A perfect first movie to check out if you want to get into classic Shaw Brothers face-kicker flicks. It’s real easy going, even if you can’t point out China on a map and you’re a klutz with chopsticks. The tidy, simple storytelling brings the action and clever twists with an orchestral score that sounds like it belongs in a Western. Shaw factory man director Chang Cheh is at the top of his game. There’s remarkable craft and energy here considering that it’s one of EIGHT films that Cheh churned out in 1974.
The story is your basic matter of two rival kung fu schools battling it out in the old days. The good guys are the Shaolins. The impatient, high-strung bad guys are the Manchus. They pick a fight and murder one of the Shaolins at a religious ceremony in the first scene and now asses need to be kicked.
The Shaolins’ problemo grande: The Manchus have on their side two super villain-types that no one can beat. One is a guy so strong that he can trap a person’s fist with his stomach muscles! The other is a completely impervious to pain freak who can retract his genitals inside his body so that he’s just that much less vulnerable.
How do you fight that? The Shaolins do it by sending their best men back into training with mean old kung fu masters out in the woods. Those parts are the real meat of the movie. Quentin Tarantino fans will notice right away the moments that he purloined for Uma Thurman’s training scenes in Kill Bill thirty years later.