Shaolin Brothers (1977)

Two words-Hopping Vampires!

From the moment I saw the dark forest shots and familiar waterfall I knew this Hong Kong movie was filmed in Taiwan. I immediately lowered my expectations. Good thing because the story was almost incomprehensible.

My hopes were heightened when the movie began with a line of hopping vampires, hopping through town guided by a Taosist priest. Those hopes came crashing down pretty quickly.

The gist of the plot is Ming rebels trying to survive against their new Ching overlords. Two of the main players David Tang Wei and Carter Wong had studied with the same master and now ten years later were on opposite sides. As he often did in later movies, Carter played the baddie. David’s sister Fan Ling also joined in the fighting. Tung Li was a Ming General working as a rebel, too.

Carter had stolen the masters poisonous needles and the rebels had a secret list. Now that the basics are out of the way, it was time to get down to some fighting. David was poisoned by the secret needles and the rebels sought to send the secret plans via “hopping vampires” as the area was crawling with Chings.

The movie muddled around for a bit with the “hopping vampires” being taken through town and getting into fights. Finally the Ming General and the brother and sister rebels took on Carter and the blood started flowing.

The body count was high, but due to the poor storytelling and often dark scenes I wasn’t emotionally attached to any of the characters.

The initial fights were mostly hack and slack sword fighting. In the grand finale fights we finally got some hand to hand combat. You don’t have Carter Wong in the movie if there wasn’t going to be some kung fu. There was a lot of wire-fu, especially for Fan, but most of it was tolerable.

Joseph Kuo made sure there were some interesting shots but the story was haphazardly put together. The fights weren’t interesting enough either to hold my attention. Only for hard core fans.


10/25/22

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