TIGER'S CLAW (1974) has a simple, serviceable plot about a wandering kung fu champ, played by Cliff Lok, who seeks out champion fighters so he can fight and beat them purely to satisfy his own egotistical need to know he's the best. When he learns of an elusive fighter called "the Tiger" who is said to be unbeatable, he seeks him out even if it means getting himself arrested after a faked rape attempt staged with his female partner, so he can go to the jail where the Tiger has been imprisoned. To make a long story short, Cliff finds the Tiger (Shih Kien), breaks him out of prison, and takes him home to his foster mother who turns out to be the Tiger's former maid. Tiger refuses to fight and instead seeks out his old sworn brother who had set him up on the murder charge which put him in jail 20 years earlier. The Tiger is tricked by the sworn brother into getting drunk and is about to be killed when Cliff intervenes, solely in the interest of keeping the Tiger alive for their destined bout.
Once one gets past the lengthy prison sequence, the film settles into a steady series of fast and furious well-choreographed hand-to-hand (and stick-to-stick) fight scenes. Cliff Lok, then a rising kung fu star (yet to do such great kung fu films as KUNG FU GENIUS and RING OF DEATH), fights veteran fighting star Shih Kien (best known in the west for his portrayal of the villain Han in ENTER THE DRAGON) in two major fight scenes. The fighting high point is a spectacular brawl in which Cliff takes on a dozen or so henchmen of the Tiger's sworn brother, all of whom are armed with sticks or knives.
Cliff is more intense here than usual, leaving out the humor he displayed in KUNG FU GENIUS and MAD MAD KUNG FU (aka OL' DIRTY KUNG FU), among others. Here he's just a cocky, arrogant, 20-year-old who thinks he's the best there is. The ending is somewhat unsatisfying and comes with a message about not devoting one's life to fighting. But if these characters didn't devote their lives to fighting, there'd be no movie.
The main actors are Cliff and Shih Kien and they do a fine job of carrying the movie. There's a cute actress I can't identify who plays Cliff's classmate and sidekick who travels with him, helps him out of jail and even helps fight at one point. But when Cliff faces the Tiger she begins to fear for his life and her cheerleading fades somewhat.
The film is low-budget and the cinematography not as nice as we'd like, a problem exacerbated by the poor quality full-frame DVD copy of the film that's commercially available. The English dubbing is kind of strange. The actors all sound Asian or Asian-American, but are somewhat inexperienced at voice dubbing. The goal may have been to make the voices more authentic-sounding, but it just calls unnecessary attention to itself. Overall, however, if you're a Cliff Lok completist, you should probably see this.
