This obscure Hong Kong action flick is by the numbers in a lot of ways but has a few things about it that mark it out as being somewhat distinctive. It has a typical revenge set-up so very common in these types of movies but this part of the story is really pretty tedious and it's the other less expected stuff that ensures that there is interest value in this one. Unpredictably, it focuses on a woman who raises her child with the help of a tiger. She had been left for dead by her evil father yet survived the ordeal with the help of the big cat who seemed to take a shine to her after she urinated on it by accident. Go figure, yet in the dialogue the woman says that legend says that a tiger will serve a woman if she kisses it. Sure
but ultimately she did actually pee on it and did not appear to kiss it at any point. There's no point in splitting hairs over details like this though, as this is the kind of film where logical details are beside the point.
I would probably describe this one as having a good beginning and ending but with a tiresome middle section. The opening scenes focus on the tiger family, the middle section involves the boy getting involved in trouble with the local villagers, while the final section improbably switches to supernatural horror. This latter part might have been bizarre but it was also pretty effective in places with the witch woman as scarily sinister as female witches always seem to be in East Asian films. This material follows on from where the boy and his mother are killed, leading to the tiger taking vengeance by somehow taking on the form of a witch. It begins killing not only bad guys but innocent bystanders as well. All this strange material was delivered pretty well and suggests to me that this would have worked a lot better as a straight horror movie than as an action flick. The martial arts scenes are in the middle part but they are all pretty forgettable to be honest, while there is also a romantic sub-plot too, which also is a little tiresome.
All-in-all, a decidedly left-of-centre oddball of a movie. But worth watching for its more eccentric content.
