Wu ye lan hua

I'm guessing that MASTER OF THE FLYING DAGGERS was made as a response to Tsui Hark's ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, a film whose success kick-started a mini-wave of similarly fantasy-themed wuxia epics during the era. Even the Shaw Brothers studio tried their hand at some of these outlandish stories, but MASTER OF THE FLYING DAGGERS is an undistinguished and entirely cheap Taiwanese version of that kind of tale.

The story sees Adam Cheng as the loyal hero and Brigitte Lin as the subject of his affections. The storyline sees them battling some weird ninja assassins who are dressed in these natty glitter costumes which are pretty but hardly imposing. Sadly, the plot makes zero sense whatsoever, and seems merely to consist of a jumble of scenes muddled together.

A lot of the scenes are set in some kind of exotic cave where exotic women lounge around in some semi-erotic moments. Bizarrely, there's an Egyptian temple in the film too, with low rent martial arts star Don Wong playing the world's most unlikely Egyptian. Most of MASTER OF THE FLYING DAGGERS consists of cheesy effects scenes and a whole slew of wire work, and none of it is very convincing, so my recommendation is to skip this particular title.