Synopsis:

A mischievous Shaolin disciple, Hsai Hu uses trickery to graduate from the rigorous Shaolin monastery without completing his martial arts training. His mentors, well aware of his deceit, send monk Hui Kang to keep an eye on Hsia Hu, just to keep him out of trouble. Once outside of the monastery, Hu soon discovers that people are mistaking him for his twin brother Hsiao Fu, A hardened criminal and Kung-Fu expert. Relatively incompetent in the martial arts, Hsai begins to relish his "Instant Kung-Fu Man" image and impersonates his brother at every opportunity. While respect and fear have been heaped upon him in copious amounts, hatred and abuse come his way as well. Yi Lan, Hsiao Fu's former accomplice and now sworn enemy, returns to settle a score with his one time friend. Truly unable to adequately defend himself, Hsia receives a lesson in honesty at the hands and feet and elbows of not only Yi Lan but his Shaolin Monk companion, Hui Kang as well!

Audio/Video:

The audio for the film is presented in a mono platform. As such, all of the aural information is channeled solely through the center speaker. The English-dubbed dialogue is easily understood. The video for the film is of very poor quality. The colors are faded, the image is very soft and there are far too many scratches and fleckings within the images to note. At the start of the feature the normal warning banners are brought up however, they appear to suffer from tracking difficulties usually found on VHS. Once the image is corrected a very poor menu screen is posted which echoes the poorly drawn caricatures from the artwork on the DVD Amaray case.

Extras:

The extras identify a trailer for the feature in the disc however, the only trailer available is a very marred and for lack of a better term-"chewed up" trailer for a Jackie Chan movie. The trailer itself is in Chinese with English subs. The English subs are pretty garbled which makes understanding the point of the trailer a bit difficult to discern. No elements of any film are presented rather, Chan performing various forms of martial arts in period costumes.

Overall:

The Instant Kung-Fu man is a run-of-the-mill martial arts film from the 1980's complete with all the wonderful kicking sounds and "whooshing" sounds we've come to love! This is not the best martial arts film of its kind but it is fairly fun and enjoyable all the same. Rent it and see what you think!