In der Gewalt des Roten Drachen

1972 Taiwan with Jimmy Wang Yu, Paul Chang Chung, Helen Ma Hoi-Lun, Cho Kin, Sit Hon and Shan Mao. A girl is attacked and Jimmy to the rescue. He soon learns he rescued an enemy spy and allowed her to escape. Since the Jins are invading the Songs and Jimmy is a valuable swordsman he gets off with "Sorry about that, Chief". The Jin invader is shown to be a bad guy that likes to undress wives and rape sisters and kill peasants for sport. Jimmy attempts an assassination and is captured. As expected, the girl from the first scene saves him and they escape but the story is poorly written as to the details. The movie also stops for a song four times. This is something I thought ended in the 1960s. Many of these movies were made up on the fly and shot sequentially so it is my guess the writer ran out of ideas by the one hour mark and they needed some padding. It all wraps up well with a good final fight and some things just can't be resolved and must end in total disaster. I like that. The fights are good and frequent and well mixed with empty hands and various weapons. Jimmy still has his Shaw Brothers pucker puss on at times. He fights better in a brawl versus many opponents with long sequences and looks sloppy in the one on one fights which is contradictory but that's Jimmy. He is the king of the brawl. The copy I have is surprisingly widescreen with good resolution. I suspect it came from a laser disk. The opening credits are German and the audio flip flops from Chinese to German at random but the hard subtitles are in English. Overall above average by Jimmy Wang Yu star power alone rating 6 ½ out of 10.