Guo guan zhan jiang

Tung Li fights a salt smuggler and takes a place among the smugglers. He is accompanied by the kung fu chick Ingrid Hu Yin-Yin and a comic relief type guy Hon Gwok-Choi. For some reason the girl is also carrying gold and a map.

This one starts with a fight and with the great Corey Yuen as a fight instructor all the fights are good. Tung Li, actor and not martial artist, started making martial arts movies for Shaw Brothers about 1967 and by now he has practiced long and hard and he is as good as any of the stunt men.

My copy is a digital file that plays on a HDTV as a square video with Chinese and English subtitles plus Korean subtitles on top of those two. I suspect the original source was a laser disk because that format often came with both Chinese and English hard subtitles. Then it was recorded on VHS with the Korean subtitles added. I have looked long and hard but could never find a better copy. It is still watchable on a HDTV though the colors are washed out and the subtitles crowd out the picture.

I recommend this movie for fans of martial arts movies of the golden age from 1967 to 1984. I rate it slightly above average. The action is almost all hand to hand and there is plenty of fight time. There is no wire work or even mini-trampoline leaps. There are no particularly creative fight moments but the important thing is all the action never gets boring, repetitive, or like the same fight over and over. It all looks exciting and I never hit the fast forward.

Tung Li fights a salt smuggler and takes a place among the smugglers. He is accompanied by the kung fu chick Ingrid Hu Yin-Yin and a comic relief type guy Hon Gwok-Choi. For some reason the girl is also carrying gold and a map. This one starts with a fight and with Corey Yuen as fight instructor all the fights are good and no two fights are alike. Tung Li, actor and not martial artist, started making martial arts movies for Shaw Brothers about 1967 and by now he has practiced long and hard and he is as good as any of the stunt men. I came across this strange copy as a VHS type transfer to a digital file. There were hard subtitles in both Chinese and English so I suspect there is a better copy out there likely on the old laser disk format. This copy also had Japanese subtitles on top of the other two plus a little intermission commercial. It ran short too, obviously missing quite a few minutes. The only criticism I have of this movie is the story gets needlessly complicated toward the end. Overall, for fans of martial arts movies of the golden age 1967 to 1984 this one is mandatory.