I generally watch martial arts films in the original language with subtitles. Sometimes however there is only a dubbed version. I believe this to be the worst dubbing job I have ever heard. I literally think Eric Idle was doing the voice for the servant - his voice acting was incredibly jarring! The combination of the poor timing/lip sync or the incredibly British accents... just made it rather hard to watch.
Given the bad dubbing and the fact that they didn't translate any of the signs, letters or messages in the movie - it's hard to tell if the plot really did make much sense or not in the original version. I'm going to hope it's clearer when you can understand the actual dialog and read all the visual clues.
In general this woman is trying to revenge her father. I'm not quite sure who killed him or why and am confused about the people she meets/fights along the way. (whose side are they on? what's going on?)
Beyond the plot confusion, the poor dubbing, I'm not really sure how to rate this film. Most of the Kung Fu films I've seen are Hong Kong films made in the 80's & 90's that have so defined the genre that it's hard for me to look back on the earlier "classic films" from the 60's & 70's (like King Hu). Having seen the later works first this isn't as impressive, the fight scenes are good, but not exciting -- however for all I know, in it's relative context this may've been new/revolutionary for it's time.
I did however finally decide that it's worth watching just because I always like strong female characters as central characters of the movie and other than Wing Chun, I don't find a lot of these. This avoids the traps of being sexist or overly sentimental -- and for that alone I recommend a watch!!
Let's just hope they decide to rerelease it w/ subtitles instead!
