Shuang la

TWO FISTS AGAINST THE LAW is your typical kind of kung fu movie, made with a low budget and featuring a few recognisable faces amongst the cast list. As is the norm for these films, a jokey, non-serious plot line gradually gives way into become more thriller-orientated, with various 'good' characters teaming up to tackle an opium smuggling criminal mastermind.

Such films are made or broken by the quality of the action sequences, and I found them to be rather routine here. That said, they're not particularly bad, and there's plenty of the acrobatic type stuff if you like that sort of thing, it's just that the choreography doesn't stand out as it would, say, in a Shaw Brothers film. Repeated use of the zoom lens doesn't help much. For a lot of the running time, the screen is occupied by a trio of goofy comedians who mug their way through the proceedings. You know the type: one has a bright red nose, another has a mole on his nose with a massive hair coming out of it, and the third has buck teeth.

A youthful-looking Melvin Wong (ABOVE THE LAW) is on hand as one of the heroes but doesn't really stand out much. Inevitably, the guy who does stand out is the one playing the villain, and of course it's Hwang Jang Lee for the umpteenth time. Hwang Jang Lee gets to show off his power kicking in the extended climax which is inevitably the best part of the movie, and the good news is that he also employs the use of a flying guillotine to injure his opponents. So you get a great ending tacked on to a distinctly average movie, as is so often the case in the martial arts genre from this era.