In the movie, Jackie plays Yi, a student at the Shaolin temple who is always getting into trouble with his teachers because of his laziness. On enight while he is supposed to be on guard duty, Yi falls asleep, which allows someone to steal the manual for the deadly "Seven Fists" technique. The Seven Fists can only be stopped by another style called the "Five Fists", the manual for which is thought to be lost. But, one night in the temple, a group of five ghosts appear, and lo and behold, each of them is a represenative of one of the fist styles. Yi begins to learn the Five Fists and then sets off to stop the evil clan member who has been going around the countryside killing people with the Seven Fists.

Spiritual Kung Fu's main problem is that it has the pacing of a turtle on qaaludes. It takes forever to get the story going, with most of the running time vastly dominated by the sort of extremely lame attempts at comedy many Hong Kong productions seemed to favor at the time. The jokes aren't as sophisticated as your average Hanna-Barbara cartoon and the laughter quotient soon falls into negative territory. And any attempts liven things up with the ghost story elements are taken out of the equation by the horrid special effects and especially the costumes worn by the ghosts. I've see junior high school plays held at the local VFW with better production values.

Things do pick up during the final act, where Jackie is allowed to stretch his cinematic legs a big by directing the action scenes. The fisticuffs help to keep the viewer interested, but they're missing the inventiveness and kinetic energy that marks Jackie's better work. They certainly can't make the viewer forget about the crap-fest which proceeded them. Seriously, who the hell thought neon red wigs, white spandex suits, and sparkly skirts would create a menacing ghost? If you're a Jackie Chan completist, you might still want to track this down, especially since you can find it sitting on the top of any random 99 cent DVD bargain bin. Most others out there, though, will just want to leave the DVD in that bin.

The Shaolin temple is in disarray and the Abbot goes into solitary to repent for the sins of the monks (for losing the book). Jackie is also subjected to spending more nights guarding the books. One night a meteor hits and all the books are dislodged freeing five rather odd looking ghosts. As it turns out they are the masters of the "Five Fists" kung fu and see Jackie as the chosen one so they take him as their pupil.

Meanwhile a mysterious man is going around defeating all the kung fu masters using the style of the stolen book and the only man that stands a chance of defeating him is Jackie who, combined with the skills of the ghosts, must rescue the Shaolin Temple.

One of the films from Chan's 'Low Wei' era, "Spiritual Kung Fu" really shows its age mostly due to incredibly dodgy special effects and rather freaky 70's sounds. Still, the film contains some awesome fight choreography from Chan with some decent gags and early shades of the "Drunken Master" movies. Whether or not you can find a decent print in widescreen with subtitles is another matter as most copies seem to be very poor quality coupled with crap dubbing.