Story in Temple Red Lily (1979 dubbed release, originally Lui xuan liang huo shao hong lian si, 1976) features a Sung dynasty swordswoman played by Chia Ling from Thousand Mile Escort (Ren ba shao, 1976).

She received the Golden Horse award for her performance in Peter Yang Kwan & Florence Yu Fung-Chi's The Escape (Ren, 1972) & can be quite thrilling to watch in anything.

The dvd version of Story in Temple Red Lily I've viewed, the only one I could find, was atrociously dubbed sad to say.

If not for the fact that I'm easy to please when there's a swordswoman in the tale, I might not have made it through to the end, as I just entirely prefer to see such films in Chinese.

It's possibly a good enough film to merit remastering with removeable subtitles so that it can be seen in its original language, though difficult to judge in its currently circulating state how good it might be in correct presentation.

It's evidently a remake of a feature-length chapter of Huo shao hong lian si (1928-1931), originally an 18-movies serial that ran to 27 hours, one chapter widely circulated as a self-contained movie The Burning of Red Temple Monastary.

The 1976 Taiwan remake is based on a long-running newspaper serial by Zhenggiu Zheng. The 1920s film set is regarded as the starting poing for the golden age of kung fu cinema.

The remake, as dubbed in 1979, is pretty much impossible to make complete sense of where the story is concerned, though I'll make a stab at doing so:

A "drunken kung fu" expert is a wildly laughing weirdo, who proves he can defeat the well trained & sober monks, being careful not to hurt them.

The high lama teaches an absurd "magic temple bells kung fu." In service of an evil white-haired baron, he killed all the monks of a rival sect, apparently a sect who supported the Emperor & his heir whom the baron wants to usurp.

Chia Ling plays swordswoman Wong Chu, a rebel against the old baron. Wong Ye (Dorian Tao-Ling Tan), brother of Wong Chu, is a heroic general who wants to protect the young prince whose destiny is to rule the nation.

The baron, quite naturally for an evil s.o.b. wants the prince dead, this fact provided merely as an excuse for more kung fu fighting.

Our heroic force is attacked all along the route in the attempt to transport the prince to a place of greater safety.

The high lama fights by means of cornpone magic arts, but for the rest, most of the swordplay is down-to-earth rather than flying & magic nonsense.

Chia Ling looks especially fabulous doing comparatively realistic swordplay, though everyone else's choreography is a bit shy of excellent, weakening the action here & there.

The de rigour "fight at the inn" early in the tale is a tepid variation for the inn location seen in film after film after film.

Many of the characters do fail to shine in the stock situations without original interpretations, but this failure may in great part be the fault of the dubbing. Whatever nuance the film might've had originally is stripped away by the amateurs reading it back in English.

One goofy element renders this mainly a kiddy flick, & that's the big silly stuffed bird used as a flying steed. The stuffed bird also has the ability to peck out bad guys' eyes.

Adding to the kid-vid worthiness is the hoop-fighting child, Kee Chee, stronger than many monks. For climax, we get to see a cute little model of the Red Temple burn down.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl