Basically, Richard Harrison is Antonio, a criminal who masquerades as a priest, going so far as to lug around a big cross with him everywhere he goes. His travels have led him to China and a gang of Japanese thieves. After he helps the thieves rob a train, they leave him for dead and make off with some treasure. He is rescued by stock hero Dragon (Chang Yi) and together the two track down the gang and try to get the treasure, eventually leading to a showdown in a ghost town where Antonio reveals the Djangolike reasons he carries the cross around.

Lame kung fu overall. Meandering direction consiting of several sequences of Antonio and Dragon walking- it is pointless time filler to try to sew the film's not-there-narrative together. Harrison stinks, lots of wide-eyed mugging, hampered stunts, and you just know he was drunk out of his skull.

White Lotus Trio (aka. Avenging Trio) is a very weak 1980's HK cop/triad film, the kind that were such big hits in swimming in the wake of films like Police Story, Tiger on a Beat, and Long Arm of the Law. In a great bit of HK genre schizophrenia, it starts off in a comic vein with three hapless losers ripping off a mob boss and taking the money home to their henpecking pregnant wives. The film goes from a My Lucky Stars/Aces Go Places style comedy to a crime film in a blink; the three would-be thieves are gunned down by the gangsters and their wives swear they will raise their unborn children to get revenge.

As the rest of the film plays out we meet Leung Kar Yan (Sleeping Fist, Legend of a Fighter) a gangster out to usurp Boss Chui and Gordon Liu (Master Killer, Fist of the White Lotus) a cop leading a task force to stop the warring triad gangs. A pretty sub-standard cop film, and despite the novelty of two great martial performers like Gordon Liu and Leung Kar Yan together, the fights are not particualry well-staged or impressive. Really the only memorable things about the film was a great bit of camp where one of the femme-cop task force is trying to get info from a suspect so she attempts to smother him with her boobs and a way too long (comic?) scene where Lueng Kar Yan tries to hit on a pop singer.

The DVD:

Picture: Both Shaolin Quick Draw and White Lotus Trio are presented in full-screen. Little is left to imagination in terms of their tape source, especially when Quick Draw's picture breaks up and you can see the tracking errors, picture breakup, and jumps. So, it is poor-quality vhs, washed-out, muddy, grainy, and Quick Draw is the worst off featuring frequent problems with the tape source.

Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono. Quick Draw is an English dub version, a very poor one- Harrison's dubber is a screeching dweeb and they name a monk "Wally." White Lotus Trio is in Cantonese with burned-in English and Chinese subtitles. Both are as weak as the picture and don't offer much other than the basic muffled vocal track, tinny fx, and feeble synch score. The burned-in subs on White Lotus Trio are an eyesore read, but I've encountered worse. With lines like "I want to make them scare." and "Are you a dump?", the translation is pretty bad.

Extras: Chapter and Fight Scene Selections

Conclusion: I'm fine with the fact that sometimes kung fu movies, especially lesser ones, still languish in badly preserved prints and tracking down decent copies is a hard task. But, bad tape transfers of pretty cruddy movies, featuring stars with movies ten times better in their resume, means I gotta' give this a pass.