La Terrible Vengeance du maître de Shaolin

It starts with fighters sparring before the abbot. He chooses five to learn Shaolin martial arts. This is a problem for Hwang Jang-Lee who wants to steal kung fu books. Some other student confronts the abbot to get the books and is denied. He kills the abbot and gets the books, which seems to show that this great knowledge in the books didn't help the abbot at all.

The story starts out slow developing a story line that has been done to death and could have been established in two lines of dialog. This means that by 15 minutes in the only hope the viewer has is for really good fights or maybe some special moment. This viewer kept watching simply because Hwang Jang-Lee had yet to throw a kick and I am a patient man. That first kick came at about 18 minutes and not much else.

Dragon Lee gets killed off early but returns to life before being completely buried.

Too much talk is one thing but too much repeating the same talk is much worse and that is this movie's fatal flaw. The fights also looked repetitious and Hwang Jang-Lee's fights, I would say like the cliché "He phoned it in". I rate it below average and suitable only for hard core fans who want to watch every movie on their list.

This film has almost all the Fu fundamentals needed to be graded a Kung Klassic!

It has the poor dubbing, rubbish acting and a terrible story-line. It has though some fantastic and inventive fight scenes that are well choreographed thanks to the talents of Dragon Lee and Geofrey Ho, which are even more entertaining combined with over the top gray hair pieces, bugs bunny voices (Where do they find these guys?) and very obvious fake mustache chicken eating foe! (I laughed so hard a little bit of wee came out!) It's accidental comic genius tops all the Kung-Spoof films ever (They are balls).

The perfect hangover remedy list: Get some "Pop" and pizza and let Solimsa Yongpali soothe your aching mind.

On the Kung Scale: 8/10

The movie is OK, but the sound effects are awful. I saw it on DVD and it was dubbed to English which makes the sound even worse.

The plot is standard and the fighting scenes are acceptable, not good.

Lousy production values, Dragon Lee performing his battery of awkward fighting mannerisms (I really hate that stupid back-bobbing thing he does when he goes into the praying mantis stance, almost as much as the inexplicable fact that he appears to be trying to hold his nunchaku in the fold between his palm and wrist, as though he's got floppy little T-Rex hands that can't quite get a grip on the weapon) as felled extras drop to the ground before him, ridiculous hairpieces sliding off their heads...yes, "Martial Monks of Shaolin Temple" is another miserable no-budget effort from director Godfrey Ho and the folks at Filmark/Asso Asia. Do these films have a fan base? Yes. But good god, what kind of wretched twilight people could possibly derive any pleasure from a movie like this?! We're not talking about bad filmmaking: we're talking about utterly *abysmal* filmmaking on every level. It's the sort of device you might employ if you wanted to torture information out of someone without subjecting him to any physical harm. I suffered through it to see the consistently amazing Hwang Jang Lee (Wong Cheng Li) kick his way through the opposition, and for that I give the film two stars. But I did suffer, and so will you if you insist on watching this monstrosity from beginning to end. As anyone who's reading this review must be aware, the talented and dynamic Hwang was slumming in these sad little productions.