Something Cult, Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #174: Drunken Master (1978).

In the film that marked his breakthrough in Hong Kong, a 24-year-old Jackie Chan plays Wong Fei-hung (a true-life Chinese fighter), who's a mischievous young man with a knack for falling into threatening and embarrassing public incidents. When they become increasingly shaming, his father snaps and makes him trainer harder at martial arts. This soon sees Fei-hung come under the tutelage of Beggar So (Yuen Siu-Tin), a trainer notorious for punishing his students to the point of crippling them, but after rescuing Fei-hung during a street fight he is revealed to the fabled Drunken Master. Even so, Fei-hung resists his training and flees only to encounter contract killer Yim Tit-sam (Hwang Jang Lee) who hands his arse to him. Now with some reality literally kicked into him, Fei-hung returns to the Drunken Master and commits to his training there. This now includes a form of Drunken Boxing called "the Eight Drunken Immortals"; meanwhile Yim Tit-sam is contracted to murder Fei-hung's father and does so. Once his training is complete, Fei-hung goes on a quest for revenge.

As a massive Chan fan I was happy to be able to catch this on TV here this week. Now for a non-stop martial arts flick it didn't disappoint but do whatever you can to see it in Cantonese because dear God, the English version's dubbing is so poor it has to be heard to believed. When it's not out of sync, it frequently sounds jarringly American and like the voice actors were reading their lines lightheartedly off cue cards. Nonetheless, in this form the film (somehow) overcomes that to become genuinely rollicking action fun. In the director's chair was Yuen Woo-ping, probably the most famous and celebrated action director and choreographer in all Asian cinema (he even choreographed the fight scenes in the Matrix trilogy decades later), then just cutting his teeth on filmmaking but still demonstrating an innate gift for designing and pacing action scenes. Jackie, of course, essentially just plays himself but in his concentrated approach to the role you can see all the athleticism, comic timing and charisma that would later make him a Hollywood megastar, and Siu-Tin serves as an effectively ruthless yet avuncular mentor, in the (later) vein of Pat Morita's Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (who Chan himself later played in the remake of that, come to think of it).

Overall, despite the fucking horrific dubbing I had to listen to, I had a whale of a time with Drunken Master.