Without a shadow of a doubt, for me, this was the holy grail of viewing pleasure when I was a youngster. Having fell in love with Hong Kong films at an early age in the mid-80's, The Best Of The Martial Arts was the greatest thing I had ever seen!
With no internet to surf for information, find photos, watch video clips or to shop from, this feature length documentary was my only insight to what Hong Kong films were out there, leaving me blown away the first time I saw it. It got to the point where I had rented and watched the video so much from my local video rental shop, that they let me buy it and had to get a new one in. It didn't take long after that for me to wear that video tape out...
Presented by Golden Harvest, and directed by Sandra Weintraud, better half to producer Fred Weintraud, the film was basically a passion project for the couples love of Hong Kong films and having just worked with Golden Harvest on China O'Brien 1 & 2, seem to have been given the go-ahead by Raymond Chow to use the cream-de-la-crem of what the incredible film studio had compiled up to that point. This included an incredible list of kung-fu classics from Bruce Lee's legendary flicks to Broken Oath, Magnificent Butcher, Warriors Two and many, many more alongside 80's action hits like Jackie Chan's Armour Of God, Wheels On Meals, Dragons Forever, Tsui Hark's Zu Warriors, and Sammo Hung's epic Eastern Condors and Shanghai Express - and it doesn't even stop there!!
No millennial could ever imagine the amount of excitement and amazement this film could bring to a young, new fan of the fascination that is Hong Kong cinema. Not once, and still, did I ever tire of it. Hosted and narrated by John Saxon, co-star of Bruce Lee's epic Enter The Dragon, viewers are taken on a journey and review of Golden Harvest and Hong Kong's finest, albeit with a few mistakes and hiccups of wrongly named movies to the clips that are playing. In between we get to see interviews with the legends Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, along with director Robert Clouse, the awesome Cynthia Rothrock and Keith Cooke from the set of China O'Brien, which of course, appears numerously throughout.
While dated by today's standards given how spoiled we are with 4K restored Blu-ray's, special features and the fact that I now know, just what exactly was released in Hong Kong during the same period, I still can't help but have a major soft-spot for The Best Of The Martial Arts and rate it 5 stars for sheer nostalgic reasons, and the joy it gave in introducing me to such amazing films, encouraging my love for Hong Kong cinema even more. While many more have came since, I've yet to find one that amazes me in the same way as this first did.
A must-have for any fan of martial arts cinema and Hong Kong movies, The Best Of The Martial Arts is one of the greatest introductions to the films we all love, and a great collection of some of Hong Kong's finest martial arts fights and superstars!
Overall: One of my childhood favourites, and a fantastic introduction to the amazing world of Hong Kong movies!
