It was nice of them to notice, since Yuen has tended to suffer by comparison with his fellow Hong Kong directors in terms of international profile - although he's arguably just as important and influential as the better-known likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-Tung and Ronny Yu, and even if his name sounds distinctly silly to Western ears, that certainly didn't harm Ringo Lam's career. If nothing else, Yuen must take a huge share of the credit for transforming Jackie Chan from cut-price Bruce Lee clone to the king of kung-fu comedy and arguably the biggest star on the planet - even today, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978) and Drunken Master (1979) rank among the best-loved films he ever made.

Since then, Yuen has spent much of the time making gems like The Miracle Fighters (1982), a film that is every bit as good as the better-known Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Mr. Vampire (1985) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), but which for some reason has had a much lower profile. Indeed, perhaps because it's closer to the more traditional martial arts films of the seventies, with their emphasis on old-fashioned physical skills shot in long takes to showcase the performers at their best, its action sequences are arguably far superior - arguably as exciting as anything to emerge from Hong Kong in the 1980s.

The plot is convoluted in the extreme, but revolves around a national hero being forced into exile for marrying a woman from the wrong family. When fleeing the emperor's palace, he strategically kidnaps the crown prince... who unfortunately dies in transit. He therefore brings up an orphan in the prince's place, who ends up being trained by two feuding magicians to help defeat the villainous Sorcerer Bat, who turns out to be pulling virtually every string behind the scenes.

None of this particularly matters, though, because this is a film whose appeal rests entirely on a near-constant stream of brilliantly inventive set pieces. Right from the start we're confronted by a warrior who both lives and fights in a large jar, and during the course of the film we meet a talking fish, a challenge involving crossing a snake-pit on a bridge made out of paper, a lesson in how snoring loudly in your sleep can keep assassins at bay, and probably the most ludicrous excuse for an apparently dead character turning up alive at the end that I've ever seen.