Our girl rescues a goat from a dog. Ominous music plays as a small boat arrives at a dock. Nasty looking guy kills a woman in the boat. A guy leaps out and they sword fight. Nasty guy 2, others 0.
Back to our girl who is looking at a sword and moping. Dad seems to be explaining things to her. After the credits, a guy with a lantern approaches a gang of villains. He gives the leader some paper work. Leader just grabs another guy and kills him. Everyone laughs but I fail to see the humor. After that he kills a scholar then a couple in bed.
Cut to another old guy gives young guy a letter. The villain and his gang appear. They fight. He escapes. Our girl rescues him and brings him home. Dad approves. The gang has followed them and the fight continues. Dad displays a fighting style that scares the villains into a retreat.
These are actors with no martial arts skills fighting stunt men who do have martial arts skills. To make this look good one technique used could be called the minimal effort technique. The actor is motionless and the attacks come in very close to his face or body. He moves just a bit to evade the attack. This repeats for a few more moves. The result is the actor appears to be untouchable and can defeat the attacker without breaking a sweat. To execute this requires a stunt man with excellent focus. The actor has to trust the stunt man and really not so much as flinch when the blade comes close to his face. Dad does this during the attack and it looks real. Also at about the 38 minute mark there is a special moment by Melinda. She does two full cartwheels during a fight. That is really her not a stunt double. Melinda has certainly been practicing her moves!
Melinda Chen Man-Ling was Cathay Studios go to girl for sword play movies. She started in dramatic movies. Other than her filmography I have never found any other information about her. At the various Asian movie sites it is usually noted "she withdrew from the film industry". Translated this means she married a rich guy and had dozens of fat babies.
My copy has no English and I understand only about ten words in Chinese. The video has an "8" in the upper right corner. The size and quality seems to be a VHS recording of a television broadcast. For a VHS recording it is about as good as it gets.
Overall this is a totally average by the numbers martial arts movie from the golden age from 1967 to 1984. Only a hard core fan of this genre who has watched hundreds of these movies and is digging deeper could possibly be interested in this movie. To you I say - go for it. No understanding of Chinese is even needed to figure out what is going on.
