The Seven Monsters present themselves to a leopard skin with glowing eyes draped over a throne. They are ordered to find a map, or a pendant, or a man named Lo within 10 days. One of the Seven Monsters expresses his concern that the mission might take longer. The leopard skin quickly kills him with magic.
Unless you are a hard core fan of martial arts movies of the golden age from 1967 to 1984 you would turn this movie off after that opening two minute scene. It starts so bad that even this hard core fan suspects that the reason I have never heard of this movie is because it is a total stinker.
Somehow, the movie recovers from that first scene and I watched it to the end without fast forward.
Cut to a grandfather is playing with the kids and one kid is missing. They find an injured man in the tall grass and bring him home. He has a pendant and his name is Lo. He warns them about the Seven Monsters. They hide him in a secret chamber. The gang attacks and there is a brief brawl. Lo ends up running away with the little girl. The gang catches up to them. He fights them with the girl clinging to his back. A fisherman helps them escape again. The King of Hades now appears and kills the fisherman.
The pendant leads Lo to the kung fu manual he needs to defeat the Seven Monsters and get revenge. However, practice must begin in childhood. Now we know why the little girl is in the movie and why we have not yet seen Chang Ching Ching. He finds another old master to teach her. The gang attacks again, the master dies protecting them. They escape by falling off a cliff into a river. Another old master becomes her new teacher.
At 43 minutes Kai Pao-Yu (the 9 year old girl) has finally grown up to be Chang Ching Ching. She can chop down tress with her bare hands and fly. The gang returns for the third time and kills the third teacher.
The fights are few and short until the last 20 minutes then become almost non-stop. The end fights had a lot of different weapons used but nothing too hokey. I rate the fights as standard for 1971 and that's it. There is nothing to sit up in your seat for, just by the numbers totally average stuff. I watched this once to write a review and I am sure I'll watch it again.
My copy is a digital file that seems to have a VHS tape as source or was recorded from a TV broadcast. The picture is square (the sides are cut off) and there are hard subtitles in Chinese and English. The quality is not good but I have watched worse.
