The Concrete Jungle (1974)

Concrete Jungle is an obscure Hong Kong kung fu flick and rightly so. Even for a martial arts movie it lacked a coherent story. Worse yet, the movie has not been taken care of and is in terrible shape.

CJ looked like someone took the movie reel and dragged it behind The White Truck of Doom, taped it back together with masking tape, spilled coffee on it, added white subtitles on an often gray background and then just for grins cut both sides of the film causing 1/3 of the subtitles to not be seen. The scenes shot at night were almost completely dark with green wavy lines running through them. The dialogue and music were also garbled. If you can get past the visual and audio defects, you'll find the storyline defects just as bad.

Not being able to see all of the action and read all of the subtitles did prove a challenge. There's a reason I couldn't find a synopsis on any site. To sum it up-Lo Lieh's character Chen, was driving at night when he saw a woman, Yu Shih, being assaulted and stopped to help. He ended up in a fight against Michael Chan (never given a name except Villain that I could tell) and his goons. Lo Lieh battles them off, killing one in the process. The woman refuses to go to the police because she doesn't want to upset her fiancé. Later the police inspector questions Chen, telling him if it was really self-defense, he needs to provide a witness or he may be prosecuted for murder. After that Michael Chan takes every opportunity to stalk or attack Yu Shih. Inexplicably, she always manages to escape. I say inexplicably because she runs like a two-year-old who hasn't figured out how to use her arms and legs and is just about as clever as a two-year-old. When Chan isn't terrorizing Yu Shih, he and his men attack Chen at every opportunity. This villain has a very full schedule. Even though Chen is constantly having to fight the bad guys whether at work or walking down the street, he never stops to try and figure out what is going on and how to stop it. It's like he's on a conveyor belt of fights he can't get off of. Chen is rapidly seduced by a beautiful woman, a danger sign he can't see, which brings the thrust of the plot finally to the forefront. Most of the movie involves fighting, running-lots of running to nowhere, and shots of Chen driving his car around town. The writer and director had no idea how to connect scenes and even less about character development or story logic.

It's a martial arts movie so I must comment on the fighting. Most of it was rudimentary at best, some fights were better than others.

The only positive thing about this movie for me was Lo Lieh. Even in this horrible mess of a movie he had screen presence. The actors did the best they could with the abysmal dialogue and ridiculous plot.

Unless you are trying to watch all of the movies from this golden kung fu era or all of Lo Lieh's movies, I'd suggest you avoid this chunk of concrete.

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