From my above summary line, you may have concluded that I do not like Hong Kong/Taiwanese kung fu movies. Actually, I really enjoy these movies... at least those made from the mid-1980s on. Efforts made in the 70s for the most part I must admit do not move me, including this one. It is a little better than average, thanks to not only some good looking sets and costumes, but also some skillful camera work and visual composition. But apart from that stuff, I was bored for the most part. The scenes involving kung fu are indistinguishable from the dreary kung fu you usually get in a 70s movie. The story is thin and curiously keeps the movie's heroine off of the screen for large chunks of time. You won't be missing much if you skip seeing this movie, and I can only recommend it for die hard fans of Angela Mao - and even they will find much of the movie dreary and boring.

I saw this Angela Mao film on a double-feature DVD, where it was accompanied by "Yoga And The Kung-Fu Girl". I expected the former to be the better of the two, but boy was I wrong! "Moonlight Sword And Jade Lion" is one of the most badly made films I've seen in a LONG time. I stopped following the plot about 30 minutes in, and from that point on I had no idea what was going on, nor did I care. According to IMDb, this is the ONLY film that "screenwriter" Ren Chung ever worked on, and thank God for that! You might think that the fight scenes could possibly redeem the picture, but they don't: they range from the forgettable to the ridiculous (a lot of the characters seem to have unexplained superhuman abilities). Another disappointment is that Angela Mao does about 95% of her fighting with a spear. Still, her extreme beauty is the only reason this film escapes the lowest possible rating.

I was really looking forward to this : Angela Mao and Don Wong Tao together, but apart from a few scenes this is a disappointment. First the Dynasty print is pretty poor (a VHS transfer ?) and why they didn't change the extremely poor dubbing is beyond me. I'm still not sure if it was the dubbing or poor editing that led to me wondering what was going on most of the time. Numerous characters come and go and who Don Wong was meant to be was lost on me. It starts slowly with a rather stiff acting Angela Mao (with rather strange hair style even for a Chinese film) wandering around looking for her masters missing brother. The fights are mediocre and occasionally contain some strange weapons which seem to work poorly. There is a lot of unnecessary wire work and the settings look cheap and flimsy at times. The beautiful Doris Lung pouts a lot but her fight with Angela should have been a highlight - and wasn't. Man Kong-lung as a poisoned (presumably black mailed) swordsman has several pretty poor fights. HK Cinemagic mentions Ti Lung in the cast but this is either a mistake or he was very well disguised. Definitely not one of Angela or Don's better films. What a shame this could have been so good.

'Moonlight Sword And Jade Lion' is one of my all time favorite movies.I think I like it because the main idea is Angela goes out on her own to find a friend of her father's and find out the truth about her parents' murder.A sub plot is this guy has one of a pair of jade lions and if he gets the other one he will become 'master of the Kung Fu world'. However it's not clear to me why.The sound on 'Moonlight Sword' is bad and it's in the wide screen format. On my TV this only uses about 50 percent of the available screen. I don't understand why people like this format.This was a different time in history where there was no mass communications. This guy wants to have a meeting with someone so he throws a knife at the guy's face and shouts "Get in touch with me.".There's also two guys who I think are twins (one the good guy and one the villain) and they kill people by throwing big knives into the back of their heads just when they are going to say something important."You don't understand. It wasn't our fault. We were under orders from .......UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !" To me the greatest scene is Angela gets surrounded by these gals who are carrying explosive flowers. She takes them all out with her telescopic spear.Then she goes into the 'temple of doom' that has various hazards such as flying saw blades.Jeff Marzano