Kuan yue gui shao

It opens with Chan Sing displaying his shirtless manliness. His character gives out some sort of royal order that will result in the slaughter of enemies and innocent bystanders (it doesn't matter either way.) Cut to a lone traveler attacked by a gang. He is holding his own but a large group intervenes. It seems they are acting on Chan Sing's previous order. He is quickly killed. A few choppy edits and missing frames later the same group kills four robbers who were dividing loot.

I read from another review that the plot of this movie is Chan Sing wants a martial arts manual owned by a traveling physician martial artist. I would not have known that otherwise. By 20 minutes in I am only looking forward to seeing the lovely Doris Lung Chun-Erh to appear and save the movie.

She arrives at about 28 minutes in and has a fight. This is also when the tracking on the VHS faded to black and white and so many frames were dropped from the film source that I decided the only way to watch the rest of the movie was with the fast forward button.

My copy is a digital file that may have come from a VHS tape but before that I think it was a laser disk. It has the dual Chinese and English hard subtitles of a laser disk but they are chopped off on both sides. I suspect this digital file made the full journey from film to television broadcast to laser disk and VHS and then copied again with no care for how much was lost through careless edits and video quality. I usually save files like this to watch on a cell phone with noise cancellation headphones on a long flight and it makes the whole experience tolerable but I would not recommend it for anyone less than a hard core fan of this genre.

Do not even try to watch this movie unless you come across the laser disk.