Nü xia mai ren tou

Despite the title the movie starts with pretty ladies running, giggling and gossiping. The intrigue begins with a marriage proposal rejected because the bride comes from a family of robbers. It seems though our star, Lisa Chiao Chiao, plays a competent swordswoman she still just wants a husband like all good girls. The prospective grooms in this movie seem equally capable of the feminine vices of cheating and deceiving. Lisa Chiao Chiao is instantly recognizable as the girl who saved Jimmy Wang Yu in "The One Armed Swordsman". She has zero martial arts skills along with most of the actors. No fight choreographer is named in the credits. The fights were all weapons. Such was the surplus of talent at Shaw Brothers at the time that the fights still came across good. Of particular note are the two fights at the end where the set took over the action. In the first sequence Chan Leung is trapped underwater as burning oil prevents him from surfacing. He eventually does surface and bone dry but that's movie magic for you. The end sequence has Lisa on a high and narrow bridge. An award for the best mannequin in the history of movies should go to the dummy that made the fall off that bridge. It looked so good the editors let the full shot play out. Overall I rate this a notch above average for martial arts movies of the golden age 1967 to 1984.