Shaolin Drunken Monk (1982)

Lau Chung (Gordon Liu), the son of a martial arts master whose school was forcibly taken over by a senior student, returns after years of training from a drunken fist master to seek revenge alongside a one-handed stranger with a grudge of his own.

Shaw Brothers star Gordon Liu takes a break from studio features with his mentor Lau Kar-leung to star in the ultra-low budget kung fu flick Shaolin Drunken Monk. A low grade supporting cast and shoddy filmmaking all around insures that even Liu’s talents go to waste in what becomes another inferior Drunken Master clone. It’s one of a couple Korean productions Liu worked on with fellow Hong Kong stunt actor Chin Yuet-sang.

After watching a few of Liu’s excellent films at Shaw Brothers, it’s almost impossible to sit through this turkey, at least not without laughing. The production is a joke from start to finish, where continuity gets tossed out the window and the filmmakers opt for tawdry exploitation and gimmicks over quality martial arts action and philosophy. It’s not surprising when one looks at the talent behind the screen. Director Ulysses Au Yeung-jun is a B-moviemaker by all definitions, as The Secret of the Shaolin Poles, his cheap take on the Fong Sai-yuk legend proves. However, that film was generally entertaining despite its faults, whereas this one is not.

Frequent use of flashbacks that play out a dull story of one man’s campaign to usurp his master’s place as head of a kung fu school are overused and poorly constructed. Everyone’s acting is terrible and the normally respectable Liu is reduced to tying up and kidnapping his leading lady, laughing as she wets herself in terror, and leering as she bathes in the nude. Of course, this could only lead to a meaningful relationship and the two are soon making love. Liu ought to beware of fickle women though. Right before he abducted her, she had just finished telling some random dude how he was more important to her than her father. It’s not long before she has completely forgotten the first dude and is giving Liu the exact same line. Truly, this is Gordon Liu’s Killer Meteors, except that he was already an established star by this point, whereas Jackie Chan was still waiting for his big break when he starred in Lo Wei’s martial arts flop.

Billed as the film’s “kungfu supervisor,” master kung fu moviemaker Lau Kar-leung undoubtedly had little to do with the actual production of this film. The action director credit goes to Chin Yuet-sang, an experienced stunt actor whose credits include many quality genre films such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin with Gordon Liu and Sammo Hung’s The Prodigal Son. He turned to action direction and has had some success in that department, with relative hits like Dance of the Drunk Mantis and Hit Man in the Hand of Buddha. In Shaolin Drunken Monk, any attempt at quality action is compromised by poor direction or inferior stunt actors. Chin himself plays an idiotic Chinese ninja who blinks out at will and uses shuriken, an obvious nod to the popularity of ninjas at the time. His best scenes involves some reasonably complicated sparring with Liu where he uses a chain whip and relies more on his Chinese martial arts knowledge.

Liu easily performs the best out of the cast. Of note is his use of Drunken Fist boxing. The director completely flubs his training, making it all but impossible to believe that anyone could learn to master kung fu from an alcoholic vagabond with an unusually well-developed upper torso. Liu makes the best of it though, particularly at the end as he takes on a Korean martial arts actor named Kim Young-il, who plays the lead villain. Curiously, Liu’s character relies on other Shaolin kung fu techniques never acknowledged in the story, but familiar to any avid viewer of Liu’s other movies. Undercranking (speeding up the action) is noticeable and much of the sparring is still clunky by Hong Kong standards.

The best moment in Shaolin Drunken Monk for giving an overall impression of what can be expected is a “dramatic” montage where Liu’s lady friend mulls over being torn between her loyalty to her villainous father and Liu. Scenes from throughout the movie are thrown together with no thought to sequence or timing, including a scene that hasn’t even happened yet! If that’s not enough, Liu’s hair changes length from scene to scene and sets look they were constructed from garage sale leftovers. This movie, which has little to do with Shaolin, is an exploitation of Gordon Liu’s fame and offers nothing else except a cheap laugh for fans of bad movies.