The movie opens with a demonstration culminating in martial artists being bullet proof. Everything in the demonstration is phony. Wong Yu enters as a martial artist who makes a living doing phony things associated with martial arts. The crowd wants to believe what he does is real and it puts food on the table. Is there a right or wrong here? This is probably the first time such a complex moral dilemma was ever put in a martial arts movie.
Wong Yu continues to create his own problems through the movie by embracing the phony and using it to get out of each situation but that only leads to the next situation. His master passed out drunk in the first scene but he returns in the final scene. Wong Yu cannot escape from his phony machinations but his master saves the day by yelling out to him the names of real kung fu styles that he has practiced. Wong Yu then overcomes the bad guys by discarding the phony and using real kung fu fighting.
The action is lacking in the whole first half of the movie. At about the 80 minute mark the grandmaster of all martial arts movies, Liu Chia-Liang, steps in front of the camera for a terrific fight sequence. Despite the lack of action in the first half, the movie has other interesting features. Liu Chia-Liang presents a preview of things to come. He uses hard core practical effects that the Yuen clan will use in their early 1980s movies. There is also the occult link to martial arts that will be done by Sammo Hung and Lam Ching-Ying in his vampire movies at about the same time. Both of these details will peak a bit later with such movies as the Chinese ghost stories and the bride with white hair movies.
This is Wong Yu's first lead and much more can be said about him. For now I will only add that his story is the rags to riches and back to rags story.
I rate this movie above average and consider it mandatory for fans of the genre.
