O Príncipe de Shaolin

An oddity from fighting choreographer turned director Tang Chia. The man behind the fighting scenes of many a Shaw Bros. production turned to directing at the end of his career, this being his first and apparently the only one released in the U.S. If this film is any indication Tang Chia's taste ran to the fantastic.

The film starts like a standard period piece but soon with the introduction of the Fire General, who shoots flames and explodes things, and the Water General, who swims under water and has a Mickey Mouse voice, the film settles into it's groove. The infant Crown Prince, hidden from the evil 9th Lord, is adopted by three crazy monks who are imprisoned in a detention pavilion at the Shaolin Temple for twenty years.

Gimmick weapons, lots of wire work, a fighting wall of hoop wielding monks and more are here. Not a great film but done with a lot of humor and enthusiasm. The final fight scene is about as strange as these films get. Good fun.

It has been a while since I saw it. It's good, but nothing spectacular. I think it is a Shaw Bros. film, so the action was decent. Hoaky costumes and some crazy Shaolin monks in it. Not bad.

Watch this movie for the action sequences. The storyline and characters are simplistic but adequate for purpose in this type of shows. The background story is a palace intrigue in which the legitimate emperor was deposed by an evil prince. This sort of things doesn't need elaboration. It is enough that we know who the bad guy is and wait to watch his ass kicked. The costume and setting is probably based on the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD)... the kingdom of Western Hsia was referred to. What I normally do with this kind of movies is to simply scan through the plot in my first viewing and then re-visit the fight sequences. There were many great fights... like a Cirque du Soleil performance, some of the choreographed fights were fantastic - very imaginative. Fun.

A cool film, no doubt, designed by the Shaw Bros. Superhumans abound, from the Ninth Prince and his iron glove whose two entended fingers can snap swords like bamboo, to an aquatic assassin who fights with two herringbone-cleavers, to the intertwined mass of the 18 Shaolin monks whose combined bodies create an unstoppable single fighter that protects the secrets of their Temple. You even have a Chinese exorcism, complete with possessed young girl slashing off heads with long needle-like claws, and this only a brief sub-plot.

The final confrontation alone, between the film's two young fighting heroes and the evil Ninth Prince, astride an ornate royal transom that turns into a sword-shooting, body-crushing battering ram, makes the movie well worth seeing. A groove.

This is one of Ti Lung's best movies in the 80's...I didn't know that he could play comedy-action, as he is always a serious actor. Lots of kungfu action with swords, stick, etc. Yes, the title is misleading by all means, but it's highly recommended for martial arts lovers out there...because it's AWESOME!!!