this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Action Movies

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Action Movies

Do you like gladiator movies? War movies? Gangster movies? Kung fu movies? Swordfight movies? Alien invasion movies?

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Guess who wins this fight.

...a 1973 Hong Kong martial arts film ...The story is about the Korea under Japanese rule during World War II. A Korean nationalist played by Carter Wong gets into a fight with some Japanese people and is chased into a church. The priest there is captured and tortured. Trying to secure his release, the leader of the resistance, Jhoon Rhee is himself captured and tortured by the Japanese. Carter Wong, Angela Mao and Anne Winton have to now try and rescue him. This leads to an explosive climax with the heroes having to fight the likes of Wong In Sik (Hwang In-Shik), Sammo Hung and Kenji Kazama.

Background

Rhee landed the role in the film with help from his friend Bruce Lee whom he met in 1964 while both were performing demonstrations at an international karate event held in Long Beach, California.[3] In 1972, Lee went to Golden Harvest Films boss Raymond Chow with the idea of making a movie about Taekwondo with Rhee in lead role. Rhee who never thought of himself as an actor didn't think it would come to fruition but a year later in the summer of 1973, Rhee was flying to Hong Kong to star in the film which was set in Korea, playing the part of Master Lee, a leader of a group of underground patriots. The plot for the film was based on a synopsis written by Rhee. It didn't take long to produce the film and by 19 July Rhee was back in the United States. This was when Bruce Lee called him to let him know that the film's editing had been done and it was ready for release.[4] Rhee was looking at the possibility of more film work but with Lee's death which was around the film's release and the possibility of being away from his family didn't appeal to him. So this became his first and last film.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Taekwondo_Strikes

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[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

An old-school martial arts movie, the kind where the actors are clearly all martial arts experts but the choreography's cinematic rather than realistic. (the bad guys attack one at a time, the hits are clearly not hitting hard, when someone gets hit they go flying across the room, etc.)

Some really interesting people in this movie:

  • Jhoon Rhee "the father of American taekwondo"
  • Angela Mao, hapkido practitioner and actress in a lot of films
  • Sammo Hung. You know Sammo Hung.
  • Carter Wong.
  • a bunch of guys doing Karate, including Kenji Kazama
  • and others. Like, there's this European-American woman Anne Winton who was a black belt in TKD and she only made like 2 movies bc unfortuntely irl she was horrifically murdered at a young age.

The version on tubi was dubbed, in that way where everybody's emoting like they're reading newsclips or something. You don't really see this for the acting tho. I was gaming while I watched this and only closely watched during the fight scenes. Anyway, it's pretty entertaining.

Content WarningIn the dub, they use the term "jap" a lot to refer to the Japanese occupiers, which I think in the US at that period was realistic, but nowadays I believe it'd be considered a slur?

[–] klu9@piefed.social 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Looks good! Unfortunately not on Tubi or other legit free sources here in MX.

Justwatch Search results, in case anyone's interested.

Eureka have apparently done a high quality Bluray I might have to put in my cart.

That has Mandarin, "classic" English dub and an alternative English dub.

Jhoon Rhee looks really familiar even though apparently he was only in this and one other film, neither of which I recall seeing.

[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 3 points 19 hours ago

Eureka have apparently done a high quality Bluray I might have to put in my cart.

tbh I don't think it's worth owning unless you're really into TaeKwonDo or something...