Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Wizard-8 From my above summary line, you may have concluded that I do not like Hong Kong/Taiwanese kung fu movies. Actually, I really enjoy these movies... at least those made from the mid-1980s on. Efforts made in the 70s for the most part I must admit do not move me, including this one. It is a little better than average, thanks to not only some good looking sets and costumes, but also some skillful camera work and visual composition. But apart from that stuff, I was bored for the most part. The scenes involving kung fu are indistinguishable from the dreary kung fu you usually get in a 70s movie. The story is thin and curiously keeps the movie's heroine off of the screen for large chunks of time. You won't be missing much if you skip seeing this movie, and I can only recommend it for die hard fans of Angela Mao - and even they will find much of the movie dreary and boring.

Woodyanders Feisty ace martial artist Chu Siew Yen (a sound and commanding performance by the beautiful and charismatic Angela Mao; Bruce Lee's sister in "Enter the Dragon") promises her teacher that she will find his missing brother. During her search she also tries to find the person who killed her parents. Of course, accomplishing said tasks proves to be easier said than done as Chu faces opposition from many people while attempting to uncover the truth. Karl Liao's energetic direction maintains a snappy pace throughout and stages the plentiful chopsocky action with considerable rip-roaring brio. The slight and often jumbled plot is really nothing more than a flimsy excuse to show off Mao's incredibly agile, athletic, and exciting martial arts prowess. Fortunately, Mao more than holds her own as she takes on several folks all at once and manages to retain her poise and dignity as the story gets more increasingly silly and unintentionally funny (one gut-busting camp highlight has Mao fighting a bunch of women armed with deadly giant exploding flowers!). The handsome widescreen cinematography by Sun-po Li and Yung-hin Cheng boasts a sizable number of smooth gliding tracking shots and makes the most of the pretty rural scenery. Fu Liang Chou's rousing score also hits the stirring spot. The dubbing is really bad and thus adds to the picture's considerable kitschy charm. An entertainingly inane diversion.

phillip-58 I was really looking forward to this : Angela Mao and Don Wong Tao together, but apart from a few scenes this is a disappointment. First the Dynasty print is pretty poor (a VHS transfer ?) and why they didn't change the extremely poor dubbing is beyond me. I'm still not sure if it was the dubbing or poor editing that led to me wondering what was going on most of the time. Numerous characters come and go and who Don Wong was meant to be was lost on me. It starts slowly with a rather stiff acting Angela Mao (with rather strange hair style even for a Chinese film) wandering around looking for her masters missing brother. The fights are mediocre and occasionally contain some strange weapons which seem to work poorly. There is a lot of unnecessary wire work and the settings look cheap and flimsy at times. The beautiful Doris Lung pouts a lot but her fight with Angela should have been a highlight - and wasn't. Man Kong-lung as a poisoned (presumably black mailed) swordsman has several pretty poor fights. HK Cinemagic mentions Ti Lung in the cast but this is either a mistake or he was very well disguised. Definitely not one of Angela or Don's better films. What a shame this could have been so good.

Brian Camp MOONLIGHT SWORD AND JADE LION is a frequently confusing kung fu tale about a swordswoman (Angela Mao) seeking the brother of her late teacher in order to learn who killed her parents when she was a baby. That's basically all the film is about, but it takes 90 minutes to get there and only after the film bogs down with a lot of pointless intrigue involving a host of other characters skulking about trying to kill each other. It's never entirely clear who these characters are or what their connection to the action is, but the film gives us lots of scenes with them. One character, played by Wong Tao, is set up as the male lead and potential partner of Angela, yet he vanishes for the whole middle section of the film as if the screenwriters had simply forgotten about him.The good news is that Angela is very attractively garbed in a pink-and-white outfit and appears in a lot of fight scenes. The fights are generally short and overly gimmicky (with flying plates and chopsticks and such), but Angela gets to do a lot of swordplay and acrobatics and makes the whole thing worth watching. Wong Tao (THE HOT, THE COOL AND THE VICIOUS) is the only other notable fighting star on display, but he doesn't get to fight enough. Lung Chun Erh, another fighting femme and always an appealing presence (see SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES and THE MAGNIFICENT), appears all too briefly as one of Angela's enemies and fights her in one scene over the jade lion of the title (whose significance is never adequately explained).The exemplary sets and costumes are all displayed to great advantage in the high-quality letter-boxed print available for review. The English-language soundtrack, however, suffers from some of the worst dubbing yet heard in a kung fu film. The voice used for Angela is particularly annoying. The English track omits so much key info that one wonders if much of the original dialogue hadn't simply been ignored by the translators. The music track consists largely of cues lifted from Italian westerns.