"I should have learned Kung-fu instead of ethics." This is why I love Kung Fu movies. Our hero has no chance at the beginning to even begin to fight the bad guy, proceeds with training and in the end is strong enough to beat the bad guy. It's simple, it's entertaining, it is what I enjoy. The Shaw Brothers's 36th Chamber of Shaolin is the perfect example of these movies. It has all the best parts. Great fights, epic training montage along 35 chambers, but not the "Top Chamber". A great hero in Gordon Liu who plays San Te the Shaolin Monk. Lo Lieh plays the bad guy as General Tien Ta and has an epic mustache. We also get a lot of weapons and the best one is the three-section staff and we get a satisfying ending. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is a movie to recommend people who haven't seen a lot of Kung-Fu movies and want to begin somewhere. I had high expectations and it blew them away. It is up there with the best of them; Once Upon a Time in China, Enter the Dragon, Drunken Master to name a few. So if you haven't seen this classic yet, what are you waiting for?

Hands down, the best martial arts film ever to come out of the Shaw Brothers studios. Granted, I haven't seen them all, but The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is so good, I can't imagine anything else that I haven't heard of is better than this. The training sequences are of course the highlight of the film, but the story also works rather well. I can't recommend this one enough.

The original title of the film is Shao Lin san shi liu fang. Also known as The Master Killer and Shaolin Master Killer.

My favorite kung fu movie I've seen. Exceptional choreography, and the density of fight scenes to narrative faff is low. Loved the training sequences especially. I slowed down some of the fight scenes to .2 speed and am just amazed at how intricate the movement is here. Really outstanding work.

Rating: 4.25* / 5* or 8.5 / 10 I think it's one of the best Kung Fu movies I've seen. My review contains spoilers, so read with caution. I'd say what I like most is the realism, if you can put it that way. Normally, in movies where the protagonist has to train, they include a short montage of what the training is like, but here the vast majority of the movie revolves around his years of training. Another thing I like is that they talk about the time he spent training. At the end of the 35 chambers, they tell him he did it in a record time of 5 years. If I remember correctly, he spent a total of 7 years living in the temple. 35 chambers in 5 years may seem like a lot of time to some people, but let's remember that Shaolin monks devote their entire lives to training, so completing the 35 chambers with 7 years living in the temple is a considerable achievement. I can combine this with what I mentioned about realism. I think anyone who has practiced martial arts or exercises appreciates the protagonist's process even more. When it was his turn to do the bell exercise, he carried a super-long bamboo weight with it, I said, "No, my brother, this one's going to ruin his wrists in half a minute," and that's what happened, lol. It's worth saying that the fight choreography is good. Now for something that left me a little stiff, a little anticlimactic. The film begins with the protagonist living in a place occupied by a foreign force. After certain events, he decides to go to the Shaolin Temple because he knows they practice Kung Fu there and has the idea that he could learn how to defend himself against the invaders. So far, so good. The thing is that the protagonist is in the temple training for 7 years and after a certain conversation he is "expelled from the temple" until he fulfills a certain penance and there he returns to the place where he came from and fulfills a certain revenge like in the last 20 minutes of the film, that's where the anticlimax for me is, the protagonist left and in 7 years everything remains the same (which is not impossible) but the thing is that he would not have gone to complete his "revenge" if he hadn't been sent to do penance outside the temple. Apart from the fact that the resolution of everything was like in 20 minutes it was also a bit anticlimactic, if you think about it, ok, the protagonist completed the 35 chambers in 5 years so you could say that he is some kind of prodigy in martial arts so it would not be strange if he was able to defeat the invaders relatively easily. It still leave me with a feeling of "Already...? That's all?"