Tigre blanc

In a hotel room in Kunming, China, 2005, four western tourists were getting ready to go out for that day's restaurant round, then this movie was on by accident - and we couldn't stop watching! We actually laughed at the lame slapstick, the "lion dance" was terrific, the energy - as mentioned in another review - was perfect throughout! Excellent work.

Now I am at IMDb trying to check out this film, you see, we had to go 15 minutes before the ending to get to the restaurants before they closed, which was surprisingly hard to do with a random Chinese kung fu movie. We made sure to snap up the movie title, I'm going to watch this all the way.

Then I see here it's from 1981 - which wasn't expected at all. Very good film, might look like your classic low-quality run of the mill kung-fu, but believe me, this is a notch above the rest!

If I'm being honest, this movie peaks right near the start and fails to completely live up to the insanity of that first action scene. It opens with such a simple, brutal, thrilling, and kind of darkly funny brawl, and I was prepared for something genuinely masterful if it maintained that energy.

The rest of the action is good, but never as great as at the start. The whole movie gets more ridiculous, surreal, and even fantastical as it goes along, and I thought most of the ride was decent. It made things pretty unpredictable, and that snappy Yuen Woo-Ping directed action is always fun to watch.

If you're looking for a slightly less cartoonish and slightly more brutal Kung Fu Hustle kind of film that also has a premise you might find in a slasher movie, I could recommend Dreadnaught.

"Dreadnaught" is a consistently entertaining flick about Mousy (Yuen Biao), a hapless and clumsy coward who stumbles his way into plenty of trouble. While trying to collect a debt, he inadvertently runs afoul of a homicidal lunatic called White Tiger, and spends the rest of the movie being stalked by this freak. The flick is a very early attempt at a kung-fu/horror hybrid, with White Tiger sporting spooky Chinese opera-style make-up and frighteningly leaping into frame time and again. Of course, once he sneaks up on folks he karate chops them rather than stabs them. Still, the guy who plays White Tiger is genuinely creepy, and you really feel this guy's menacing presence. Yuen Biao is great as the goofy Mousy, tripping and falling his way in and out of danger. The fight scenes are excellent, played about half for laughs and half seriously. Add in Kwan Tak-Hing in his classic role as Wong Fei-Hung, and a couple of gross scenes involving ripping heads off chickens and cockroaches, and you've got the makings of a very intriguing kung-fu flick. If you're a fan of the slap-happy style of fighting perfected by Biao, Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan, and you like old school kung-fu stories, this one should be right up your alley.

Even though the movie had stereotype characters like the cross-eye goofy cop or the bad guy with the facial flaw, Dreadnaught also had some way cool scenes. If you can bear sitting through the slow, run of the mill parts, you'll be rewarded with 3 major scenes [in order of awesomeness]: 1) the fighting Dragons 2) the opera theatre fight and 3) the tailor. It's a slapstick comedy too, so you'll have a few laughs, too. I just don't get the title.

This film begins so similarly to Young Master that I almost felt I was rewatching it. However, to my surprise, it matched and surpassed the classic Jackie Chan movie by miles. The Dragon/Lion fight scene is worth the admission price alone, and it only gets better after that. The comedy is almost Martin/Lewis, and the fighting is amazingly choreographed. Anything less would be your standard Kung Fu fare.

Highly recommended.