No Surrender Cinema: The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu
Two young rebels who spend their time getting into fights on behalf of the less fortunate are recruited to rid their city of the deadly Dragon Gang. With a cast of characters that includes coffin makers, corrupt officials, and a femme fatale, have these fighters finally met their match? It’s time for some kung-fu chaos in this edition of No Surrender Cinema as I look back at another entry from the seemingly endless supply of 70’s and 80’s martial arts movies. Read on to find out more about The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu!
Right from the get-go, we find out that our heroes don’t take crap from anybody. While enjoying a nice relaxing day of fishing, Hung Wen-Ting and Hu Ah-Piao see a father and daughter’s boat get hijacked by a gang who has some nefarious plans for the girl once she becomes their captive. Luckily, the two fishermen are well versed in the ways of the fighting arts, and waste no time leaping into action and disposing of the villains. This doesn’t sit well with these men, who are members of the feared Dragon Gang, which is led by the sinister Dragon Lady. After reporting back to their leader, the gang finds Hu and engages in an all out assault that includes flour bombs, flaming wagons, and bamboo spears. Hu is able to fend off his attackers, but is jailed after being forced to relent in order to spare the life of a local girl who is being threatened by a corrupt judge.
After Hu’s surrender, Hung is alerted to the situation and heads into town to bail his brother out (though not literally). After a bit of trickery, Hung helps his brother and a rather portly inmate escape, complete with pig oinking sound effects dubbed in for the latter! After engaging in a bit of Three Stooges-esque buffoonery, our reunited heroes engage in battle with the guards briefly, only to both end up behind bars. It turns out that the brothers are not the only ones causing trouble for the local government, as the Emperor has decreed that he wants the Dragon Gang eliminated, ASAP. After some discussion, the idea of having Hu and Hung released for the sole purpose of acting on those orders comes up. If they die in battle, so be it; if they succeed in defeating the gang, the government will kill them after the fact. Hu and Hung are once again free men, though they do take revenge on the official who imprisoned them and help their friend out of jail as they had previously promised. Man, you know, for a movie about secret kung fu, there’s already been an awful lot of fighting. It can’t be that much of a secret if it’s being used so frequently, can it?
The Dragon Gang isn’t happy about their new rivals being able to walk around freely, but their first encounter with the duo post-prison doesn’t go well for them, with Hu and Hung laying the smackdown on more gang members and even tossing one of their enemies from the film’s first encounter down a well! The pair also tries their hand at a little subterfuge to try and bring the Dragon Gang down, with one of them posing as a prospective husband for the Dragon Lady! Things seem to be getting hot and heavy, but all a ploy for her to let her guard down. The assassination attempt fails, and nearly claims Hung’s life once he’s struck with one of the Dragon Lady’s poison darts! The brothers narrowly escape and regroup, but regrouping is exactly what the mistress and her Dragon Gang are doing. The gang is now out for blood, going so far as to employ the services of a sorcerer who casts a spell that creates a “demon”…an overweight fighter who acts as the sorcerer’s zombie henchman. The first encounter between the heroic duo and the mindless monster doesn’t go so well for the good guys, as the demon withstands the assault…including a sequence where the brothers use giant sledgehammers and pound him into the ground like a kung fu version of Whack A Mole…and tosses them through the wall of the local coffin-maker’s shop!
The brothers survive (much to the dismay of the coffin maker, whose business has been thriving thanks to Hu and Hung’s war with the Dragon Gang), but their ladyfriend is now a captive of the sorcerer and the Dragon Gang! As it turns out, landing in the coffin shop turns out to be a fortuitous circumstance for our heroes. The coffin maker’s daughter is immediately smitten with the Hu and Hung, and tells them that in order to defeat the Dragon Gang, they must first learn the way of the Dragon Fist. In addition, she’s able to whip up a concoction that’s going to allow the brothers to defeat the sorcerer’s demon when the inevitable rematch occurs. The brother’s bumrush the Dragon Gang’s lair, only to end up imprisoned next to the girl they were there to save! Thankfully for them the Coffin Maker’s Daughter (not the Coal Miner’s Daughter) comes to the rescue, destroying the demon with her concoction (which included garlic…was this brute also a vampire?) and freeing her new friends from captivity. From that point on, the remainder of The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu‘s runtime is devoted to our dynamic kung fu duo engaging in all our war with the Dragon Gang, going toe to toe with everyone from various henchmen to the sorcerer and the gang’s lethal lady leader!
The final minutes of the film, which featuring our heroes splitting up to take on the sorcerer and the Dragon Lady separately before ultimately teaming up to battle the former, is some of the wildest kung fu action I’ve seen in a while (and think of the ground that covers). It’s here in the climactic battle that we see one of these characters invoke his “frog style”, complete with ribbit noises and images of a frog spliced into the fight sequence. Not only is a coffin used as a weapon, but it’s weaponized by being launched as a projectile. TWICE. All in all, it’s a fairly crazy finale for a film that, up to that point, had been rather by the numbers.
The typical kung fu tropes are plentiful in The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu; editing that can make things confusing, a soundtrack that doesn’t fit (the synthwave used for this film feels like it would be perfect in an episode of Miami Vice, while the “happy music” sounds downright country), odd sound effects (real people don’t sound like planes taking off when they throw jump kicks), and the usual amount of the word “bastard” thrown in. It also has two likable heroes, comedy that is remarkably clever in its subtlety (the bit about the coffin maker appreciating the fact that Hu and Hung have been killing off the Dragon Gang since it increased his business is actually funny), and a variety of villains that helps it stand out from the pack of roughly 12, 795 other kung fu films released around this time. The “demon” wandering around in shredded clothes like a sumo Hulk, only to be defeated by something that can kill Dracula was certainly a choice, but it made for a memorable one (though not as memorable as Dracula himself actually showing up in Kung Fu From Beyond The Grave).
I’m not sure why this film was called The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu since we had two heroes equal in stature, and there was really nothing secret, save for the passing mention of our heroes needing to know Dragon Fist style. What I do know is that this is another film that doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in kung fu circles; there’s only a handful of other reviews out there despite the fact that this film has lapsed into the public domain and can be watched anywhere online or on a variety of kung fu DVD compilations. With that level of availability you’d think someone else would have stumbled upon it just by accident, but it took my travels down Tubi’s kung fu rabbit hole to bring this one back to the surface. Since we all know I love bringing the lesser known kung fu content to the forefront, I’ll take that as a win, especially since this is a film that I’d recommend all of you readers out there spend your time on in the very near future.
The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu is currently available to stream on Tubi, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and pretty much everywhere else. Physical media collectors such as myself can also find it on DVD by itself and on compilations produced by Mill Creek.
