Jackie Chan - Meister aller Klassen 2

Slightly better than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, the first half of the movie is a good funny movie. The second half is barely comedic with super poor action happening quite frequently. Jackie's training with the ghosts is decent though. There's a great comedic bit with a giant pen and the movie does have a couple of really good scene transitions. Check this movie out for the comedy.

A sacred manual of the Seven Fist technique is stolen from the legendary Shaolin temple, and the only style good enough to conquer it, the Five Fists, has long since vanished. Thankfully a meteor hits the temple walls, unearthing the spirits of the Five Fists style, who summarily teach their deadly animal kung fu to lazy student Jackie Chan, so that maybe he can help when the Seven Fist thief strike again. What makes this Lo Wei adventure so endearing is the shoddy special effects – with Star Wars released the year before, Spiritual Kung Fu plainly outlines how behind the times HK was in their effects department (the meteor is a sparkler on a piece of string), and the flame-haired, hula-skirt wearing superimposed ghosts do retain a certain charm despite the cheapness.

This movie was shot back to back with Dragon Fist, and the similarities shows. They both take place at Shaolin temple, and Jackie is a student. This one has more comedic flavor to it. Lo Wei directs this movie as well.

Book of Seven Fist has been stolen from Shaolin temple. Only Five Star fist can win over the Seven Fist, but this technique has been lost. Conveniently, the spirits of the Five Star travels to earth and shows Yi-Lang (Jackie Chan) where the lost book is located. They also give private lessons to Yu-Lang. Killing starts to happen around the temple with Seven Fist technique. It turns out that a man kept in the dungeon Wei-Wu is the culprit who stole the book, and doing the killing. He feels that his Seven Fist style is invincible. Yu-Lang volunteers to leave the temple to settle the score with Wei-Wu. But the real culprit turns out to be a surprising person, and more unexpected things happen with the spirits during the battle.

1978 must have been a good year for Jackie Chan, as he made slew of good movies including his early master piece the "Drunken Master". While this movie is no masterpiece, Jackie Chan looks so good in his role as the Shaolin student. The movie came out after the Dragon Fist, and the Drunken Master, and this movie almost looks like a cross between the two. There's lots of comedy, but Jackie's kung fu looks so sharp and stylish.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't enjoy some of the comedic parts of this movie. Problem with Lo Wei's directing style is that he always portrays supporting cast as low class or no class idiots. He might feel that this is a necessary comedic touch to entertain the audience, but this in my opinion has kept the status of Hong Kong movie low for years. This became obvious when younger directors like Jackie Chan came along and started to direct movies with quality comical touch. Now Hong Kong is considered to produce top notch movies, second perhaps only to Hollywood.

The movie is better than average kung fu movie from the same era. It's a charming movie with good kung fu action mixed in.

I watched this movie a few month back. It's plot is pretty forgettable, same for the fighting scenes. For the most part the movie is cliché-ridden and steadily mediocre, but there is one, big exception.Around the half of the first hour of the movie there is this scene that will stay with me forever. As you might have figured out from the synopsis, the ghosts that haunt Jackie are the big part of this movie. Before the said scene they appear a few times, later they teach him some moves and thank to that Jackie wins the final fight. But the first encounter between the ghost and Jackie is one of the funniest moments in all of Jackie Chan's films. The poor special effects, the ridiculous script (Jackie starts peeing at the ghost), the whole insanity of seeing a fake skeleton bounce on the screen because the guy used X-Ray Vision scroll and looked at his friend is more then enough reason to watch this movie. I haven't laughed much at the movie for a long time, and I'm happy that I saw this low-budget martial arts extravaganza.

In conclusion if you have the opportunity to watch this movie, please do. The first 1/3 is pretty boring, and for the rest of the movie you wish that the craziness that occurred around 30 minutes in repeats itself, but sadly that doesn't happen. But this 10 minute segment of Jackie playing around with ghost is more than enough for you to rent this movie.

This movie (which really should have "Spiritual Kung Fu" listed as an alternate title) may be mostly for those who specifically like kung fu movies, but if you're one of those then this is a classic. While it forebodes the comedic action of later Chan movies, it is actually much more serious, and Jackie's part may be the biggest part, but it is almost matched by several other characters, so the emphasis doesn't lie so squarely on the lead character as it usually does in Chan's movies.

If you're a kung fu movie fan, don't listen to the negative comments posted here. This is one cool movie with lots of cool weirdness, and definitely some very cool fights. At one point, Jackie, who's still considered a novice, has to fight the 18 top students, and he licks every one of them in a long and impressive fight scene. This movie is definitely worth your while.

My rating: 8 out of 10.