Continuing Hong Kong Film Net's summer of Godfrey Ho, today we are offering up a review of his 1982 picture Fury in Shaolin Temple. While this movie does not subscribe to Ho's usual cut-and-paste formula, it still has all the earmarks of a low-budget production that was quickly slapped together to dupe a few sheckles out of naive viewers who see Gordon Liu's image on the cover, and thus expect a production that has some modicum of quality.

Even though Fury in Shaolin Temple is comprised of all original footage -- something fairly unique in the bizarro world of Godfrey Ho's cinematic output -- it still comes off like Ho was planning on recycling some of what he shot, as the narrative is incredibly disjointed to the point where it starts to fail to make any sense. The best I can piece together, there's a monk who was kicked out of the Shaolin temple who wants to get the manual for the mystical "wind fist" so that he can enact his revenge. Thus, it's up to a pair of brothers (Gordon Liu and Phillip Ko) to team up and combine their kung fu styles in order to put a stop to the nefarious plan.

For the most part, Fury in Shaolin Temple is your usual old-school kung fu revenge flick, with nothing to distinguish itself from the hundreds of similar films that have come out of Hong Kong before and since. Godfrey Ho's trademark craziness is seldom seen here, with one of the only instances being a scene where a group of Shaolin monks are wearing unitards during a fight. Are they mastering kung fu or sweating to the latest Jane Fonda exercise video? As bizarre as the scene is, at least it shows something a little different and interesting, something which the majority of the movie fails to do.

To their credit, Gordon Liu and Phillip Ko seem to have been trying awfully hard, especially for a low-budget production such as this, which results in Fury in Shaolin Temple's few bright spots via a handful of competent training and fighting scenes. But a couple of good brawls are not nearly enough to justify setting aside eighty-two minutes to watching this movie, especially since the only readily available version for North American viewers is from the notorious grey-market label Ground Zero, who have taken a page out of Ho's own playbook and associated their DVD (which looks like it was sourced from a fifth-generation VHS) with the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, which -- after sitting through this sub-par effort -- only serves to piss off both kung fu and hip-hop fans.

RATING: 4