| Its not often that you see a kung fu movie based around pottery. Usually someone's killed someone else's brother or one clan is trying to wipe out another but here everyone's fighting over a manual of secret pottery making techniques. Japanese invaders, apparently blighted by inferior earthenware products, will go to just about any lengths to get their hands on the manual. Lengths that include killing, kidnapping and, erm, setting up roadblocks to make sure that nobody can escape from the village where they suspect the manual is hidden. Apparently it never occurred to anyone that people who wanted to escape might not use the road, but there you go.
After years training in kung fu the pottery maker's son returns to the village to save the day and, along with his equally skilled brother and a high kicking babe (who's relevance to the story escaped me), takes on the Japanese in a reasonably entertaining series of kung fu fights until the so-so ending. There are no ninjas in this film.
Although the film features plenty of fight scenes and just the right amount of plot development for this type of movie it still doesn't quite manage to hit the mark. The principal actors (don't know who was who) are all adequately skilled in martial arts and do display some genuinely impressive kicking techniques but the choreography is rather uninspired as is camerawork and editing. At one point in the film the villains bring in western fighters to help their cause but, for the most part, they seem to carry all the grace of a sack of spuds and are easily outclassed by their eastern counterparts. The other main problem is that there is no really formidable villain for the heroes to face in the film's climax. Instead they just kick and punch their way through anyone that stands in their way without any real difficulty. This doesn't really make for engaging viewing. |
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