The One-Armed Magic Nun 
              
Director: Chan Lit-ban
Year: 1969
Rating: 6.0
This Cantonese (though my version was dubbed into Mandarin) martial arts fantasy from 1969 was rather fun though as dusty as the space under my bed. The action is old-fashioned, creaky and charming. Clearly made on the cheap using low-rent sets that look like they have been used a thousand times before. And I am sure they were. But I very much enjoyed this battle between good and evil and the fantasy elements within. It creates a great roster of bad guys and good guys. It takes place just as the Ming Dynasty is being threatened by the Qings at the border. There seems little hope that they can turn them back and the Emperor seems unable to make decisions.  The general at the border realizes all is lost and so asks Hua Yuan Biao (Lui Kei) to escort his niece to safety. The niece, Wen Feng Zi, is played by the lovely Suet Nei, one of the female action stars of Cantonese cinema. On the way they are first attacked by the Lu Long Five Ghosts, a group of three men and two women who try and insult their foes to death and give hearty laughs while doing so. Hua accuses them of breaking the rules of Jiang Hu - we steal treasure, not women. They laugh some more.



Hua fights them off but then he realizes that all the men with him have been killed and the niece kidnapped by Jin Diao Er (Yung Yuk-yi) with her Ghost Claws as weapons and sharp fangs making her ineligible for the Miss China contest. She is the thing of nightmares. Hua chases after her but runs into another fang enhanced person who looks at Hua as his next meal. It is turning into a bad day for Hua. He is knocked out only to wake up to find himself in Shaolin Temple which is the size of a theater stage.



These are Mings and their leader is the One-Armed Magic Nun (Lin Jing) who explains to Hua that Ba Ba Taoist is leading a rebellion of fifteen sects against the Emperor because they may as well be on the winning side. Ba Ba is of course played by the evil white haired Sek Kin. It is up to Hua to defeat them. Unfortunately, Hua is not very competent and has a thing for the niece who has been brainwashed by the zombie woman into thinking she is her daughter but also given kung-fu powers.  Suet Nei is adorable playing a pouting psycho with intentions of killing everyone in the temple. The most damage she does is biting men's noses.



Lui Kei who plays Hua was a big Cantonese star at the time and would later go on to direct many of those Shaw erotic films. In the cast is also Simon Yuen as the monk in red and near the end you can spot Sammo as one of the bad guys banging on the drum. After all the fighting is over, the One-Armed Magic Nun tells them that the Qings have overrun the border and nothing can stop them - so they need to go off and hide and wait for the right time to reclaim their country. That time of course comes about three hundred years later. Directed by Chan Lit-ban who directed quite a few Cantonese martial arts films and the choreography is from Leung Siu-chung, father of Bruce Leung who shifted over to Shaws once the Cantonese film industry went into decline. Some of his Shaw films are the 14 Amazons, Lady of Steel, Lady of the Law and Lady Hermit.