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Half a Loaf of Kung Fu

In Half a loaf of Kung Fu, Jackie plays a young man desperate for a job. Unfortunately he's always picking fights without having the Kung Fu skills to back up his bravado. He finds a job as servant, but makes the mistake of spying on she-who-must-not-be-disturbed and one of the other servants ends up dead. Naturally, Jackie runs off. He chances upon the great whip hero attempting to put an end to a notorious bandit, but distracts him at the wrong moment and both fighters end up dead.

Discovering a bounty note on the body of the great whip hero, Jackie impersonates him so he can collect the reward on the also-dead bandit. While out strutting he bumps into his former boss and the woman he spied on. He runs off, but they catch up. He then accidently kills his former boss and is only saved from a thorough thrashing by the woman when a passing beggar (who is also a Kung Fu master) intervenes. Jackie begs him to teach him Kung Fu, and eventually the beggar agrees if Jackie will run an errand for him first. The errand turns out to be escorting a treasure (the evergreen jade) which every bandit in the area wants to steal.

The story then becomes very complicated with every character either working for or being related to every other character. Since everyone seems to guess he's not the real whip hero (the real whip hero's sister even turns up) Jackie eventually learns some Kung Fu by reading a manual, so that by the end of the film he's an expert.

This film was designed to poke fun at all the clichés of the traditional martial arts films (every beggar is a Kung Fu master, the really bad guys have moustaches and bad wigs etc.) and is very funny if you're at all familiar with such films. Having said that, for a comedy there's a lot of blood and deaths. The fight scenes aren't particularly impressive, being over choreographed (presumably for comic effect), but there are some great moments, like when Jackie tears a bad guys fake moustache off in mid-battle, and the big baddy's cheesy bad guy laugh. Definitely a film that should be watched as a spoof for maximum enjoyment.

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