Boy, that sure was a lot of time devoted to the simple setup that this guy knows kung fu. Especially since the film introduces about thirty more characters over the next ten minutes and doesn't really have Hsu Yuan-ping fight that much until the very end.

This convoluted nature of the film, its piling upon piling of subplots and characters, no doubt, has to do with ?Jade Hairpin? being one of those Chinese, multi-novel, classic stories of danger, action, drama, and intrigue. It is only really a hurdle due to the pure volume of characters and how quickly it moves (plus the subtitles didn't help- more on that later).

Minus the subplot tangents, the basic breakdown of the film is this: A powerful martial arts group, The Nanhai, has, just by being so good, irked most of the martial world who want to steal their secrets, which are contained in a book being transported by Miss Hsaio and some Nanhai warriors. Hsu Yuan-ping and a couple of sisters called The Two Lovelies of Ghost Valley are the most sympathetic, meanwhile a bigwig bad guy has all the heads of five or six martial clans ambush the Nanhai and try to steal the book.

I completely lost interest in this one. I'll admit it. I mean, I took notes and everything but they aren't doing me a lick of good. There just wasn't enough imagination going on in the action to make me perk up and try to follow the labrtyhine story (which again was not so much complex as it was convoluted). It is usually the kind of film I'd enjoy. Colorful good guys in an against the odds struggle against several wacky outfitted villains, complete with booby trapped dungeon finale. But, I found myself wished I were watching a similar, better film, like Shaolin Kung Fu Mystagoge