Shui ling long

Hey, am I the only one here who's seen this? When I was in college a Taiwanese student got a print of this from his embassy and one of our film professors screened it in his Gangster Films class. A fun if rather generic martial arts action film, in which, as seems to be the convention, a woman fighter is taken by everyone she meets to be a man for no reason our Western eyes can discern (must be the hat or something). The warring gangs were certainly different from the ones we'd been seeing in American films from the 1930's. According to our instructors, the popularity of martial arts films in Taiwan were due in part to a prohibition against films depicting firearms!

This a martial arts movie with jealousy as the storyline and I'm sure it is the only martial arts story about jealousy. I know the Chinese love story plot is totally different than the Western love story plot. This is my only example of a jealousy plot so I must question – Do the Chinese have a weird concept of jealousy or is this story just not told right? It begins with Chia Ling getting jealous because her boyfriend Yueh Hua always takes her for a walk in the woods past a tree where someone carved the name of a well- known beautiful and married woman. Perhaps if you are Chinese that happens often? I don't know. Then we have some remarkable coincidences. Chia Ling, dressed as a man, meets the same woman and saves her by fighting off a horny guy. Next Yueh Hua also saves her from robbers. They spend the night in a cave where Yueh Hua fights off a guy in a terrible bear costume. Filming that sequence had to be the poorest decision in the history of all movies. Back to the jealousy and now Lo Lieh, the beautiful woman's husband, thinks Yueh Hua must have boned her in the cave that night. The only one who can testify to prove it never happened is the star of 279 martial arts movies the hugely great Got Siu-Bo. Unfortunately GSB plays a deaf mute so he can't testify. This is quite a big role for the big man and though I love to make fun of him I must acknowledge the large one can act. He even gets to throw a few punches. I never said he could fight though. Speaking of fights – Yueh Hua had been making martial arts movies about ten years. He can pull off a long sequence of moves but he never advanced to the point where he ever looked like a real fighter. Lo Lieh is the real deal but in this movie it seemed he phoned it in. Chia Ling was the high point of the fight sequences. A curious thing happens about one hour into the movie. Lo Lieh is torturing Yueh Hua and two goofballs appear out of nowhere to abduct his beautiful wife. When you make a movie and start filming without a script or any idea of where you are going with a vague storyline like jealousy there comes a moment when it all goes to hell and the story line peters out or becomes too absurd to carry one. That's when two goofballs enter and you pretend you were making a screwball comedy all along. Yet, this movie doesn't even get that right. What a mess and below average rating for the year and genre.