By the time the 1980's came along the Shaw Brothers started to use a lot more blatant wire-work in their kung fu stunts and I'm not really a huge fan of that gratuitous flying/fighting stuff mass-popularized later on in stuff like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. There's a lot of that stuff in this film but I still think this is an interesting/wacky enough of a kung fu flick that it's probably worth checking out for martial arts movie fans. It straddles the line between serious dramatic tragedy, about the title character who gets treated like shit by his fellow students, and crazy insane fight flick when this bastard fellow learns something called silkworm style and can shoot laser beams and spin silk like mother-fucking Mothra or something! There's also some crazy bad guys with punk-rock colored dayglo hairdo's with matching eyebrows and that sort of thing. Enough of those little goofy bits to make it worthwhile.
There was a sequel, RETURN OF BASTARD SWORDSMAN, the next year but I haven't seen that one yet so I can't say how directly it follows this storyline.
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