Koong Fu Must See's!

The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter (Shaw Brothers, 1983) Directed by Lau Kar-leung and starring Gordon Liu and Alexand Fu Sheng in his last roll. This is flick is sort of like a Kung Fu King Lear, not in terms of plot but in it's overarching sense of loss. The movie itself begins with battle, where the heroic Yang clan is double crossed and slaughtered, and that tone was tragically reinforced when superstar Alexander Fu Sheng died in a car crash during filming. Fu Sheng was a very good actor and comedien as well as a highly polished martial artist and had he lived, he probably would have competed with Jackie Chan in the video, dvd and American market. This guy was the goods, and he doesn't really do much in this movie, but it amounts to his memorial.

In the movie itself, Gordon Liu survives the battle and becomes an outlaw. He basically bulls his way into a Buddhist Temple and develops his own style of pole fighting by studying the monks at practice. It turns out one of the monks is part of the conspiracy against the Wangs. It all comes to a head when Gordon, to save his sister, must battle a hord of bad guys in a house of coffins. It's an incredible sequence.

Btw, this is also historically significant in terms of cinematography as you can see the look of the later Jet Li/Yuen Wo Ping late era classics developing here. If you can't get it at Amazon, try YesAsia.com!