good back-story, and good acting

Better Late Then Never

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

SHAOLIN FIST FIGHTER is a typically silly and low rent martial arts film from Godfrey Ho. It stars the unlikely-named Elton Chong, who seemed to make a lot of films with Ho and for his infamous Filmark studio. The plot is a nonsensical bit of writing which seems to copy the success of Jackie Chan's DRUNKEN MASTER with bits and pieces of Ho's own choosing thrown in to the mix.The hero is a typically upright youth in the Chan mould, accompanied by a drunken old master (actually another young actor in a grey wig with his nose painted red). They're pursued by a Hwang Jang Lee lookalike bad guy. There isn't a wealth of action here, but a handful of slightly sped-up fights, the best of which is saved for the outlandish climax. Elsewhere we get a weird interlude in a cave with members of a crazy sect, some low-brow humour, and a general anything-goes air to it all. It's too cheap to be successful.

Aw man, this is one hilarious film. Godfrey Ho brings us a winner once again. I mean it - this guy doesn't need ninjas!In this mainly food orientated film, there's a guy called Colin who's a chef that can throw clean dishes into their exact places. Some guys turn up and waste his wife while a guy with a fake plastic red nose watches on (they leave Colin under a tree full of birds who crap on him!). Vowing revenge, Colin basically gets his head kicked in about ten times before red nosed guy takes him under his wing while being a chef for a priest. There's also a feminist cult who live on the set of Suspiria and clang cymbals during strobe bursts to make men's ears bleed. The leader of this cult kind of hangs around for the first three quarters of this film so she can be molested in a kung fu fight. Red nose guy trains Colin by making him be a horse and making him tougher (Colin kicks a rock that previously vexed him and it explodes). It's strongly implied that red nose guy wipes his arse on old kung fu instruction papers that Colin steals. Colin gets stronger and basically hunts down those folks who killed his wife, without asking the red nosed guy why he didn't step in and stop these guys killing his wife in the first place. So Colin goes around wasting people, and the last battle is indeed the funniest, as the main bad guy somehow stretches his arm about ten feet to set about our hero, just before something more surreal happens that I won't mention here.These early films of Godfrey Ho are worth a watch, as they are somehow more surreal than the ninja films, even though the stories are more coherent. Here you will see chicks dressed as men, men burying themselves in the ground just so they can punch people in the face, the hero giving a guy a haircut during a kung fu fight, and a lot of food related violence. If you like Godfrey Ho, then you'll like this. If not = avoid (see the two other reviews here)

If not for the VHS rental craze this "series of still pictures" (I hate to call it a movie) would be crumbling to dust somewhere as it sorely deserves. Why was it made in the first place? In 1981 anyone with a camera and film could call upon an army of capable stunt men who would work for tips. No script or budget was needed. It was made up on the spot and only needed a few words of dialog to tie the fights together. Despite all that it often comes down to - so how good are the fights? The fights are simply competent at best because they were copied from other movies such as the part in the training sequence where the hero is harnessed like a horse and acts like a horse. Sammo Hung did that before and he was actually funny. Despite the competence, the editing and film speed make the fights look askew. The only possible reason to watch this would be what Dr. Craig D. Reed pointed out in his book "The Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Movies of the 1970s". Movies can have "a moment". The good ones always have a moment and even the bad ones can have that moment that rises above. If this movie has one, I missed it and I'm not watching again to find it.