Shaolin Prince

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!!!

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.

So the story goes, a bunch of children get chopped up and brutally killed because a couple of them are actual princes. Lo and behold two princes actually survive the whole ordeal and they grow up and learn weird @$$ kung fu and seek revenge against some guy with some golden finger weapon or some crap and blah blah blah and so forth. This is one of three movies directed by Shaw Brothers veteran Tang Chia and yes I wouldn't be surprised if the producers fed this guy crack before making these movies. I like this one because of the insane kung fu action and the insane amount of special-effects this movie has to offer which I think is a lot better than those dumb@$$ Marvel movies. "Nyuh! CGI, special effects." So gay. The story was pretty good too and easy to follow but still follows the same formulaic pattern like all other kung fu movies do which is about learning kung fu and seeking revenge. But who cares. Highly recommended kung fu movie with a lot of crackhead crap in it. Enjoy.

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.

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.