This chaotic poster was made for a 1986 Taiwanese kung fu movie called Ren zhe da, which in English was renamed Ninja: The Final Duel. It stars Wang Chi Chung acting under the name Alexander Lo, along with Alan Lee and Alice Tseng. We gather the film is distilled from an eight hour television series. Cutting all that footage down to a ninety minute adventure makes for a final product that’s choppy (see what we did there?), but the basic idea is the Ji Ho Clan wishes to defeat the Shaolin Temple, which is protected by the heroic Lo, two Hare Krishna martial arts experts, a renowned African American monk from Harlem, and others.
The film is notable for Alice Tseng’s pivotal fight scene, in which—à la Reiko Ike in Sex & Fury—she battles a group of men while naked. If you unrepentantly use the freeze frame feature on your telly the fight is a vulva memorable sequence. Also memorable is the Harlem monk, played by Eugene Thomas acting under the name Eugene T. Trammel. His dialogue is dubbed by a voice actor imitating black vernacular English, but with an appalling Taiwanese accent. As surprising as the explicitness of Tseng’s nude sword battle is, the black monk’s ghettofied dialogue is, in a way, even crazier. We can’t imagine why the filmmakers thought that was a good idea, but as unintentional humor goes, it’s top tier.
The fighting between Ji Ho Clan and Shaolin Temple builds to a climax, with various good guys making the ultimate sacrifice, until finally, as in many kung fu movies, the grizzled (but surprisingly spry) Shaolin master shows up to restore order by whipping ass on the best enemy fighter. Why doesn’t the old master just fight this guy immediately and save his loyal underlings a lot of effort and pain? The Buddha once famously said, and we’re paraphrasing, “Be loathe to pull thine disciples’ bacon from the fire, because, after all, there is nothing more replaceable than a loyal follower.” Or something like that. In any case, Ren zhe da is a movie kung fu aficionados must see.
