8 Masters

There may have been something lost in the translation of this 1977 Taiwanese import but I think I got it all on the first try, uncle. The movie starts off not with our hero (played by Carter Wong, who you may know as "Thunder" in "Big Trouble in Little China"!), but with his father challenging a member of the 8 masters to a duel. The man asks for a 3 month postponement which is denied. They immediately fight and both die. So, now the 8 Masters want revenge on the dead man. So they go after his son. The dead father's friend (who sports a suite Sonny Bonoesque mustache) however finds the son before the 8 Masters and brings him to a Shaolin temple for protection, but not before receiving the wounds that end up killing him. So flash forward 10 years and our hero is an adult and ready to leave the monastery because he had made a promise that he would blah blah blah who cares!? This is a 70's kung fu import! It's all about the fight scenes and there's plenty of them. This has more fight scenes than 2 Fast 2 Furious has fast-driving car scenes! So rather than go over the plot or acting or cinematography we're gonna go for some of the fight highlights, uncle.
The first battle of the movie is marred by large credits imposed over it and degraded film but it's still a fine taste of the fast paced combat to come, uncle. It's followed quickly by a scene of our hero being saved as a very young boy, uncle. His savior tosses him up from the ground to a high tree branch with his feet! then proceeds to dispatch 2 men before the boy loses his grip and is caught by his protector. Then before being allowed to leave the monastery he must take on more gold-painted, partially-nude men than you'd find at a gay pride parade. By far the best fight sequence of the movie is early on, in a restaurant soon after our protagonist leaves the monastery. The awesomeness of the scene is wholly-dependent on the defeat of a single opponent when our hero tosses him more than 10 feet off the ground causing him to get hung up on a balcony overlooking the restaurant! Now if that weren't enough the man stuck on the balcony then proceeds to wet his pants and it lands on the face of another defeated opponent below him (HOT!). The middle slows down in the fighting department but once our hero dons his racquetball uniform... IT'S ON! In a barrage of non-stop action he takes down the 8 Masters 1-by-1, mostly unarmed (though they rarely return the courtesy) and often outnumbered. He busts out some pretty impressive moves like snatching 2 swords out of mid-air that had been thrown at him, jumping of the flat of a held-out sword and running back up the suspended chain of a Kusari Gama to the enemy still holding it up! And it's all lightning quick with plenty of acrobatics and rather skillful fighting on the part of the actors. The end gets a little freaky though when he must take on 2 sets of..... well.... The best way I can describe them is equal parts geisha, Marilyn Manson video, Brazilian dream and The Hong Kong Danger Duo (YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE DANGER!).
There's more to the movie (secret daughters, a pair of suicides, blood debts, etc.) but a lot of it is kinda pointless and unnecessary, uncle. The constant fighting at the end gets a little tedious and the sound effects are annoying and headache-inducing to say the least. Every move is a accompanied by someone blowing into a microphone or some kind of amplified sound of two fat thighs dressed in corduroy or "windbreaker" material swishing past each other. The movie is dubbed rather than subbed. So while it provides for the amusing cliche of the mismatched mouths-to-audio it's not exactly the ideal method of translating a foreign film. Worst of all this movie doesn't even employ pan-and-scan, uncle. It simply cuts off the "excess" movie from its original format. One scene in particular has 2 people speaking and facing each other but neither can be seen, uncle. We're left to stare at a plain gray wall in the background.
As a movie it kinda falls short but as highlight reel fodder there's plenty to mine here, uncle. Every fight scene is pretty well done, nothing overly fancy like flying or magical powers, fast, occasionally goofy and, though often obviously choreographed, still fun to watch. Oh, and did I mention people call each other uncle a lot?!