Thursday, October 26, 2006

[1980] CLAN OF THE WHITE LOTUS: This time it's Gordon Liu versus Lieh Lo as a Pai Mei lookalike (Pai Mei himself gets killed in the opening credits.) That's the film! It's something like a five-round fight as the overconfident Priest White Lotus beats Liu's Hung Wei-Ting again and again, but always manages to find a way to leave him alive for the next film. And there's some training sequences--Gordon has to learn ladies' kung fu to get in striking distance of Priest White Lotus (which means his voice drops an octave while he fights) and then learn acupuncture (to find the priest's fatal point. It's a really memorable scene when he slows Priest White Lotus down enough to run through all the pressure points he can think of with the needles he hid in his hair.) Other than the fights there's a bunch of training sequences with Gordon beating on his comic relief sidekick and Kara Hui telling him to stop beating on his comic relief sidekick before he kills him. When she's not teaching him about feminine kung fu. She somehow manages to really stand out despite not having a huge role--she's basically Gordon Liu's coach. It's decent stuff--a couple of the later fight scenes are really memorable, as is the initial fight where Gordon loses his brother and his girlfriend to those no good Chings.

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