Tiger Love (1977)

"Let's eat together"

Tiger Love was a strange story amalgam of kung fu, Romeo and Juliet, and weird horror. None of the three actually worked although the horror aspect was memorably bizarre.

Sher Shin Lan (Hug Chin) and Lin Shao Ho (Lo Lieh) are lovers and on the run because they come from warring clans. Sher's dad and his men have the two trapped on the edge of a cliff. When Shin Lan thinks they've kill Shao Ho she leaps from the cliff and is assumed dead. Now is when the story gets weird. She lands in a tree with a tiger attempting to climb up it to eat her. In fear she pees on the tiger and passes out. The tiger takes her to his cave and cares for her. She thinks it's because if a woman kisses a tiger he becomes her slave. Um, pretty sure she didn't kiss him unless that was edited out, but the kiss is alluded to several times. She has Shao Ho's baby and Uncle Tiger helps her raise him. A young Shao Chang whacks the tiger in the nose with a stick and the tiger leaps at the child with a freeze frame on the child's terrified face. Child Services Line 1!!

Shao Ho grows up and meets his father who is actually alive! He goes to live with him and traps a girl from the Sher family during a hunting expedition and the two fall in love. Papa Sher (Wang Hsieh) will not allow it nor will Papa Lin. The Lin patriarch kicks Shao Chang out. After the Sher heir is mysteriously killed (and stays mysterious to the end of the movie), Shao Chang is blamed and the Shers ambush the Lin family and kill nearly everyone. While looking for Shao Chang, his mother is mortally wounded by the Shers. She begs her son to not seek revenge so that she can rest in peace. He agrees. The tiger, however, doesn't. He kills a man and declares that for 20 years out of love for Shin Lan he hasn't killed a human. In the past, he'd eaten 99 humans and with this 100th kill he will now become a tiger demon! During the day he's a tiger but at night he turns into a green glowing fanged witch with tiger paws for the kill. Vowing vengeance on the Sher family he begins to take them out. Some of the attacks looked frighteningly real. This was no CGI tiger, but the real deal! When the tiger demon disguises himself as the Sher grandma and asks to be let into the house by Shao Chang's love, all I could hear was, "my grandma, what big teeth you have!" going through my head. When the tiger demon states, "Let's eat together," it's not what the young women think their "grandma" means.

The kung fu wasn't great and there wasn't much of it. Stephen Tung would choreograph martial arts for more movies than he would act in and going by this film, that was a good thing. The young romance wasn't very believable. Lo Lieh didn't have many scenes but he could act at least by kung fu standards and was entertaining to watch. Wang Hsieh as the bad clan leader could play the role in his sleep and might have. The editing was choppy at best and the story pacing was awful. For a story with a wide variety of conflicts it could be painstakingly slow during the middle segment. The last 20 minutes with the tiger demon was so amazingly crazy that at least it might keep your attention. The most suspenseful part of the movie was wondering if the actors and stuntmen walked away from the mauling scenes in one piece. The two young lovers were also related, was she his aunt? Or was his mom her aunt? They skimmed over the family connections. Bestiality was implied a couple of times between the mom and the tiger, but I just refused to let my mind go there. Like I said, this was one weird movie.

I'm on a quest to watch as many Lo Lieh films as I can which is why I put myself through this mess. Unless you are in the mood for a poorly made and utterly strange kung fu film, or a kung fu filmdom completionist, my advice is to skip this one.

6/23/23

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