Xue men ying zhao

Formerly a minor star at Shaw Brothers, Chi Kuan-chun tries his hand at Jackie Chan-influenced kung fu slapstick in "The Eagle Fist." When a militia captain (Chi) attempts to arrest some bandits, an old vagrant (Cheng Kei-ying, the director and fight choreographer of this film) steps in and shows him just how inadequate his martial skills really are. The captain takes the vagrant as his teacher and learns some of the deadly nerve-locking techniques of the eagle claw style. The rest of the techniques can be found only in a manual stolen from the vagrant ten years earlier by a masked killer known as the Red Dart.

Will Chi track down the Red Dart and retrieve the manual for his teacher? Will you care? Doubtful, but the final fight scene does deliver if you can make it that far. (Don't get the notion that the filmmakers were doing you a favor, though. One decent fight is the least you can expect after ninety minutes of insufferable nonsense.) Long-faced and grave of expression, Chi Kuan-chun is not at all convincing in the kung fu comedy realm; he's a competent screen fighter but doesn't have much charisma, and the rest of the cast has even less. "The Eagle Fist" is a dreary, cheap-looking and excruciatingly unfunny film that simply doesn't do what it sets out to do. It's the kind of martial arts movie that gave the genre a bad name in the years before it achieved mainstream acceptance.