Swordsman With An Umbrella tells the tale of a young man skilled in the art of umbrella fighting, who must avenge his murdered parents and his bitter teacher (a wise old man who instructed him in the Way of the Umbrella after the deaths of his parents) by seeking out and destroying an evil scarred swordsman. While on this quest he meets a somewhat attractive girl who wants him to give up this life of vengeance, and a bunch of random thugs who want to slice and dice him with their swords and spears and arrows and stuff. That's what I got out of it, anyway; as with Thousand Miles Escort (another Hong Kong martial arts movie I reviewed for this site not long ago), the dub was spectacularly bad and confusing, although not, unfortunately, as inadvertently amusing. The film is mostly just dull.





The movie begins at an inn in "Dragon Town". A customer enters. The customer sits at a table and asks a waiter for tea. Every other schlub and bozo in the joint immediately and weirdly take the customer to task for this obvious breach of etiquette: they demand that she drink wine instead. The argument turns terse, and before too long the ringleader of the schlubs and bozos is on his feet demanding that she drink the wine he's presenting to her. Our hero, and the film's protagonist, chooses that moment to enter; he brazenly takes the wine from the ringleader and quietly sits down to drink it. Offended, the group begins to menace him instead, but they're all sent packing after he catches a sword in mid-swing between two fingers and begins breaking the sword bit by bit by flicking jagged pieces of it into the faces (usually the eyes) of his attackers. Kinda cool, I guess, but that's about as clever as the swordfights and stuff get in this film, I'm afraid -- even the whole umbrella-fighting angle eventually proves disappointing.

Anyway, the movie skips around a bit after this. A group of generic bad guys from the "Tiger Club" grouse about the attack at the inn (the defeated assailants belonged to the club) and decide that they must either kill the deadly "Iron Umbrella" or somehow get him to join them. Their leader, who wears a black hood over his head and laughs uproariously at the slightest provocation, hits on a swell plan: frame Iron Umbrella for the murders of a bunch of rival club members so that all the martial arts clubs in China will want revenge on him. The plan is carried out, and pretty soon all the clubs have banded together to try to find and kill him. (The scenes that establish this are confusing as hell, though; I was taking notes, and I didn't grasp this part of the plot until after the movie was over. For a sample of how incomprehensible the dialogue in this flick usually was, just listen to this).

Meanwhile, Iron Umbrella is going about his revenge, killing the martial artists who defeated and cast his teacher, Iron Man, into an abyss. He starts with an old man who doesn't seem to be bothering anyone anymore (the battle with Iron Man was thirty years ago), killing him pretty handily with his pointed umbrella (which he basically uses just like a sword; he doesn't even do any marginally interesting things with it until at least forty-five minutes in). As he's walking away, though, a Tiger Club guy pretending to be a beggar shoots his face full of scalding water or something, and he has to be saved by a mysterious sword-wielding girl dressed in blue. She slashes the Tiger Clubber and takes Iron Umbrella to her house, I guess, where he recovers and tells her his whole life story: for some reason this dude with a scar on his forehead killed his parents when he was a boy (in the flashback they appear to be simple peasants; it's never explained why this bad guy needed or wanted them dead) and drove him off a cliff, where he was found and taught umbrella-fighting by Iron Man. Fifteen years later, before he kills himself by -- no kidding! -- slapping himself in the forehead, Iron Man gives the young Iron Umbrella a hit list of former enemies he wants rubbed out (for the whole casting-him-into-the-abyss thing).





The woman in blue, an early advocate of non-violence, tries to dissuade him from any more killing, but Iron Umbrella ignores her and spends the rest of the movie fighting Tiger Clubbers and anyone else who comes after him. (At one point a woman dressed in pink tries her hand at killing him, but the woman in blue stops her, telling her to leave him alone because he's really a good person. A weird conversation between the two of them later ensues: click here to listen to it). The fights are all right, but not brilliant or particularly creative; probably the most interesting moment occurs when Iron Umbrella opens his umbrella up and somehow uses it to fly around in the air (kinda like the Penguin, I suppose). Other than that, it's pretty dry.

The dub was obviously British-produced. It was awful, but not so outrageously bad or funny as to truly endear it to me -- I only openly laughed at it once or twice, and then only at the maddening inscrutability of the dialogue; the performances themselves were generally stolid and boring and British.

So, Swordsman With An Umbrella turned out to be something of a waste of my time. Disappointing fight scenes, long stretches of boring, a shallow story, an only somewhat attractive leading lady, and a dub that never really hits any of the remarkably funny notes that we've all come to expect from low-budget kung fu flicks like this. It's not really worth watching.

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