Greatest Kung Fu Movies
Submitted by jokow11 on Tue, 07/24/2001 - 10:39
Tags:
- Ong Bak - I just got this from Thailand. Wow! Incredible fighting. No wire-fu. Just incredible stuff. Everyone who has watched can't believe it. Only version I could get is in Thai with no subtitles but the plot isn't very hard to figure out. It was the no. 1 movie in Thailand last year. See it if you can. You'll never look at Muay Thai fighting the same way again.
- Mad Monkey Kung Fu - My second favorite Shaw Brothers film. Played mostly for laughs, the fight scenes are acrobatic marvels. The training sessions where he learns to act, live, and fight like a monkey are great and quite astonishing.
- Fist of Legend - Jet Li. Hands down the greatest fight scenes ever filmed. No martial artist has ever looked so deadly. Well filmed and directed.
- Drunken Master II - Jackie Chan's return to kung fu films after his action roles. Great fight scenes (the axe gang scene and the final confrontation are brutal). Make sure you get the wide screen version of this or you'll miss stuff. Also very funny.
- Master of the Flying Guillotine - A very early film which is not quite up to the more modern films. The Street Fighter video game was based on the tournament in this movie. Great weapon work with the flying guillotine (used by a blind guy looking for a one-armed man). Beware of films with clone titles - they aren't very good.
- Wong Fei Hung (renamed "Once Upon a Time in China" in the USA) - A series of 5 films starring Jet Li and directed by Tsui Hank. All the films are beautifully shot and would be great historical movies even without the fighting. The 2nd film relies less on fight scenes than the 1st and third. I would recommended viewing all in order. Much better subtitled than dubbed.
- Enter the Dragon - Bruce Lee. Most people have seen this film. Bruce goes to the island - kicks everyone's butt. Much better than some of his earlier films wher he tends to mug at the camera and not fight very much.
- Challengers From the East (Kung Fu versus Ninja, has many titles) - The greatest Shaw Brothers film ever made. A Chinese man marries a Japanese girl. They fight over whose kung fu is better. He ends up fighting the greatest fighters from Japan one by one. The best weapons fight scene in a kung fu movie. Not only does this have great fights, it's well acted and really funny.
Author Comments:
This is based on the best technical fighting scenes, best stories, and best action.
Interesting! Most sites I've seen that mention the Shaw Brothers list Five Deadly Venoms and The Kid With the Golden Arm as the top movies (or it could just be that those gravitate to my eye, since they are the only ones I recognize). I remember loving them both, although I haven't seen either in probably 15 to 20 years. Apparently the available VHS and DVD prints of many Shaw Bros. films are in pretty bad shape, but there's some hope, as the rights to the Shaw collection were bought a little over a year ago. No news that I can find since then though.
The rap group "The Wu Tang Clan" has been rereleasing some kung fu movies with intros and rap videos added. New Shaw Brothers stuff is coming out sporadically at best. Unfortunetly some of them are the edited for TV versions with the blood cut out of the movie (I just bought Dirty Ho and it was cut). Five Deadly Venoms is good but I don't think the fight scenes stand up with the one's on my list. I like it a lot, I just don't think it's up to it's rep. My friend loves Kid with the Golden Arm. It has a great plot and story, but the kung fu is a little too "strike, pause, strike, pause" for my tastes. Both are good movies.
hi jokow1, need to find eng or spanish subtitles for dirty ho & the kid with the golden arms
I recently saw Once Upon a Time in China and enjoyed it. Although I think my favorite part was the commentary track by Ric Meyers. In fact, I liked it enough to get his book, which I've just started reading.
If you liked it, be sure to see Fist of Legend. I also just bought Jet Li's Fong Sai Yuk (I believe it's called "The Legend" in the USA). It was great. Very funny. The sequel wasn't as good though.
Wow, you saw Ong Bak! I'm so green about the gills. Where'd you get it?
http://www.ethaicd.com/show.php?pid=9642
$7, includes shipping for VCD. Good quality. DVD is PAL only. No Subtitles. Thai Only. My bank actually called when I ordered it to let me know a Thai bank had used my card. The lady on the phone wasn't hip to Ong-bak.
:-) The heathen.
Thanks for the info, I may just give that a shot!
Copies of Ong Bak have also been floating around the file sharing sites, especially those using BitTorrent. That's how I got mine.
I'd love to give that a shot, but I live in the sticks so I'm stuck on a dial-up line. It'd probably take me a week to download.
Out of curiousity (and broadband-envy), how's that work, once you've downloaded the complete file? Do you burn it to VCD or DVD and watch it on your regular player, or do you watch it on your computer?
You have to remember that today's scenes and movies have a lot of help from technology and a lot of scenes have little special effects added, so the scene still looks human like, but it isn't, however in the olden movies like some of Jackie Chan's and Bruce Lee's it was just them and obviously everyone knows that in a lot of Bruce Lee's movies, the film had to be slowed down because he was too fast!