Dud in the Desert
Duel in the Desert is what you get when you mix a convoluted story, bad direction, poor martial arts choreography, and almost no Angela Mao---few duels and more duds.The story starts with everyone converging on the inn Angela's family runs to find a place to stay so that they can take part in a horse race with a 500 gold tael purse. And that's the end of that storyline. Pai Ying and Hsieh Han, along with Wan Chung Shan are looking to make money on a deal regarding 3 treasure chests full of Imperial jewels. Unfortunately for them so are a lot of other people. Theft, revenge, subterfuge, a murder case, betrayal, a secret letter (there's always a secret letter or book!), deals and double dealings, hidden identities, and undercover police officers are shuffled together in hopes of finding a story.
To make matters worse there were few fights and even those weren't very good. Most of them were of the grab, lock, pose kind. Don Wong and Ling Yun had a fight that moved faster and didn't seem as posed. In many of the other fights you could see how far people missed their hits and kicks. Angela is always a delight to watch but she only had a short fight at the one hour mark and in the final couple minutes of the movie. Even her kicks, fierce gaze, and snake kung fu couldn't save this film.
The version I watched was dubbed which might have been fortunate. The film was faded and badly cropped, subtitles would have been hard to read and run off the screen. People's faces were almost completely cut out of some scenes due to the cropping.
If there had been some good fights and more Angela it might have made up for the ridiculous story and all the people running around trying to either steal the jewels or save the jewels. Either way, this is a film only for lovers of 70's Taiwanese kung fu movies and Angela Mao and even then it might require a great deal of patience on the viewer's part.
3/1/23
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