can even see some relatively accurate Eagle Claw (briefly), Preying Mantis and Hung Ga during the film. That said the choreographers frequently revert to movie style kung fu. Unfortunately the martial art fighting is just OK with a lot of slow fighting and unrehearsed moves.

The film available is a horrid TV print with screwy English dubbing. Not only is there no pan and scan on the original widescreen, the image is set dead center, it's also zoomed in to avoid the original subtitles. I might have liked this better if I saw an original print.