Shaolin Temple



I've been loving the new Shaw Brothers DVDs from Celestial. They all look great, and it's great to see movies that have otherwise been available.

Shaolin Temple (from 1976, not to be confused with the Jet Li film of the same name) crams the whole galaxy of Shaw Brother stars into one very dense movie. The first fifteen minutes introduces no less than 15 main characters, including six Ching rebels, five wanna-be Shaolin students, three righteous Shaolin monks, one traitorous monk, and one female monk who always keeps her back to the camera. Plus a partridge in a pear tree.

Because every actor (including Ti Lung and David Chiang) has to get an opportunity to do some martial arts, Shaolin Temple has less than a coherent story. Most of the time I was trying to figure out which were the characters I was supposed to be following. Most of the early running time is taken up with the obligatory Shaolin training sequences, with students chained to the ceiling and forced to stir cauldrons of food with a pole or forced to walk on rice paper covering pointed rocks, without breaking the paper!

Towards the middle of the film two of the students decide they have learned to enough martial arts (they joined because they secretly wanted revenge on someone, a Shaolin no-no) and try to escape the temple through a hall of rotating wooden dummies. If you remember old video games where you had to make the correct jump again and again, you get the idea.

The last half hour is devoted to the Ching storming the temple, with about a couple of dozen extras and canned crowd noise supposed to represent a cast of thousands. I have no idea why the Ching would do this, and the movie doesn’t explain. Several plot threads are left dangling (like who was the woman with her back to the camera?), and many characters die before I had an idea who they were. I think that many of these characters were supposed to be folk heroes or famous fictional characters, so the intended audience already knew who they were. Be that as it may, this is probably my least favorite of the DVDs I’ve gotten from Celestial.

Posted: Thu - November 20, 2003 at      

©