Ma fung gwai kuen

When young Tieh Chiao San is sent by his dying father to live with a former kung fu colleague in the town, he accidentally gets into trouble when missing with a gang running a snake-oil scam and then getting into a fight with an old drunkard. When Tieh reaches his destination he finds that the snake-oil gang is run by none other than his father's friend. He joins the gang but cannot bring himself to do the bad deeds demanded of him; this continues to the point where he is beaten and left for dead. Luckily he is rescued by the pretty Tsai Chiao and hidden out with her drunk uncle and leprosy suffering aunt as well as a Shaolin temple. Tieh uses his time to learn some new kung fu styles, which is just as well as it is not long till the gang come after him looking to finish the job.

I have been enjoying using the festive season to catch up on a lot of films I have been wanting to see, in particular a lot of old Shaw Brothers kung fu movies that I was looking forward to seeing. Generally the standard has been pretty high – much higher than you would expect if your experience of the genre is limited to the "comedy" clips of badly dubbed action delivered out of context. So the dip had to come at some point and for me it hit with Tigress of Shaolin. I was attracted by the title because generally I have noted that the Shaw productions have had strong female roles (and leads at times) and I presumed this would be the case here with the "tigress" of the title but not so. Putting aside my preconceptions I waited to see what the film did and found a comedy where every line is excessively delivered, much humor is crude and basic and the whole thing is given a silly or wacky tone which really needs you to be totally in the mood for it. For me it didn't work as it was too deliberately wacky and not actually funny enough to support how forced it felt.

This wasn't helped by my waning interest in the film as so much of it just seemed cobbled together and made up as it went along. Maybe it was just my aging copy, but the film stock looked bad, the colors, costumes and sets were all significantly below the usual standard and even the soundtrack was poor. The cast follow direction to match the material, which is a shame because the direction is not good. Everyone pulls faces and hams it up. There are some nice turns in here but generally the material fails them. The martial arts action is also affected by the comedy hamming, although there are some good sequences if you ignore everything else.

All told, Tigress of Shaolin is a poor film. It is overly wacky and hammy in ways it cannot justify with the material. The performances are poor and, although some of the action is good, generally it feels like a hotchpotch of half-baked ideas and no strong hand on the tiller to bring it home.

It's alleged that many kung fu films were written as they went along. Certainly many independent HK and Taiwanese productions have a thrown together feel to them so it's certainly possible but that would force the producers to shoot the film mostly in sequence. Shaw productions generally have the sense that there is some sort of script before they start filming. Here we have a Shaw oddity directed by an obscure one time director at Shaw who seems to have worked in the very same cheap independent productions mentioned above. Well here we have it, a high energy but story wise shapeless film that really does seem like it's from another studio.

A young man, Tieh, is sent by his dying father to live with a kung fu colleague in town. Entering the town, Tieh disrupts a snake-oil medicine scam and runs into a rascally drunk who fights him. Finally finding his father's friend, Tieh makes the discovery that the guy is running the snake-oil medical scam and a fraudulent hospital with his Tibetian (!) gang. Tieh becomes an underling in the gang but is unable to do any of the bad deeds his bosses demand. Accidentally overhearing a drug smuggling scheme, Tieh is beaten, thrown into a lake and left for dead. Rescued by the rascally drunk's god daughter (played by Kara Hui) he gets a job with a grocer and befriends a waiter at a bad restaurant but the Tibetian gang is on his tail again. Tieh ends up sheltered by a Shaolin temple, learns a little kung fu there and more from the drunk's wife, a master of the famed Leper's Fist!

Sound a little all over the place? Well, it is, but fortunately the film is fast paced with lots of fight scenes and a decent sense of humor. The advertising makes it seem that Kara Hui, who's great here, plays the title "Tigress" but she's really a supporting character. The "Tigress", from the best I can tell, is the crazy wife who is afflicted with boils and skin growths. The actress who plays her is quite funny. The character cleans dishes at the Shaolin temple so I assume that's where the title comes from. The fights are sometimes sped up and generally don't make fighting sense unlike other Shaw films. Lots of odd poses and movements. One of the villains wears sunglasses and has what seems to be an American Indian outfit on with a braided pony tail wig. At one point Tieh starts dancing like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Overall the film is quite dumb but the energy the performers put into it makes it all very enjoyable.