Eagle vs Silver Fox

Eagle vs Silver Fox (1980) is one of the best bad kung fu flicks I've seen. You are free to interpret that statement as you wish. There's a pretty good pre-credits fight between the titular Silver Fox and some guy who is hiding a piece of paper with a message which Fox wants. Right before he kills the messenger by kicking him in the chest three times, Silver Fox jumps up and grabs the guy around the neck with his bent leg and kicks him in the head with his other leg, which was pretty impressive.



The credits are hilarious, because the words fly to the front of the screen out of trees, a guy's shin, and, in the case of the executive producer's credit, out of a guy's ass.

Next we see another group of guys receiving a message to transport from some guys at a monastery. The message looks like two Chinese characters on a sheet of paper; I don't know why one of them doesn't just memorize it, but I guess then the movie would be over. Of course, Silver Fox (who is the villain here, by the way) sends another group of dudes to get this message too, and during the fight we see one of the bad guys doing some shifty eyes. When they get back to Silver Fox they don't have the message because they threw all the bodies in the river. But Fox doesn't punish them for this bit of genius. Somehow he knows that the shifty eyed guy was working against him and let one man escape with his life, so Fox crushes his throat.



Some old dude finds the guy who was let go with his life lying by the riverside and takes him to his house, then begins coughing. Next we see a bunch of assholes walking along, jumping around and being obnoxious on their way to one of those inn/teahouses you see in every one of these movies. My husband was pretty impressed when I said there was gonna be a fight in the teahouse and I turned out to be right; that's because I've seen a couple of kung fu movies. The owner of the place was cowardly and the gang leader talked like Snidely Whiplash.



The guy who fought them all before they could really do any damage, but after they ran off all the customers, was of course the man who escaped from Silver Fox's guys earlier. The fight was cool, because he fought two of them by throwing chicken at them and making them catch it in their mouths, and a third guy got thrown up the bannister and then slid back down and racked himself on the newel.

I should tell you now that in the teahouse there is a pickpocket character who starts off as a man with a female dubbing the voice, leaves, and comes back with the same female voice actor doing the dubbing but now the actor is female too. She robs the hero, he robs her back, and then she follows him off down the road. Then things get nonsensical. They meet an old man and the pickpocket lady asks him for some food. He kicks her ass, and then starts telling our hero a long story about his own training that ends up being a flashback back to the coughing guy who rescued the hero. Then we get a long boring training sequence including the trainee standing in a river while a Sousa type march plays. Then he accidentally kills the trainer, we go back to the present, and there is some more fighting with a different roving band of jerks. The lady man falls in the river, goes to change clothes, then is peeped on by some itchy guy who appears from behind a bush. Then we learn that the chick was supposed to have been disguising herself as a guy! This is the first time I've ever seen that plot device used when the character was played by a man in an earlier scene. Even Tommy Wiseau used actors of the same gender when a character was inexplicably played by two actors in The Room.



Oh boy. Now the leader of the first gang meets up with a member of the second gang at the teahouse, and they commiserate about having been beaten up by our hero and pickpocket. "Ha, ha, you got beat up by a girl." "You got beat up by a girl too! Wait, that was a girl?" Then it comes out that all the marauders are part of the original group who killed the second messenger. They probably were different actors in the beginning too, since I didn't recognize them.

Hero guy tries to teach pickpocket lady that fighting is wrong by, what else, fighting her. He even takes her hand and hits her in the face with it. Thankfully, he doesn't say "why are you hitting yourself?" while he does it.

Back at the teahouse, a bald thug from the beginning joins the other wounded thugs, only his voice actor has changed from the dumbass "which way did he go, George" guy to Bob Hoskins. There's another fight with these thugs. Pickpocket lady beats Bob Hoskins/Lenny with a spoon and Hero chokes the other two. The old guy from earlier appears on top of a rock.



The bodies get back to Silver Fox somehow and as they lie on the lawn Bob is taken to task for having survived. Fox opines that "everything you want done, you must do yourself." Fox surmises that the hero and the pickpocket are after him right before receiving a note to that effect. The henchmen beg him to let them kill the two, who are meanwhile hanging out with the old guy and have now admitted to each other that they know they are old acquaintances who have been betrothed since they were younger. Hero plans to fight Fox to the death tomorrow and I can't fucking wait. The girl tearfully begs to go to the fight too and the old man laughs maniacally.

Then in a lovely blue-colored day to night sequence (we know it's night because of the cricket sounds) the old man finds two new thugs outside and beats the shit out of them while trying to keep them quiet. I guess he doesn't want to wake the lovers? He actually takes one guy's hand, holds it over his head and spins him around like a dance partner.



At daylight our hero meets Bob and another bald dude in a field. He says he wants to fight Silver Fox, not two boiled eggs. He jumps up and stands with one foot on each of their heads. They put him in a coffin. He climbs out and fights them with gratuitous reverb sound effects, then sends them back on a wagon covered in burlap to where Fox is ill-advisedly hosting a premature victory party. He orders the burlap removed, then he and the music act like we're supposed to be surprised that dead henchmen are in fact revealed. I don't know how the Fox dude made it to this movie, which is a sequel, he is so dumb.

Hero arrives and Fox asks if it is his custom to come announced. Hero asks if he needs an invitation to come and kill him! (Oh, snap). The old man displays some more appearing powers, and uses some kind of tickle fu on some bad guys, then sits down and eats Fox's huge feast while watching pickpocket lady fight some guys with swords. Fox seems to have the upper hand, even dealing Hero a very dusty foot to the face and later standing on his thighs like they're doing a cheerleading stunt and smacking him in the face. Finally the old man helps out and they kill Fox just as the movie reveals that he is the reincarnation/ghost of the dead trainer. And you thought the bad guys were gonna win! Last line of the film, from the old man: "merciful Buddha, I thank you."



Like I said, this is a good bad movie. It's not even so bad it's good; it's in the odd condition of being good and bad at the same time. You can find it on DVD as a Black Belt Theater release. Unlike many such old kung fu DVDs, this one has trailers and deleted fight scenes. I recommend you do if you like fighting for the sake of seeing the choreography, but not if you enjoy a good plot.