THE INVINCIBLE KUNG FU TRIO is an average Taiwanese kung fu movie that manages to waste the considerable talents of a trio of kung fu stars, all of whom have done better work elsewhere. They play Shaolin rebels battling evil Qing government officials, but the plot is strictly routine and the fights barely pass muster. Imagine the kind of fun that would have played out had a genuinely good choreographer shot the action instead. Meng Fei is the nominal hero, but I always found him a second-rate Alexander Fu Sheng and that's the case here. Failed kung fu star John Liu does better as the strapping, arrogant fighter. Angela Mao is here for name value but has a surprisingly small role. This film is really one for the fans only.

I was watching through Angela Mao's flicks and came across this one. Angela Mao started out at Golden Harvest, and because of their excellent production quality, all of her early works with Golden Harvest were of excellent quality. Her works with any other company were few notches below those compared to the Golden Harvest's. That being said, this is not such a bad movie. I've seen enough shoddy works from various movie studios that relatively, this comes across as at least par with other Taiwanese, and Hong Kong movies of the era.It's interesting to see Angela Mao in her native environment. She got married around this time, and she's captured at the height of her beauty. Her movements are amazing, and although short and underutilized, she does make the movie lot more watchable.The only thing that's epic about this movie is its beginning and ending credit rolls. Taiwanese movie studios must have had serious case of making movies by a committee. This show as they missed the whole point: If they could hire Angela Mao, they should have featured her more prominently throughout the film. She shows up for few seconds couple of time in this movie. What a waste of talent.So the movie probably followed a pat formula they had for making movies. While acceptable, the word "talent" doesn't seem to matter much to these people - a stark contrast to Raymond Chow who recognized a good thing when he saw one.Maybe that's why Taiwan while much more rich in land resources hasn't gotten beyond the first base when it comes to movie production while Hong Kong cinema is now world renowned.Hord of bozos doesn't replace one visionary, and this movie seems to be a proof of that concept.

THE INVINCIBLE KUNG FU TRIO is an unusually shoddy kung fu adventure that wastes the talents of three significant genre performers-Meng Fei, John Liu and Angela Mao-and does great disservice to the oft-filmed legend of Shaolin warrior Fong Si Yu. Shot in Taiwan on an extremely low budget, the film takes up the tale of Shaolin students Fong Si Yu and Hung Si Kwan (joined here by a third comrade, Lu Ka Chai) and their efforts to battle Ching oppressors. Their chief antagonist is the Abbot of Wutang who makes it his job to get rid of the three heroes and actually comes up with a clever plan to do so. He creates three exact doubles of the heroes and trains them to fight their counterparts. The Abbot, played by Kam Kong, is dark-haired in some shots and white-haired and white-browed in others. No explanation is given for the transition. Nor is there any explanation of what technology he employs to make perfect doubles of the lead trio.Meng Fei previously played Fong Si Yu in the far superior PRODIGAL BOXER (also reviewed on this site). Additional films on Fong and Hung were done at Shaw Bros. where Fu Sheng and Chi Kuan Chun specialized in the roles, as in the similarly titled THE INVINCIBLE KUNG FU BROTHERS (1976, aka SHAOLIN AVENGERS, also reviewed on IMDB). Meng Fei, John Liu and Angela Mao are all seen to much better effect in numerous other films. (Angela has only one short fight scene here.)The fights are actually not badly staged, but are undermined by the zoom-crazy cameraman and the cut-happy editor. Fights often shift locations inexplicably from one shot to the next. Most of the fights aren't even finished before the editor cuts to the next, usually unrelated, scene, which often features someone who was in the fight. Scenes are generally quite short, although there's one long festival scene that seems to go on forever, with lion and snake dances that have nothing to do with the story. There are all sorts of extraneous sound effects, such as animal sounds that have nothing to do with the style of kung fu being presented (e.g. a cow's `moo' during one maneuver). The sounds of a train locomotive accompany one maneuver. Chen Kuan Tai (BOXER FROM SHANTUNG, EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN) is given top billing in the credits, yet he doesn't appear anywhere in the film.