Bai sheng tang

The movie opens with the backstory of the master. He was crippled in a tournament by an illegal move. Cut to children street performers. The bad guys simply kidnap them and their grandfather in broad daylight. One chivalrous man tries to stop them. The master intervenes and takes the young guy as his student. The kids are forced to perform in Chinese opera. The female lead, Suen Ga-Lam becomes their protector. She soon meets the young guy, Lam Shui-Yiu.

This is a big budget Taiwanese production I would assume from the sets and costumes. It is unusual in that there is no dialog for about the first six minutes. It has the standard training sequence but it is rather brief and the student is training on bamboo scaffolding. The pacing is good so no fast-forward needed. Most important, the fights are all above average.

The only negative is the quality of the video. The file I obtained was watchable only on a cell phone. The file size was 178kb. I doubt anything better is available but if it existed I would pay for it. If you know anything about video resolution the file size is half of what's needed for simply being able to see it. By viewing small on a cell phone made it watchable. The movie is also dubbed in English as the subtitles at that resolution would have certainly been unreadable. I can only recommend this movie for hard core fans of this genre because of the video limitations. No other movie viewer could put up with it but fans of martial arts movies from the 1970s who are used to Ocean Shores VHS releases converted to digital files have the eyes needed to tolerate and even enjoy such limitations. The movie would not even exist today otherwise. For such fans I do recommend it and rate it slightly above average.