This movie is really cool. The basic plot involves a guy (Stephen Chow) who wants to get into the Axe Gang in circa 1930 Shanghai by impressing them with how much of an arch criminal he is. He decides to pick on an apartment block inhabited by the working poor and triggers a massive confrontation between the landlady of the block and the working poor on one side and the Axe Gang and their hired thugs on the other. Both sides turn out to be more than they seem and the confrontation quickly escalates into a battle filled with Chinese Magic and Fighting Arts.

Wah Yuen steals the show as the iron-fisted landlady, marching around in a silk house robe, hair in curlers, puffing away on her ever present cigarette while shouting orders. Really a fun, fun movie to watch.

My only complaint is that some of it is a little hard to follow, and I would blame that on the translation. The movie was made in Chinese and I generally watch foreign language films with the subtitles rather than dubbed, because I like to hear the way the actors sound when they are saying something while I read the subtitle. But the subtitles didn't quite seem right, so I switched to the dubbed version, and that didn't seem quite right either. So I watched it dubbed with the subtitles and half the time the dubbed spoken English didn't agree with the English subtitles. So a really crappy job of translation makes this a 9 instead of a ten.

Other than that, the acting, the visual effects, the camera work, the choreography, the comedy, the story are all first rate and make for a spectacular show.