Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Kung Fu on Sale (1979)

This is a frustrating movie.  It's not bad, but it's not good.  It's mostly hampered by the insane way the editor speeds up the action scenes by taking frames out of them.  It's very jarring. The performers are all talented enough to get by with these fights making this decision even stranger.  There's a great fight scene in the rain with our hero fending off four attackers and none of this frame cutting nonsense is used, making it look that much better.  I will never understand why filmmakers think such things are a good idea.

The story is closer to an early Jackie Chan vehicle than a Bruce Lee movie (this is from that same Bruce Lee pack I've been watching).  A young man, Chen Woo, wants to learn kung fu and his rich father forbids him from doing so.  He gets into fights and finds an old master who teaches him an extremely weird style of kung fu.  There's plenty of lame late 70s Hong Kong humor mixed in with the pathos as well, just as one might expect.  The main villain is the main beneficiary of the frame removal technique, which doesn't help him at all.

So far this is the least good of the movies I've watched.  Four down, fifteen left.  One of the fun things to do with a movie like this is try to identify the movies the music this movie steals borrows from.  There are a lot of famous themes.

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