Bezenby
It's another early Jackie film, so you know what to expect: Period costumes, Jackie being the unruly pupil to the stern master, Jackie throwing loads of furniture around, a typical bad guy and a couple of showdowns. Spiritual Kung Fu manages to rise above the standard plots of these films by taking a turn into the weird with some truly bizarre visuals and weirdness.Jackie, this time, is a pupil at the shaolin temple, and when we first see him he's getting punished for some crime. That night, a ninja breaks into the temple and steals a rare martial arts book which ends up in the hands of our bad guy, who wants to be head of all the clans. This involves him beating the crap out of all the clan leaders periodically throughout the film.Meanwhile, back at the temple, things get weird as a meteor hits the temple (looks like someone holding a sparkler) and five spirits that look like Toyah Wilcox appear and torment everyone. So you get to see a) A spirit appear from nowhere and head butt a guy on the arse b) The guy dubbing Jackie shouting 'I'm no queer!', c) Jackie peeing on the spirits d) Jackie shoving a live frog down his pants e) A monk inviting a girl to sniff his finger and f) Jackie showing a live eel down his pants.Sadly, things get a bit more normal again later (although Jackie's first time encounter with a girl is pretty funny) and the film turns into a bit of murder mystery before descending into a fight fest for the last half and hour. Jackies battle with the monks at the temple is pretty good, as he takes on about a dozen guys armed with poles, and the last battle between the murderer, involving a reappearance of those spirits was pretty surreal.What I love about these films is that once everything's done and dusted, they just get the big old THE END up there on the screen, and that's that. This is your usual late seventies Jackie-fest with an injection of weirdness. The copy I had was pan and scanned and cut off a lot of the action – I'm sure there's better copies out there.THE END.
ebiros2
This movie was shot back to back with Dragon Fist, and the similarities shows. They both take place at Shaolin temple, and Jackie is a student. This one has more comedic flavor to it. Lo Wei directs this movie as well.Book of Seven Fist has been stolen from Shaolin temple. Only Five Star fist can win over the Seven Fist, but this technique has been lost. Conveniently, the spirits of the Five Star travels to earth and shows Yi-Lang (Jackie Chan) where the lost book is located. They also give private lessons to Yu-Lang. Killing starts to happen around the temple with Seven Fist technique. It turns out that a man kept in the dungeon Wei-Wu is the culprit who stole the book, and doing the killing. He feels that his Seven Fist style is invincible. Yu-Lang volunteers to leave the temple to settle the score with Wei-Wu. But the real culprit turns out to be a surprising person, and more unexpected things happen with the spirits during the battle.1978 must have been a good year for Jackie Chan, as he made slew of good movies including his early master piece the "Drunken Master". While this movie is no masterpiece, Jackie Chan looks so good in his role as the Shaolin student. The movie came out after the Dragon Fist, and the Drunken Master, and this movie almost looks like a cross between the two. There's lots of comedy, but Jackie's kung fu looks so sharp and stylish.To be perfectly honest, I couldn't enjoy some of the comedic parts of this movie. Problem with Lo Wei's directing style is that he always portrays supporting cast as low class or no class idiots. He might feel that this is a necessary comedic touch to entertain the audience, but this in my opinion has kept the status of Hong Kong movie low for years. This became obvious when younger directors like Jackie Chan came along and started to direct movies with quality comical touch. Now Hong Kong is considered to produce top notch movies, second perhaps only to Hollywood.The movie is better than average kung fu movie from the same era. It's a charming movie with good kung fu action mixed in.
dragon ma young
this one is a weird, weird flick. funny at times, exciting at times, scary at times(not a lot though), but mostly just weird. it invloves jackie learning a lost style of kung fu from some red haired, tutu wearing ghosts. at some time in the movie, he even takes a leak (urinates, to make myself clearer) on them! like i said, very weird.
sockii
This isn't as mind-numbingly bad as some of Jackie's films for Lo Wei, but the director has a very weird idea of what makes for a kung fu comedy (it seems to involve Jackie shoving snakes and frogs down his shorts and peeing on ghosts). This movie deserves to be on Mystery Science Theater 3000, with its terrible idea of ghostly special effects (guys in white face paint, red wigs, and sparkly skirts hopping around, and a sparkler used to look like a falling meteor). The martial arts scenes are okay, but not great.