Leopard Fist Ninja

I'm a collector of Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai films, and was quite disappointed that this movie was not a typical "cut & paste" movie with caucasian Ninja's in headbands, with bad special effects.

Nope, this is just a kung fu movie about 2 brothers that lose their family and get adopted by a family friend. This man teaches the 2 brothers kung fu, and sends them away from the land, far away to hone their skills. 20 years later the old man that raised them summons them back, to help protect their 'family' from invaders that are taking everyones livelihood.

There is one scene where they fight 'masked' men, which resemble Ninja's, but this movie is clearly BEFORE the Godfrey Ho Joseph Lai ninja craze that hit in the mid 1980's.

This movie is NOT bad. it holds its own, and there are a few scenes with good/cheesy music.

But if you are a collector of "cut & paste" type Ninja movies with Richard Harrison and the likes, this is not one of them.

South Korean martial arts movies from the 1970s and 1980s are for the most part a breed of their own though they try not to be. They were made to make money, of course, and the easy way was to copy what was going on in Hong Kong and Taiwan. A successful South Korean movie would be indistinguishable from a contemporary Hong Kong or Taiwan film.

Ninjas, of course, are nowhere to be found. This was a marketing technique to rent VHS films. Key words such as ninja and shaolin were put in the title to grab the eye of the American renter. The movie starts with the father and mother killed by the evil invaders. The children (I swore they were two girls) start to train in martial arts for revenge. They grow up to be boys somehow. The body of the movie is expository dialog scenes repeating the same information about the manual they want followed by fight scenes. The fights are at best passable for movie quality.

My copy is a digital file made from the VHS. There is no pan and scan and it is dubbed in English. I do not recognize any of the voices and at times it sounds like just one man talking to himself. At least the voices were not annoying as voices alone have ruined some otherwise good movies.

This movie is for hard core fans of the genre only. I watched it once to write a review and I doubt I will ever watch it again.

This one should have remained in obscurity, and indeed for most people it hopefully will, just because of its badness. Unfortunately this is not "so bad that it's actually funny", this is more like so bad it actually hurts.

Avoid at all cost...

I really can not agree with any of the others, who has commented this film. It is not a good movie, I'd rather say it is really bad. The editing is confusing. The acting is poor and the filming may be the worst I have ever witnessed. Except from that, It got some OK fight scenes, with out doing much impression. This may be one of the worst movies I have ever seen, if we look at the technical aspect of it. But it is really funny, because it is so bad. I will say it is worth a watch, if you are after a badly dubbed kung fu movie, with bad acting and terrible filming, that really makes you laugh. It was totally worth the 3£ I payed for it...

(sorry my bad spelling and grammar)

I'm surprised not many have seen this film as it's actually not that bad. The story is about a man who trains in the Leopard Fist style of kung fu so he can take his revenge on the Japanese invaders who killed his family when he was a boy.

The director here is renowned for chopping films up into intelligible little bits and pieces, but this film runs smoothly for the most part with only a few hang-ups. Watch out for the man who fights for about a minute and is then replaced by someone else. Also good fun is the leaves scene.

The story isn't as good as say, Blood of Dragon Peril, and the acting isn't that great either, but there are plenty of cool fight scenes and some great music to make this well worth a watch, but not a classic.