Story in Temple Red Lily, The (1979)

Officials plot with members of the Red Lotus Temple to overthrow and kill a young prince, while his loyal lieutenant and several heroes attempt to save him.

Highflying swordplay, an oversize bird of prey, and a bag full of genre conventions are not enough to save The Story in Temple Red Lily from mediocrity. This convoluted mess of a swordplay film attempts to rekindle the magic of the earliest classics, but only manages to stumble at every step. On top of that, it’s simply a snorer.

The plot is difficult to get a handle on since the filmmakers felt it necessary to clumsily incorporate elements from so many other films. Basically, a prince discovers that a few of his ministers are attempting to kill him with the aid of Red Lotus Temple monks. His lieutenant and several heroes step up to defend him. Now how the film plays out this simple story is anything but simple.

First of all, there is a nod to the evil Red Lotus Temple. This is a famous episode in China’s history where the Temple becomes a haven for criminal monks. Yet this is a small budget film and what we see of the temple, its infamous traps, and the monks themselves are not very impressive. Shaw Brothers dealt with the subject of Red Lotus in a similar hands-off approach in 1965’s Temple of the Red Lotus, but Ringo Lam’s Burning Paradise (1994) focused on the temple in great detail. Those unimpressive monks wield these bells on chains that appear to be tapping into the popularity of the “flying guillotine” craze started with Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976).

The plot to kill the prince holds a few moments of excitement, as when the prince is waylaid by enemy soldiers who engage his loyal guards. The choreography in this portion and throughout the film is adequate, yet slow and old-fashioned by 1979 standards. The one exception is Tung Li’s open hand techniques. He gets in a teahouse brawl early on and displays fairly hard kung fu with a number of bone-breaking holds. Unfortunately, the pacing of the story drags through a lot of uninteresting dialogue. Then the choreography becomes sloppier rather than better towards the end.

This leads into more idiotic attempts at combining everything popular in kung fu over the last 50 years. For no reason they throw in a “drunken master” clone who acts as a spy for the prince and engages temple monks in a series of comic battles that generate no laughs. Anyone lucky enough to view some of China’s earliest martial arts films will recognize an attempt to draw from them as well. The two main heroes include Chia Ling as a swordswoman and her male accomplice. These two appear as typical knight-errantry righting wrongs for the people. But things become strange when a child wielding an iron ring and commanding a giant eagle gets added to the mix. This massive bird of prey is seen carrying the child, being mounted by an adult, and swooping in to peck the eyes out of a villain. The heroic duo and these fantastic aviary elements are reminiscent of a rare, silent era serial episode entitled Swordswoman of Huangjiang (1930). The improvements in special effects between these two films, separated by a 49 year span, are marginal.

The Story in Temple Red Lily is one film that tries too hard to be a success by tossing in genre leftovers while missing the point. As the kung fu boom was beginning to wind down, the only thing retaining audiences was higher quality kung fu in greater quantity, something masters of the genre like Sammo Hung, Lau Kar-leung, and the Yuen Clan were providing. With excellent superkicker Dorian Tan in a very small role, there just isn’t much left that’s worth recommending apart from passable swordplay in small doses.