I honed my skills bare-handed against a duffel bag hanging in my shed and spent my evenings correcting bad boxing throughout the land, so I can kinda sorta relate to The Perfectionist in this movie.A gloriously typical entry from Shaw Brothers, Martial Club starring Kara Wei (THE BRAVE ARCHER 2 and MAD MONKEY KUNG FU) and Gordon Liu (THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN) and directed by Lau Kar-Leung (LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF CHINA), affords us a fast-paced, cleverly choreographed piece of martial arts fun combining many elements that lovers of this kind of cinema will be more than appreciative of. In my younger days, I made it a habit of walking around my neighborhood with TWO pair of boxing gloves draped over my shoulders. There is a lot of solid action throughout, making FIVE SUPERFIGHTERS worth seeing (the fight scenes seem to improve as do the students). Master, meanwhile, has his kung fu "corrected" again by the Traveling Teacher. The 2nd student encounters a "drunken cripple" who's more than meets the eye and the 3rd, Ah Fu, finds a fisherman whose kung fu is to die for. Ah Tien apprentices under a woman whose kung fu proves superior to his (her kicking is especially impressive). (This perfectionist even has paperwork to prove he's a specialist.) When their Master is publicly "corrected," his three students set out (for an agreed-upon six month period) to improve their suspect skills. There's something about this sort of film that is just appealing.Ī "specialist in correcting bad Kung Fu" arrives in town and proceeds to set crooked things straight. Fighting in a field, overacted characters, mistimed fight scenes and lots of young men dressed as old men. However this is a great example of a classic kung fu film since it has all of the elements of the cheap budgeted film. The three students don't come off with any individual personality. Unfortunately, Lo Mar is at the director's helm and that means that the camera angles are not very good. The choreography is unusual at times but that doesn't mean it always works. The fights in this film start out weak but get much better as the film progresses. It's interesting to see him on camera before he became one of the biggest fight choreographers of the past ten years. This is another film featuring Tony Leung Siu Hung, here as the beaten master. Since that seems to be the bulk of the film that's what I'll comment on. The rest of the movie is fight scenes and training scenes. Their master hides in an abandoned temple drinking. The students go their separate ways to find a kung fu teacher who can teach them a style that will defeat the crazy master. He beats up a master and his three students who he adopted as orphans. A strange black garbed kung fu master wanders around beating up kung fu teachers, "correcting" their bad kung fu. Well low and behold, here's one from the Shaw studios! Directed by third tier director Lo Mar and cast with minor actors from the Shaw stable. These films sometimes made up for their short comings by having really exaggerated characters and lots of action. And the fights were not so well rehearsed. Then there were the films from the smaller studios that might have some good martial artists/actors (who sometimes lacked movie star looks) but didn't have the sets and ended up doing a lot of fight scenes in a field somewhere. In the world of kung-fu films there were the top budgeted ones (usually from the Shaw studios) with big sets and well rehearsed stars who looked good, could act and do some remarkable fight scenes.
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