Bo ming dan dao duo ming qiang

This one goes in my top ten kung fu movies as one of the silliest. the weapon fighting scenes are excellent. As with any good kung fu movie, it contains a lot of over-top-characters:

* The king of the spear * the king of the sword * The exthortionist at the market (what a moustache!) * The king of the spears' sidekick, Potato (with the funky ummm.. hair) * The king of the swords sidekick, the humpback * And last but not least: Mr. Rockin', who has his own theme music.

All in all, an excellent and very funny martial arts movie.

This movie portrays old rivals,played by Sammo Hung (King of the sword) and Lau Kar Wing (King of the spear) who meet every 10 years to find out whose weaponry skills are better.These duels always end up in a draw and as the two warriers are aging they decide to each take on a pupil so that the duel may continue. What makes this interesting is that Sammo plays Lau's student and Lau plays Sammo's student. Some amusing scenes eventuate. This from the video cover: "Skillful balletic duels between the sword and the spear rival even the best work of Jackie Chan and Liu Chia Liang in their intricacy" With these comments I would have to agree. However this film would have to be the silliest Sammo hung movie I have ever seen. There are some scenes which I don't feel contribute much at all to the overall plot. Having said that, The duels between the elderly Sammo Hung and the elderly Lau Kar Wing with their respective weapons are masterpieces. Their mastery of these weapons has to be seen to be believed. So too, the duels between the young Sammo with the spear and the young Lau with the sword as the students of the elderly masters just goes to prove how versatile and how skilled these men are. Towards the end of the film they unite to defeat a common foe in a brilliant fight sequence and then go on to fight each other to a draw just as their old sifu's had done in another incredible fight sequence so ultimately the riddle of whose weaponry is better goes unanswered. An unusual movie with some really silly scenes but a lot of great action.

Your enjoyment of this will probably vary on whether you like a martial arts era film with a lot of comedy and way too sped up fight scenes. With the fight scenes so sped up it's difficult to say whether they are any good or not. The comedy, like it or not, is a result of Jackie Chan's success in earlier films like Drunken Master, those he did not go as overboard on the comedy nor in the speeding up of the choreography in those films.

Creativity seldom describes movies from the golden age of martial arts movies from 1967 to 1984. This movie starts with a plot used many times before in which two masters settle a grudge by training students for a challenge fight.

Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Yan both play younger versions of each other in the same time frame. That was brilliant and never done before. The movie is also a parody of all martial arts movies and of Peking opera too. Almost every added character adds a twist to the story. These movies also have a reputation for filming without as much as a script and making it all up as you go. To produce this movie required fine details and precise scheduling because the two leads had two different characters to play. I have been watching these movies in chronological order to determine some "Best" and "First" moments. As of the release of this movie I rate it the most creative so far.

None of this would matter if the fights were just average. The fights were some of the best of 1979 and likely also some of the best fights ever. The spear versus sword idea worked fabulously. Many other weapons were also used including improvising props for weapons. At first I rated this movie 9/10 but then I noticed something in comparison to the other great movies of 1979. I deducted a point because in this movie they forgot that women can fight. My other top movies for 1979, though male dominated, also had at least one excellent fight with a female.

My copy is wide screen and typical DVD resolution. There are English subtitles and dubbing. I recommend playing both because it's amusing how the spoken and written words rarely match. I rate this 8 of 10 and highly recommend it for all fans of the genre.

I'm amazed this film isn't better known among kung-fu fans. I didn't get to see this film until recently, despite being a fan of Hong Kong fight films since 1972 (when KING BOXER (aka FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH in the US) was released in the UK - a movie that pre-dated the Bruce Lee craze by a couple of months.

As the 1970s wore on, I kept up with the kung-fu films, even after the first wave of "fans" moved onto the next craze. I saw DRUNKEN MASTER when it came out and thought Jackie Chan was great - and I even liked his fat pal Sammo. And while I also caught up with early Sammo classics like WARRIORS TWO and THE VICTIM, somehow Bo ming chan dao duo ming chuang managed to pass me by. And that's a real shame ...

Flash forward twenty-odd years and I'm helping out as technical consultant on the UK partwork mag "Hong Kong Legends" and I'm asked to analyse the action sequences for an old-school film called ODD COUPLE. I figure anything with Sammo in it has to be at least worth a look, but I wasn't prepared for the overall excellence of the martial arts skills on show here. The combination of Sammo and Leung Kar Yan is nothing short of electric and some of the kung-fu techniques they display are jaw-dropping. Especially worthy of note is the sequence where the Old Sammo and old Kar Yan are duelling and Sammo is one moment disarmed by Kar Yan's pole and the next has neatly recovered his sabre and carries on fighting. Bravo!

If you appreciate solid martial arts skills, you could do a lot worse than check out ODD COUPLE.