What a waste of my time!!!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

With so many of Chang Cheh's stalwarts on hand, it's impossible not to like TEN TIGERS OF KWANGTUNG. The always reliable Ti Lung (the backbone of so many martial arts epics over the years) plays Li, a pawn shop owner whose pawn shop has a hidden room for hiding anything and anyONE of value. It's not long before the masked revolutionary Cai, on the run from Qing minions, turns up needing "any port in a storm." Lung naturally puts him up. Enter Lo Meng as "Iron Finger" Chen, and things start to get still more interesting. It isn't long before The Lucky Gambling House becomes a battleground. (At one point, a villain dangling by his heels from the ceiling is literally decapitated by a drop kick...) Among the few extras on the DVD I have is a 2001 poem by Chang Cheh. The last two lines are interesting: "What does opulence amount to? Only a dream across the silver screen!"

There is an art to fight choreography, and this movies fights are technically "clean" but lack drama and build up. This movie is an example of why Shaw's popularity fell and golden harvest rose. As the years went on, there was a focus on a sort of Chinese opera style of dance acrobatics and the fights lost the umph of earlier movies such a Heroes Two and Shaolin Martial Arts. Also, the plot is a disjointed mess, and despite the fact that it has a "ton of stars" they are given very little to do. They are better films in the same genre, so I would give this one a pass. You would be better off seeking out Avenging Eagle, Shaolin Temple or Disciples of Shaolin. I read somewhere that Disciples was Fu Sheng's favorite film. Another worthy flick is 5 shaolin masters.

When I watch Kung Fu films I usually like to take off my thinking cap and drown myself in action and cheesy plots. Very rarely do I encounter a Kung Fu film where I find myself confused when the ending comes, and this is exactly where I found myself at the end of Ten Tigers of Kwangtung. This film has one of the greatest Shaw Brothers casts of all time. Ti Lung, Fu Sheng and the Venoms are the lead actors and are all in top form. In case you haven't see it is about a group of fighters teaming up to protect a Ching loyalist. The group of fighters will eventually come to be known as the Ten Tigers and safely guide this Ming rebel to the South to meet with his troops. There are a lot of plot twists and betrayls in between all of this. There are a lot of flashbacks in this film. It starts off in the present time with Ming loyalists trying to kill off the disciples of the Ten Tigers and flashes back to why they want to kill them. The flashbacks show in detail how the Tigers were formed and the film does it's best to develop each character. The knock on this film is that there are too many characters, flashbacks and plot twists. These are the reasons why this film is great IMO and maybe even the greatest. There aren't many Kung Fu films that you have to watch a few times to really understand and the fighting is top notch. If you haven't seen it be sure to watch it and if you have seen it watch again, more than once

This is one of those rare times when almost all of the great martial arts actors from the 70s are in the same flick. Great action sequences and a more than passable plot (by Kung Fu standards) make this one of the better kick flicks of all time.