Xie seng

From what I can tell of it, some enterprising studio hacks got their hands on an unfinished kung fu film of the mid-eighties. One of the last of the real chop-sockies, one can imagine that it was probably shelved due to loss of interest in that genre. It revolves around a female acrobat harassed by a group of thugs who have managed to learn some good kung-fu from a renegade Shaolin monk. There's also a young hero, and an old master to teach the young hero a few tricks, and then the fight scenes, which are actually well-done, and then - well, happily ever after, as we all know.

Unfortunately, the hacks who picked up this film have added two or three scenes of soft-core naked body rubbing. We can see these are add-ons, because the film stock is different, the actors are different, the episodes have nothing to do with the rest of the story, except that the renegade monk of the real film is something of a lecher, and because what the thugs want to do with the female acrobat is sell her into prostitution. Still, we all know what men and women do behind closed doors, so the justification for the porn is pretty slim.

A small number of films like this appeared in the late '80s -early '90s, probably because the chop-socky market had collapsed under the tidal "New Wave" coming out of Hong Kong at the time. But they aren't even good as exploitation, which, to be successful, has to mask its voyeurism in the guise of some necessity of plot or drama.

When it's shamelessly unrelated to anything narrative or dramatic, as in this case, it's just embarrassing.

Too bad; as straight-ahead chop-socky, the original film isn't bad. If you can fast-forward the smut, the fight scenes are actually pretty good.