HIGHLIGHTS AND FUNKY STUFF: Watch for Lam Ching Ying's show stealing, tour de force acting performance. Good training sequences. Beware of the dude with the rings--he is a straight up killer with slick moves for days.

FINAL SUMMATION: Awesome. Mandatory. Will not cause swelling or bloating. Consult a doctor if effects last for more then four hours. Quality checked and tested on animals...because their pain is funny.

Even though this a Yuen Biao vehicle, and he truly shines in this. The standout performance really comes from Lam Ching Ying in my opinion. Just watching this guy move is a pleasure.

All the fights are 100% on point. And Yuen Biao, besides playing the lead character, is once again doubling left and right.

Sammo, true to form, takes a backseat to his co-stars as the comedic relief. But he also gets to show some of his stuff in the very enjoyable training sequences. And as per usual in a Sammo movie, you learn a little something in between fights. In this case, about Wing Chun and Peking opera.

If I must point out a flaw. It would be the abundance of goofy characters dispersed throughout the first half of the movie. And, although nothing out of the ordinary for a movie of this type and era, it is still, in my mind, what keeps the film from truly reaching the legendary status bestowed upon it by fans and critics alike.

But still a classic and a definite must have.

You like fighting? Of course you do. What kind of insipid, braind-dead dolt doesn't want to see fighting in a martial arts movie? Certainly not I. There's combat here, and there's a fair amount of it, and Sammo Hung is the captain of this ship so you can be sure it's good (he makes an appearance as a guy who has only one good arm to do battle with). Don't expect modernized "action fighting", though...this is strictly a martial arts movie.

You like comedy? Then go watch The Simpsons or fall off a cliff or something. Prodigal Son makes a few stabs at being humorous, but it isn't often successful. Yuen Biao gets knocked into a river a couple of times, a guy gets his face painted while attacking an opera performer, and "Pork Pie" gets over-zealous while practicing calligraphy. Maybe you'll think it's hysterical, but personally, when I want to laugh I'll take my car out for a spin on Friday nights and stampede drunk teenagers into telephone poles.

You like stunts? Well, the money-grabbing shot here is Lam Ching-Ying doing a backflip over a burning flag with which Yuen Biao is fending off a pair of assassins. And when I say "burning flag", I don't mean like in those street demonstrations held by people whose social lives make mine look exciting by comparison, where the fire in question would barely set off a smoke alarm. I mean BURNING burning, with nary a patch of cloth visible and a great big swath of flame left behind to mark its path through the air. Fuckin' cool. You won't see any car chases or leaps from atop mile-high skyscrapers, though...this ain't one of those Fantasy Mission Farce-style time warp movies.

You like drama? Look somewhere else. Lam Ching-Ying doesn't have eyelashes, but if he did, he wouldn't bat a single one of them at the sight of his entire opera troupe butchered in their beds. Yuen Biao's character gives us little reason to wish hiim well in his seemingly endless crusade to acquire some decent kung fu training. And the big baddie who just loves to fightt really ain't such a baddie at all.

You like gorgeous women? Sorry, no dice there either. Pork Pie's daughter is a rather bulbous young woman named Twiggy (Ah...irony. Is there anything so bitter yet so sweet at one and the same time?) and the actress who plays her seems to have abandoned all sense of shame in accepting the role. The only other...ah...um...er..."woman" of prominence in this movie is an opera performer who, after fighting off the unwanted attentions of a lusty young nogoodnik, turns out to be a man. If you haven't seen it and you're now bitching me out for that little spoiler, don't, because, unless you possess the intellect of a gnat, you would have seen it coming a mile away even if I hadn't told you. So shaddap!

Last but certainly not least, do you like climactic, exciting endings? Really? Me, too. But here's where the movie kind of half-succeeds and fizzles instead of exploding in your face. There's a great, expertly-choreographed, hard-hitting, one-on-one fight to finish things off, but, getting back to that "drama" bit, it won't exactly have you jumping out of your seat, cheering the hero on. In fact, his opponent isn't even a real villain...he's just a poor shmoe in a predicament quite similar to the one our boy Yuen found himself in not long ago. At least in a cookie cutter revenge movie there's good reason the for the good guy to beat the shit out of the bad guy, no matter how trite it may be. Here, it's just two guys fighting because they can. They do a damned good job of it, but it just doesn't have the impact it could've had if the story had taken a slightly different direction.

But hey...don't let ME stop you.

You never have before...right?