The Four Shaolin Challengers (1977)
Lin Che Jong, A student of Wong Fei Hung stands up to gangsters from the local crime family,and opens a Kung Fu school in town. The gangsters take revenge by killing students and destroying the school.The town is run by a local crime lord named Shao Pei Lee, a notorious fugitive. Shao Pei Lee in turn enlists the help of a group of villainous fighters known as "The Yangtze Four" to battle Lin Che Jong and his brothers as they try to expose the corrupt officials and rid the town of Shap Pei Lee
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In this Hong Kong action flick, members of a martial arts school find themselves up against a gang of thugs, after the latter wage a reign of terror on innocent locals.The Four Shaolin Challengers is another in a seemingly endless line of low budget 70's chopsocky movies. Like most in the sub-genre this one features mind-bogglingly bad dubbing and copious martial arts fighting scenes, while its story-line can best be described as 'routine'. Where this one scores though is in its very impressive extended final show-down where we see several fights playing out simultaneously. This is a pretty interesting and memorable finale which includes the use of some original weaponry such as cymbals and an umbrella, both of which are put to deadly use. It's this well executed show-down that makes this one worth watching, the rest of the movie otherwise being pretty by-the-numbers.
This is a somewhat by-the-numbers screenplay performed and choreographed by a bunch of actors and stunt-men who were just going through the motions for their next paycheck, but it's a decent little movie. The movie kills a lot of time waiting for the final big showdown between the Four Challengers and the "Yangtze Four" hired by the Triads, but the final fight takes a full ten minutes and is a fair amount of fun. (It also counts as the first time I've ever seen a guy use a pair of hand cymbals as a weapon. It makes for an interesting sound design.) One drawback is the dubbing. You don't expect subtle, layered performances in a mass-produced effort like this, but the ESL voice acting is almost unbearable at times. It sounds as if three men (tops) did the voices for all the villains, and they just yell their lines like they are shouting down a mine shaft. Minus at least one star for the dub job. I got this movie as part of a public domain 50 movie DVD collection, so I think I paid a total of 50 cents for it. It was better than the other three movies on the DVD with it, and it was worth seeing once for curiosity's sake.