Pi li quan

THE THUNDERBOLT FIST (1972) is an oddly cast kung fu film from a Korean director working for Shaw Bros. All the key male good guy parts are played by actors who normally played bad guys in these films, so it's hard to develop much trust for them, especially since they behave so much like bad guys. The lead actor is Kang Chia, a thin, sullen, gaunt-looking fellow who never looks particularly heroic here. (The actor who plays him as a child appears to be a lot more trustworthy.) The only character who comes off as genuinely heroic-looking is the hero's female partner, Sister Die, played by Shih Szu, a frequent star of Shaw Bros. kung fu/swordplay films in the 1970s (THE LADY HERMIT, THE RESCUE).

The plot has to do with the takeover of a Chinese town by a group of Japanese who wear traditional costumes, ride horses and carry swords, even though this is set in the early 20th century, long after Japan's modernization. Our hero, Tie Wa, is sent off as a boy to train in the mountains with a resistance group. He has left his family's "Thunderbolt Fist" manual in the care of a female friend, Feng Niou, and, after growing to adulthood returns to the town to scope out the strength of the Japanese fighters and their Chinese lackeys, including one Gu Gang, whom Tie Wa fought as a child. He gets the manual back after some difficulty with Feng Niou's jealous husband, but gets beaten up and maimed by Gu Gang for his trouble and eventually is let go, allowing him to return to the mountain to train his one good arm in the Thunderbolt Fist style so he can lead the others back and retake their town from the Japanese.

It takes way too long for Tie Wa to get back the manual and when he finally starts training, with 20 minutes left in the film, it's only a three-minute scene and we never see him actually using the manual. This bothered me, not only because I was waiting impatiently for him to start training and acquire the skills needed to combat the town's occupiers, but because there are long stretches in the middle of the 87-minute film where nothing significant happens. Some of those scenes could have been cut and more training scenes added.

Granted, the final series of fight scenes in the town offer well staged action and much excitement. Shih Szu is particularly good here, in some of the best fight scenes I've seen her in, doing kung fu in some bits and wielding a sword in others. She also looks great, decked out in one colorful silk outfit after another. Too bad she only has a supporting role. (The IMDb cast list identifies her character as "Red Butterfly," a name that never appears in the subtitles of the Celestial DVD I viewed for this review.) James Nam plays Gu Gang and he's quite good in a ruthless role. He's a Korean actor, also known as Nan Kung-hsun, and he appeared as villains in a bunch of kung fu films in the 1970s. A number of the cast, including Nam, turned up the same year in KING BOXER, also known as FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH.

It starts with the evil Japanese terrorizing the town. They challenge a kung fu master to an honorable fight presumably to make their dominance legitimate. They lose the fight and forget about honor and just kill him.

The son escapes and grows up learning martial arts along with our girl Shih Szu. The Japanese still terrorize the town and specifically seek a special kung fu manual. The other subplot is a love triangle between Chuan Yuan and two girls which the Japanese try to exploit.

I have been watching these films in chronological order and it has given me insight into their development. For example, the fight scenes changed with the addition of actors skilled in martial arts along with better ways of filming and editing the fight sequences.

The "training sequence" started its development in the early 1970s. Initially it was a few brief scenes simply to show the hero learning something new to validate that even though he lost before he could now beat the villain. By the early 1980s the training sequence evolved into a major story in itself. The actors used imaginative equipment that required extreme physical skills and everyone seemed to be trying to be more over the top in every movie. Some of these sequences became known as the best part of the whole movie. Since it was early in the development, the training sequence in this movie was brief. Three punches is brief as it gets!

Here we have another average martial arts movie from the 1970s. Shaw Brothers had a way of making these average movies look above average and they did exactly that here.

Routine but enjoyable martial arts story of revenge. A Chinese man's father is killed by occupying Japanese forces. The young man then trains (cue training sequences) and then avenges his father's murder (cue Chinese vs. Japanese sequences). It's nothing you haven't seen before, but it's well mounted if nothing spectacular.