Certainly not the best of Jackie Chan’s string of Lo Wei films early in his career, Shaolin Wooden Men casts him as an orphaned mute and the least popular student at the Shaolin temple, where he can barely perform the most rudimentary tasks, like lugging huge buckets of water on his back up an ungodly amount of stairs.
It isn’t until he secretly befriends the temple’s prisoner that he learns kung fu. The script doesn’t give him many chances to use it, with the notable exception being the film’s best scene, in which Jackie must face a gauntlet of 108 of the titular wooden men, which are like robots with cannonballs for fists.
If you’re surprised to discover the prisoner who schools Jackie in the way of the fist and the foot is the same guy who killed his father many years ago, you need to see more kung-fu movies. But Shaolin Wooden Men is not a recommended starting point. —Rod Lott