Released in Hong Kong 10/31/72 as ON THE WATERFRONT (aka Kung Fu Girl Fighter), this is a clumsy adventure starred by Chang Yu (aka Chang Yi), a good performer with a filmography of almost 100 titles, including some classics like Sammo hung's The Victim. Here Chang Yu is the good guy helping the late actress Tang Pao Yun (who appeared in 48 movies, including the wonderful Epic drama Execution in Autumn, 1972), in her vengeance against the mobster Chen Hung Lieh, another big character-actor from the old days of HK cinema. Taiwanese Kung-Fu movies vet Tien Yueh (The One Armed Boxer, 1971) plays another in his gallery of badguys. There are familiar faces like Shih Ting Ken, Ma Chin Kou and many others in the stuntmen department, but all in all this is a very badly aged actioner. The martial arts director was actor Yao Tien Lung, a star himself in movies like The Bamboo Brotherhood/The match of dragon and tiger, and Infernal streets. You can see this ON THE WATERFRONT more like an archive document about how they made independent Kung-Fu cinema in the 70's, than as a real solid film. Mediocre but not too boring.
2 Reviews
Taiwanese cheapie
Leofwine_draca14 November 2017
Warning: Spoilers
I caught this on Amazon Prime under the title KUNG FU GIRL FIGHTER, although the original ON THE WATERFRONT is a better fit. It's a cheap Taiwanese crime drama with a handful of fighting scenes that don't really capitalise yet on the whole 'kung fu' genre of the early 1970s as best evinced by Lo Lieh's KING BOXER and Bruce Lee's ENTER THE DRAGON. This is more of a gangster film as rival criminal gangs strive for control of the waterfront while hired mercenaries turn up and try to thwart them. There is a female fighter in the film but she doesn't make much of an impression compared to somebody like Angela Mao and the film as a whole is too cheap and old-fashioned to take seriously.
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