Search - Snake in the Monkey's Shadow/Horror Holiday on DVD

HORRIBLE picture quality, but Snake in the Monkey's Shadow i

morgoth | omaha, NE | 04/28/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This DVD would get a 4 star rating, except for the fact that 'Snake in the Monkey's Shadow' has extremely bad picture quality. It looks like Videoasia found the film reel in a lake and just dried it out before transferring it to DVD. While the picture is washed out, it is still watchable, and, it is UNCUT!!



I will save my full review of this in case a remastered uncut version ever comes out, but I will tell you this movie is one of my personal favorites. The snake style has never looked so good. Wilson Tong is by far one of the best snake stylists ever to appear on screen and he really lets loose as one of the villains. I don't like John Chiang in most of his old school movies (I do like a lot of the work he did in the late 80's), but he looks outstanding in this old school masterpiece. And Pomson Shi's monkey style absolutely has to be seen.



I won't talk about the Dorian Tan movie 'Horror Holiday' because I couldn't follow it and it's one of the biggest pieces of garbage I have ever seen, but this DVD is worth it for 'Snake in the Monkey's Shadow'. The reason this movie being uncut is so important is because there is a very unique scene where one of Chiang's 2 teachers tells Chiang that his pet baboon is actually his kung fu teacher. Once Chiang's teacher dies, he watches the baboon fight a snake and learns how to beat the 2 snake masters that killed his teachers. Hopefully no animal rights groups have heard of this movie because they would absolutely flip out (and with good reason), but it is a very good scene and by far the longest animal fight I have ever witnessed in a kung fu movie. Not quite as good as the hawk type bird fighting the monkey in 'Iron Monkey', but better than the cat fighting the snake in 'Snake in the Eagle's Shadow'. Watching it uncut definitely makes a big difference since all other DVD releases not only cut out the baboon fighting the 10 foot cobra, they also cut out the flashbacks in the final fight.



'Snake in the Monkey's Shadow' gets a very solid 4/5 rating from me. Hardly any faults to be found. And great kung fu of course!"