MARTIAL ARTS OF SHAOLIN (1986)
Directed By: Lau Kar-leung
Starring: Jet Li, Yu Hai, Huang Qiu-yan

Step aside, Clyde, and prepare yourself for an old school high with a Jet Li twist featuring Northern style kicks and Southern fist. All movie cycles have to end and old school martial arts movies went out with a bang in Lau Kar-leung and Jet Li's Gotterdammerung, Martial Arts of Shaolin, one of the very first Chinese/Hong Kong co-productions, the last Shaw Brothers film, the last film Lau Kar-leung made for Shaw, the only time Jet Li worked with Lau, and a masterpiece of mutally assured martial arts destruction.

Let me break it down for you:

STEP - this is Jet Li's third flick, the kid's already a five time wu shu champ, 24 years old, and beating down audiences in one film after another.

STEP - Lau Kar-leung directed this fine madness, and he’s the OG of martial arts with a daddy who was a student of Wong Fei-hung’s hippest student, Butcher Wing, himself. Versed in a variety of ass-kicking from a very young age right at his daddy’s knee, he wouldn’t die until 2013, and between the day they buried him and the day he popped out of his mother, he whipped the butts of Jackie, Sammo, and his own brother.

STEP - Hong Kong's tight technical crew came to China to film in the Shaolin Temple and up and down the Great Wall of China, filming these freaked out Shaolin mofos spinning on their heads, running up walls, screeching like banshees and decimating their opponents with iron yo-yos.

Dig it: Jet Li's dad gets killed by the Man, Lord Suo, and Jet's sent to Shaolin Temple to forget about it and transcend the material world. No can do. One word that his pops has been offed and he's a kung fu slinging suicide bomber on a mission of mayhem. He makes a play for Suo at his birthday party but is foiled by some other assassins because everyone wants Lord Suo dead! A rolling brawl rumbles across the countryside panoramic as Suo's crew chases the tails of Jet and company - a Southern Shaolin monk and a jacked up chick who knows a thing or two about grrrl-fu.

You know what happens at the end (it's a movie, after all): Jet Li makes like a kung fu mechanic - he gets up under Lord Suo's hood and fixes him but good. But on the way to that conclusion this movie shows you sights that'll fry your eyes and serve 'em over toast. Ultra-rare, ultra-Jet, grrl-fu, wu shu - it’s totally Jetted out, so come up close, and taste this kung fu overdose.