Dance of the Drunk Mantis
1979 Hong Kong kung fu comedy film directed by Yuen Woo-ping

Dance of the Drunk Mantis (Chinese: 南北醉拳) is a 1979 Hong Kong kung fu comedy film directed by Yuen Siu-tien's real life son Yuen Woo-ping and written by Ng See-yuen and Lung Hsiao. It stars Yuen Siu-tien, Hwang Jang-lee, Linda Lin, Yuen Shun-yi, Charlie Shek and Yuen Kwai. This was Yuen Siu-tien's final film appearance before his death on 8 January 1979. The film was released theatrically in Hong Kong on 27 June 1979.
Plot
One year after training a young Freddy Wong (Jackie Chan) in Drunken Master, Beggar So / Sam Seed returns to find that his wife has adopted a son named Foggy. Sam takes a disliking to the boy and tortures him mentally and physically. Devastated, the boy runs away and takes a job at an inn, where he meets Rubber Legs and his student. He overhears that they are looking for Beggar So and want to kill him, making Rubber Legs' Northern 'Drunk Mantis' Boxing supreme.
However, Foggy returns home to warn Beggar So, who comes to the inn to meet Rubber Legs in a drinking feast. During the fight, Rubber Legs brings out his drunk mantis fist he combined with his Northern style against which Beggar So turns out to know no defense in particular, to bear, beating him easily.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Dance of the Drunk Mantis” is 1979 Hong Kong kung fu comedy film directed by Yuen Woo-ping. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dance, Drunk and Mantis, not as a finished interpretation.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3207962. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dance of the Drunk Mantis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.