Billy is hot for the hired help on his father's birthday but there will be no party. Lawless thugs arrive and kill everyone and take over his estate. Billy escapes over the wall. Later, Chen Kuan-Tai walks into town. He meets the lovely daughter of the head thug then joins the gang for dinner.
I am currently watching every martial arts movie ever made in the golden age from 1967 to 1984. This movie is quite a point of history. It was filmed in Indonesia and all the actors except for Chen Kuan-Tai and Billy Chong seem to be locals. Scant information is to be found about this film. My copy is actually a widescreen digital file that was not from VHS but from original film. There are many missing frames and scratches and splices. It is very unusual to find a movie from 1978 in this format unless the original reels were actually saved and preserved like the Shaw Brothers films. How and why and by whom the original reels were saved by is a mystery plus how did it get made into a digital file as I can also find no history of any DVD release.
The movie is set up to fail as a martial arts movie for the most basic of reasons. An actor with no martial arts skills can come across as a good fighter if there is also a good fighter director and good stunt men. A good martial artist cannot come across as a good fighter without good stunt men "selling the moves". These Indonesian locals are not good stunt men and the only acting they can do is over acting. Therefore, Chen Kuan-Tai and Billy Chong never had a chance. On the other hand this was Indonesia and I bet you can't name any other martial arts movie made in Indonesia in the 1970s, right? So the bar was set really low to begin. Yet overall I've seen a lot worse and I won't rate this movie any less than average for 1978. I won't lament what might have been. Chen Kuan-Tai was one of the first "real deal" martial arts actors and Billy Chong could have been Jackie Chan. A viewer who didn't know the background of these two men would never have suspected anything special about either one from watching this movie.
