Young Hero (1981) – A Movie A Day 2021 #55
Young Hero (1981) – A Movie A Day 2021 #55
After a brief break, I have rejoined my kung fu marathon. Today’s movie is another of the $1 DVDs I bought over the weekend, and it is titled Young Hero. The movie was distributed by the same company that put out the previous two kung fu movies I’ve written about so I don’t think there’s really a need to discuss the gloriously bad quality of the dubbed VHS they used as their source material. Nor do I really need to say anything about the DVD’s front cover containing images from some movie other than what is actually on the disc. With all of that left unsaid I can get right to the movie itself, and the movie itself is fun for what it is.
In Young Hero, a group of Japanese fighters are beating up all the local kung fu masters and wrecking their schools. The Japanese fighters think Chinese kung fu is weak, and in the first part of the movie, none of the Chinese fighters have been able to prove otherwise. Master Fok and his family/students take a beating like everyone else, but they’re also determined to train harder so they can get revenge. Master Fok has multiple sons, most of whom are diligent in their training. One of his sons, the “young hero” of the movie, is a troublemaker. He tends to make poor decisions that reflect badly on himself and his family, and he’s really kind of a jerk. Master Fok forbids the troublemaking son from continuing his kung fu practices since he always gets into fights with random people, but as the trouble between Fok and the Japanese fighters worsens, the young hero must grow up and stand up for his family (and really, for Chinese kung fu as a whole).
As with most of these movies, the plot is an excuse to string together multiple fight scenes. It felt like there was an awful lot of fighting in this movie with very little downtime in-between. I’m not complaining though. The fights were mostly quite fun. There were some neat sequences especially towards the end of the movie that I enjoyed a lot. There’s a training sequence with the young hero and a young woman who has been adopted into the Fok family that takes place on a raft, and that’s pretty cool. There were also a good amount of two-on-one fights towards the end of the movie that were some of the best. A lot of the fights early tended to be of groups of people fighting all over that place, and they were fine, but the action was more unique and structured when it was down to just a few people.
If I have a problem with Young Hero, it’s the young hero himself. He’s a real butt-hole for the first two-thirds of the movie, and even when he started to do the right thing, I still didn’t like him very much. My favorite character was the young woman, but even though it felt like she was being built up for an important role, in the end she was just used for motivation for the young hero and Master Fok. I thought her ending was undeserved, and it bummed me out.
Other than that though, if just for the near-constant action, I enjoyed Young Hero fine. Out of the kung fu movies I’ve watched this week, this one is my least favorite, but I’m sure I’ll watch again sometime.