The Cub Tiger of Kwang Tung

Well kids, wave hello the most random movie I've talked about on here so far. I recently decided I wanted to start checking out some of Jackie Chan's older movies, as well as some of the newer ones of his that I never watched. What better place to start than the beginning? This is indeed Jackie's first starring role in a movie so it was the best way to start this journey of discovery.

I don't really watch a lot of old kung fu movies, and by a lot, I mean any at all. In fact I think this could have been my first. My thoughts? Well I can't really judge the whole genre by this one movie but wow, kung fu movies are fucking weird.

I couldn't even start to tell you what the plot was about. Something to do with Jackie's dad dying and then running a noodle stand. Then some bad guys do stuff, and they have to get beaten up. Following the story wasn't made easier by the subtitles. They were partly cut-off by the bottom of the screen and often blended in with the background, making them impossible to see. On top of that, there were usually additional subtitles on top of those ones, I guess to help you understand the ones you can't see. The best part was that if you looked, the two subtitles were usually saying completely different things.

Even if you could completely see all of the subtitles, what was being said usually just seemed completely random. However this movie does contain my new favourite pre-fight line with "I want to beat you up!" Best war cry ever. There's a lot of strange moments in this thing. To name a few...

1)Jackie's mentor/uncle/guy he knows?, gets mad when he finds out Jackie has been fighting. He throws a potted plant at him, which Jackie knocks out of the way and breaks. The man then gets mad Jackie broke the plant, so he throws even more plants at him. It's a strange solution to the problem to say the least.

2)A woman spits on the bad guy who then proceeds to eat the spit, and comment on the taste of it. The weirdest part is that nobody seems to find this strange. It's certainly not threatening, so why doesn't anybody react appropriately?

3)Mentor uncle guy gets mad at Jackie again for fighting and makes him punch into a pile of broken glass, then immediately demands Jackie fight his sister. The man is clearly out of his fucking mind and should not be listened to by anybody.

I could probably keep going but those are the moments that stood out the most to me. The fighting is decent, but there's not much of it. Until the final scene there isn't much of the usual stunt work Jackie is known for, but this is also his earliest work. If anything I'm looking forward to what's to come in my Jackie Chan movie viewing. This one though...well it's fucking weird which made it worth watching, but it wasn't very impressive as a movie.

4/10