Drunken Master - Jackie Chan (1978) - nr Wong Chuk Yeung, Sai Kung

Drunken Master (醉拳 - tseoi kuen in Canto lit. 'drunken fist') is probably one of the earliest Jackie Chan films I saw circa 1988. Hong Kong films were so hard to get hold of in the UK at the time and much of my fascination with these films was kept alive through the pages of Combat magazine which I bought religiously every month between 1986 and 1991. Anyway, thanks to like-minded friends I met during my A-levels I was finally able to watch an English dub of this movie via a dodgy bootleg and watched it over and over.

The story revolves around Wong Fei-hung (Jackie Chan) who misbehaves to the point where his dad brings in a strict "uncle" (everyone's an uncle in Hong Kong) called So Hat-yi (蘇乞兒 - aka Beggar So played by Yuen Siu-tin) to discpline him as well as teach him the "Eight Drunken Immortals Fist". Wang Jang Lee plays the hired hitman that has been contracted to kill Wong's father and we are introduced to him in the open sequence as he retrieves his next hit from a secret altar and then goes to kill him.

Much like Knockabout, many of the rural locations seen on this film are hard to track down because Hong Kong has developed so much in the interim. One of my later posts will show how a location that had already become unrecognisable when I posted about it years ago, has changed again. That said there are some recognisalble places that we can talk about including this first one. It was a piece of flat open ground up in the Sai Kung hills that has been used by film makers on multiple occasions. I have been up here looking for the exact spot but can confirm it was completely overgrown when I was there, but this was a few years ago so perhaps it is worth a revisit soon. It's not far from the fire lookout.