Wang Yu became famous at Shaw Brothers for his One-Armed Swordsman, and so it was natural for him to début at Golden Harvest with another maimed hero. He plays Yu, a dedicated young martial-arts student, who loses his arm defending his school from a villain who has hired exotic fighters from other Asian countries to help him in his evil schemes. Yu retrains himself to fight with one arm and confronts his Japanese, Thai, Indian and Tibetan foes in a deserted ravine. Famously the most masochistic screen star in the martial-arts genre, Wang Yu here takes extraordinary amounts of punishment before winning through. He also shows himself to be no mean metteur en scène, and well able to get laughs and suspense from the special-effects-assisted tournament which climaxes the melodrama. Tony Rayns
