I found a serious title problem here. The movie title "Dragons Never Die" is an alternate title for a 1974 movie "Kung Fu 10th Dan". There is no other movie named "Dragons Never Die". I am submitting the corrections here. "Kung Fu 10th Dan" or "Dragons Never Die" stars Alex Lung Jie-Fei and Hon Kwok-Choi with Corey Yuen as action director.
It starts in a dojo. Hon Kwok Choi plays a cripple who is looking for a fight. He can't fight but his friend Alex Lung beats everyone. In the karate dojo the talk is all senseless regarding the rank of the black belts as is the title senseless. Our two wander into a town. An old guy is demonstrating Tai Chi and the crowd is not impressed. The protection guys tell him to bow down but our guys intervene. The kid with great teeth and a terrible haircut seems to be losing respect for his grandfather. Our guys fight on the docks. The hot chick likes to watch Alex working as a blacksmith. At about 35 minutes she does get naked. The townsfolk are happy Alex has beaten the gangsters. There is a flashback to his troubled soul and for a minute a story tries to break out between the fight scenes. Alex is fighting because as a child he saw his father lose a fight. He could never get over that. There is a moment in a later fight when he defeats another guy and the guy's son reminds Alex of his young self.
My copy is widescreen and dubbed in English. The voice actors have heavy non-English accents, perhaps Indian? This is surprising quality for a relatively unknown title and production company. How does a movie like this, 40 years later, end up as digital file, not restored but still in wide screen? Most of these movies only exist today because they were copied from film to VHS back in the early 1980s with the resulting loss of screen area and resolution. Plus, I have almost 3000 martial arts movies in my collection and I never heard of this one until I came across it. Movies that were far more popular back then cannot be found in any other format than old VHS converted to a digital file. I wish every movie in my collection was at least as good visually as this one.
The fight choreography is good and it is executed with power and focus. All the fights were unique and never seemed repetitive. The big boss, Han Ying-Chieh, only shows up for the final fight but he had a trick up his sleeve. Overall, for fans of the genre I rank this as above average.
