Ren zhe da

There is one all-important reason you should view this film: The Ninja Water Spider Attack Team! One of the most insane ideas ever to be recorded on celluloid: ninjas hopping about a lake on top of giant, rubber spiders! The other ninja teams're pretty good too, especially the dudes who dig super-fast under the ground. Also worth looking out for is the sequence where the fighters do their formation-marching in front of their leader: one pattern they assume is a swastika-shape, like something from "Springtime for Hitler"! Oh yeah, one more thing to watch out for: the totally naked girl fighter who likes to do high kicks! The original film/series that this footage comes from supposedly runs for hours and hours! Some more of this footage can be seen in Shaolin Dolemite.

Dec 22

Alexander Lo Rei stars in this fun fun fun Ninja film. It starts out with some Ninja training going on for 10 minutes or so, and this is worth the price of admission alone, some great fun scenes with great disguises, Ninjas walking up trees and giant inflatable spiders.

You also get Shaolin monks thrown in as well as 2 American wannabe monks and a couple of Japanese fighters that want to help the Shaolin Temple against the Ninjas.

It is a reel hoot, but it is a little let down by being a bit disjointed, characters just seems to disappear or appear in the next scene in a completely different scenerio to where they were before.

Ninja fun 8 out of 10.

A rather extreme example of screw loose Chinese film-making from the 1980's. An era where HK and Taiwanese films were fast-paced, illogical exercises in frenetic film making, this one really takes the cake and sits on it.

The plot is threadbare and indecipherable at the same time. The scenes unfurl to strike the film makers fancy not to move the story along. It's really clear that the people who made this didn't care if the legendary spider boats obviously don't work or that the film is set in some sort of time warp between the 1920's or the 1980's. The American monks seem to be parodies of the Hare Krishnas that used to plague the airports and the Black Monk of Harlem is inspired by "The Last Dragon" but everything else seems to set in old China. The digging ninjas are first shown struggling with their small shovels, then suddenly they are drilling thru the ground at 50 miles per hour. The producers of the film didn't take this seriously and neither should the viewer.

The unusual nude fight scene is the first example I've seen of Taiwanese film nude kung fu that I had heard about from a friend who lived in Taiwan in the late 1980's. He had collected a number of these films which were subsequently confiscated by HK customs when he came back. Apparently these scenes were the rage for a small time in Taiwan. My friend had actually acted in one film (as a stock white bad guy) where he had to fight a heroine who practiced "Iron Chest". You can guess how that was used. The scene in this film is more of a shock then good. Most of the nude part of the fight involves the actress being flung around while she tries to cover herself with a sheet. She finally starts to fight back but the choreography seems to have been designed to cause the most amount of jiggle instead of an effective fight scene. And the jiggle isn't that good either. Eventually the actress must have said "enough" and she is suddenly clothed in a two piece bikini she somehow creates from the single sheet. The next scene she is in, she is killed off. They probably couldn't afford her anymore.

Good for a laugh with a group of friends, that's it. Except for the nude fight even my wife enjoyed the film and she doesn't like kung fu films.

I've seen the drastically cut version of this movie (I don't know if the full version is available) and it's pretty much an incoherent mess. The plot involves an evil group of ninjas with a grudge against Shaolin Temple, and a Japanese kung fu disciple (with the extremely Japanese name of Wang Chi Chun or some such) who comes to their aid. Basically the whole mess is pretty uninspired fu battles and hijinks. The hero has absolutely no character at all. However the movie has three things going for it, in descending order of interest. 1) Gay Western Hare Krishnas wanna-bes looking to gain kung fu enlightenment at Shaolin 2) The Black Monk of Harlem, a buddy of the Shaolin Abbot, who does some serious butt-kicking, and speaks in a HK film dubber's approximation of 1970's jive that is unintentionally hilarious 3) The Ninja Water Spider Attack Team. One of the greatest things I've ever seen in a fu movie. Basically big spider floats that the ninjas paddle around on like 4-yr-olds in a kiddy pool, and occasionally fly.

Worth a viewing for the Black Monk and the Water Spiders, nothing else going on.

The kind of movie to watch on a Sunday morning! As a lover of oldschool kungfu movies, this is probably the best of the worst. Inflatable water spiders, kinetic thunderfists and tigerclaw warriors. What else do you need?!