Yu luo cha

The movie starts with spooky music and decapitations. After the credits the folks at the tea house discuss the title character. Cheng Pei Pei expresses her displeasure by tossing peanuts at the yokels. Tang Ching, however, displays his inner power by catching a peanut with chopsticks. He sits down with our girl and they discuss the plot. Cheng Pei Pei's breakout martial arts movie was "Come Drink With Me". Her character unfortunately fizzled out after being poisoned and Yueh Hua took over the lead. She had a few other movies but here is where she really did the martial arts lead female character from start to finish. At about twelve minutes in she does a fight sequence that for 1968 I consider the best state of the art. What made a fight sequence good back then? First of all it is really her, not a stunt double. Second it is a long shot showing most or all of her body. Third and most important - she does at least 20 moves without a cut. That was as good as it got before actors who were martial arts experts and digital effects. Now for the worst. The wirework was over ambitious and looked terrible because of it. The bamboo pole vault was the worst of the worst. Still I rate it a notch above average for the year and genre.

Only one review here so I'll add one more. This is fairly standard wuxia stuff from the Shaws, but I'm generally a fan of their approach so that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a standard revenge theme with a couple of interesting twists, but these rely on ridiculous coincidences and are so clumsily handled, there are no real surprises. The fight choreography and wirework is unambitious routine stuff throughout.

The only unusual thing here is the female avenger lead played by Cheng Pei Pei, who isn't on absolute top form in terms of either acting or fighting, at least compared with her stunning cameo in Crouching Tiger. However she did make me laugh with her deliciously sarcastic responses to the male lead's naïve dumbness. The rest of the acting is OK but this guy is very annoying. While he has a point that exterminating everyone named Yan maybe isn't the most efficient approach to gaining revenge against one particular unknown Yan, he's so sanctimonious and officious the whole time. A bit more attention needed to his own tragically botched revenge, and a lot less time spent obstructing Cheng's attempts to deal with the bad guys. Her crush on this idiot is incomprehensible.

On a positive note, this is reasonably entertaining throughout and the female hero gets to achieve her goals without too much interference (unlike Come Drink With Me, for example) but she needs rescuing a few too many times. As the movie begins, she's already killed 18 of the 20 Yan brothers (big families they had back then!) without a problem so how come the last two are suddenly so difficult? The main bad guy wasn't built up enough as a swordsman prior to the final showdown and I was disappointed that her practice of displaying the severed heads of her victims on any handy building got forgotten about as soon as the movie got going.

Jade Raksha, The In swordplay movies, females played a more central role in the plots and the swordswomen created in the genre are some of the most charismatic figures in Hong Kong cinema thanks in great part to Cheng Pei-pei. In The Jade Raksha, Cheng Pei-pei becomes a human combine harvester as she hacks and whacks a path through life avenging the death of her family under the moniker "The Jade Raksha." Cheng Pei-pei gained international recognition in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Languages: Mandarin Subtitles: English, Chinese (T) Country Made: Hong

Year Made: 1968 Running Time: 91