It starts with about ten men standing with their flags and Yi Yuan drops out of the sky and fights them all. This first fight is a brawl and it is typical of the fights in early 1970s movies. Long shots show all the actors at once jumping around and waving their swords. Cut to a close up of just two or three moves showing the lead actor striking a stunt man. It is back and forth between long shots and close ups for the entire fight as one by one the stunt men make painful faces then drop dead. If you have seen one of these brawls you have seen them all. I am not saying there was anything particularly bad about this first fight but there is also nothing to say in praise either. I went into detail about this fight because it sums up almost every fight in the movie.
Cut to an escort is traveling along a river and Yi Yuan is carried in an open palanquin. Cut again to a rich guy's house. Many men are talking to him and he is handling a sword. He gives the sword to one of them and three run off as if on some dangerous mission with little hope for success. Cut back to the escort by the river and Yi Yuan has another brawl just like the first fight. After that the three guys sent arrive and two of them fight him. One is killed and the other wounded when a beggar appears and helps him escape.
Yi Yuan played a character named "Dare Devil" or some other devil in about four or five movies by my count. "Paid with Blood" and "The Bravest Revenge" are two. This character is pretty much the same character in all these movies despite the story. It is a typical one dimensional bad guy character but he nails the type.
My copy is a digital file that plays on a HDTV as widescreen. It is just stretched not true wide screen. There are no subtitles and the dialog is Chinese. I do not speak Chinese. There is a subtitled version made by a fan - Jamal - but I do not have that version.
This is a movie that would only attract the attention of a hard core fan of martial arts movies of the golden age from 1967 to 1984. For that fan here's about 90 minutes of the same old same old average stuff you have seen hundreds of times and will see hundreds more.
