This is a very fun movie. Sure, the barely-existent plot is tried and true and tried AGAIN--but the kung fu! Johnny Chang (Chaing) will probably be known to many people as the back-breaking villain in "DRAGON: The Bruce Lee Story" (for which he is responsible for the action choreography). You have probably seen him getting the stuffing knocked out of him in more than a few Jackie Chan actioners. But if that's all you've seen, you have yet to see him truly shine. He performs (along with many other equally talented martial artists) some phenomenal kung fu. His Drunken Boxing is quite awesome. When he combines it with his powerful Monkey technique, the movie really starts jumping.

The flick was most certainly a DRUNKEN MASTER knock-off, but damned it if doesn't rock! You do have the "funny scenes" (my least favorite part of kung fu films, epitomized by Dean Shek characters), which are juvenile and not terribly funny. But the villains are suitably evil and have smooth and lethal Snake kung fu worthy of testing Johnny's Drunken Monkey Fist (conceived of, of course, while watching a monkey fight a cobra).

...The [DVD] is dubbed in English (the same voice-over star that dubbed a lot of Jackie Chan's early films dubs Johnny Chang), and the action suffers from time to time as a result of the full-frame pan and scan framing. But the action smokes and the price is right. If they had given just a little more thought to character and story it would certainly have scored a four star rating. Hope you dig it.

Update: The scenes of the real monkey battling the cobra have been edited out of this print. I hate censorship, but I also hate cruelty to animals, and it was a pretty nasty scene. During Johnny Chang's final fight, the animal scenes were also interspersed to show comparisons. These are also missing. We get the snake approaching the monkey, and one shot during the fight showing the monkey kicking. About 3-and-a-half minutes are missing from the film.