Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion (1977)

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.

"Moonlight Sword & Jade Lion" tells us about a young fighting lady, played by Angela Mao, who is on the search for an old master. Nobody has seen him for months, it appears, so she keeps asking people "have you seen him?" and sometimes she fights them if she doesn't like the reply. Now, the movie has a couple of memorable moments, such as the hilarious fight against roughly 20 enemies at once who are holding flowers (sic!) which can shoot flames or darts. That doesn't help to disguise the fact the story isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes. The heroine spends a month wandering around looking for clues, doesn't find anything important, and most characters just seem to be introduced to confuse her and the audience a bit. And if they do intend to tell her anything, they suddenly have a knife in their back. It was a relief to see in the other reviews that nobody else understood what the Jade Lion was for, either. So in the end, "Moonlight Sword & Jade Lion" is worth watching only for fans of Angela Mao who bravely carries on despite the lack of story progress.

I saw this Angela Mao film on a double-feature DVD, where it was accompanied by "Yoga And The Kung-Fu Girl". I expected the former to be the better of the two, but boy was I wrong! "Moonlight Sword And Jade Lion" is one of the most badly made films I've seen in a LONG time. I stopped following the plot about 30 minutes in, and from that point on I had no idea what was going on, nor did I care. According to IMDb, this is the ONLY film that "screenwriter" Ren Chung ever worked on, and thank God for that! You might think that the fight scenes could possibly redeem the picture, but they don't: they range from the forgettable to the ridiculous (a lot of the characters seem to have unexplained superhuman abilities). Another disappointment is that Angela Mao does about 95% of her fighting with a spear. Still, her extreme beauty is the only reason this film escapes the lowest possible rating.

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.