REVIEW:
Goose Boxer is a old school gem featuring brilliantly detailed and creative choreography and a delightfully bawdy sense of humor.

As the film's opening credits roll our hero, Chin Po (Charles Heung) gets a face full of goose excrement, thus signaling the start of an irreverently entertaining film that masks some deceptively rich kung fu action. Chin Po is a goose vendor who is sent to learn kung fu from his uncle, but he never gets there. Instead, he ends up in a scuffle and is mistaken for a kung fu expert by Shou Chan Yip, the bungling inheritor of a famed martial arts school that is in decline. Chan Yip gets Chin Po drunk and declares him the school's new teacher, a master of the Crane Fist technique. This charade last long enough for Chin Po to be kidnapped by a real Crane Fist expert known as the White Crested Crane (Lee Hoi Sang). For unknown reasons, he begins to sadistically force-train his reluctant student. This turns out to be a trap White Crested Crane sets to draw out his enemy, Lung Chung Fung (Phillip Ko Fei) who sends two of his students to the gym to learn Chin Po's Crane technique. Chin discovers that he's just being used and joins forces with Chung Fung, but his new ally is killed leaving Chin Po without the necessary skills to defeat White Crested Crane. Chan Yip tells him to study a kung fu manual that turns out to be 108 sexual exercises instead! To survive, he's going to have to rely on a newly created style known as goose boxing and a little help from a dwarf.

This film is a good example of the often misunderstood and subtle nature of classic kung fu. On the surface, Goose Boxer is your typical Hong Kong film of the late '70's filled with crude humor, Cantonese stereotypes, improbable martial arts combat, and that wacky dubbing. But, if you have seen at least a handful of these kung fu comedies and enjoy them enough to keep watching, then Goose boxer deserves some scrutiny.

The mostly humorous plot navigates quickly and easily through the typical genre pitfalls of convoluted sub-plots and sloppily rehashed material that dominates lesser productions. Charles Heung may not have the charisma of bigger stars of the era, but his performance as a simple goose seller who goes from being a martial arts school master to being number one on Lee Hoi Sang's blacklist practically overnight is fun to watch. Phillip Ko Fei has a fairly small role as a good guy for once, but its a welcome one. As the villainous White Crested Crane, Lee Hoi Sang gets the best role. He's your standard white-haired kung fu master with a chip on his shoulder and no compunctions about killing anything that gets in his way. His form and delivery on kung fu action is pretty memorable. He also has a great scene where he dumps Heung into a sack and later turns the poor guy into a human pretzel during a grueling 24-hour training session. Its inspired!

The rest of the action is what really sells this film, especially in the second half. Tommy Lee provides excellent fight choreography, more deliberate and detailed in its delivery than you might expect. The very best kung fu movies take the time to explain to you the magic behind the movements you see without boring you. Sammo Hung had a knack for it as evidenced in The Prodigal Son (1982) and Tommy Lee proves that he's capable of the same feat here. You also really get to enjoy the full motion of the moves. Most modern martial arts films are edited so tightly with the camera in close that you rarely get to see how even a single movement looks from start to finish. Not a problem here. In fact, the action is slowed down on occasion just for emphasis.

The final fight in Goose Boxer certainly shows that the filmmakers were willing to throw convention out the window a bit. Instead of learning some powerful style, Heung engages Hoi Sang in what neither recognize as stances and exercises meant for sexual application rather than fighting. In lesser hands, this could have been an unappetizing and disappointing finale, but the scene turns out to be creative and fittingly farcical, much like the rest of the film.