General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Lucky Stars Go Places (最佳福星)

Lucky Stars Go Places (最佳福星) is a 1986 Hong Kong action comedy film directed by Eric Tsang (曾志偉), produced by Sammo Hung, and written by Barry Wong (黃炳耀). It is the fourth film in the Lucky Stars series and was made as a crossover intended to combine the Lucky Stars troupe with the similar action-comedy ensemble of the Aces Go Places series.¹^•² It was produced by Golden Harvest and Bo Ho Films.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	1986, Hong Kong, Cantonese, color⁴
Director / writer	Eric Tsang; screenplay by Barry Wong³
Producer	Sammo Hung (also star)³
Series position	Fourth Lucky Stars film; crossover with the Aces Go Places series¹
Runtime	1h 35m (95 minutes)¹
Lead cast	Sammo Hung, Karl Maka, Alan Tam, Andy Lau, Kent Cheng, Sylvia Chang¹
IMDb rating	5.4/10⁵
Alternate titles	The Luckiest Stars; Japanese 十福星; Korean 九福星⁶

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story begins when a police informant is exposed and killed, and Superintendent Walter Tsao (曹達華) recalls the original Five Lucky Stars, a team with a record of solving difficult cases. Only Kidstuff (鷓鴣菜, played by Sammo Hung) agrees to help, and he assembles a new team from within the police force: Top Dog (狗王倫, Alan Tam), Fat Cat (肥豹, Kent Cheng), Lambo (Rambo, Andy Lau), Long Legs (高佬, Anthony Chan), and Libbogen (力保健, Billy Lau).⁴ English-language synopses describe the mission as investigating an international ammunition trade between the Japanese Yakuza, who hold stolen diamonds, and a group of terrorists.³

The new team must complete a week of training under Inspector Yum Yum (一品香, Maria Tung), a female instructor whose recruits subject her to the series' familiar lecherous comedy.⁴^•⁷ The team then infiltrates the Japanese gang's stronghold to steal the diamonds, but all are trapped inside a vault. When Kidstuff asks the police commissioner for help, the commissioner denies any involvement and has him committed to a mental hospital; Top Dog, who can speak to dogs, talks with the guard dogs and enables the team's escape, after which they join Kidstuff for a final battle with the Japanese gang.⁴

A parallel romantic subplot has Kidstuff reuniting with his former girlfriend Quito (蚊子, Sylvia Chang), who has married Chief Inspector Albert (光頭神探, Karl Maka), the bald detective from the Aces Go Places films; the two men compete for her affection.⁴ A climactic Russian roulette scene, in which Kidstuff fires five times into a revolver's empty chambers and challenges Albert to do the same, resolves the rivalry when Quito arrives and slaps Albert after he claims his life matters more than his marriage.⁸

The crossover concept

The film was designed to capitalize on two of Hong Kong's most successful action-comedy franchises of the early 1980s: Sammo Hung's Lucky Stars series, which began with Winners and Sinners (1983), and Golden Harvest's Aces Go Places series.²^•⁹ In practice, reviewers have described the connection to each series as tangential. The original Lucky Stars appear in only one scene lasting five or ten minutes, and Karl Maka's appearances as Baldy are largely unrelated to the main plot, though his bickering scenes with Sammo Hung were counted among the film's funnier moments.⁷ Eric Tsang's presence in the director's chair, having directed the first Aces Go Places (1982), served as a bridge between the two series.⁷^•¹⁰

The cast was substantially renewed. Instead of the established Lucky Stars team, Tsang brought in popular stars Andy Lau and Alan Tam together with the Aces pairing of Karl Maka and Sylvia Chang; Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao, who had appeared in the earlier entries, are absent.¹¹ One review site counts the film as the third installment of the series while most databases list it as the fourth; the discrepancy reflects differing counts of the preceding entries (Winners and Sinners, My Lucky Stars, and Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars).¹¹^•¹

Reception and box office

The film earned over HK$20 million at the Hong Kong box office during the 1986 summer season, a strong commercial result for a local production that year.¹² Cinegraph lists its revenue as $23.1 million.² Critical and audience ratings have been modest: IMDb records 5.4/10 from 432 votes,⁵ and Rotten Tomatoes shows no professional reviews and fewer than 50 audience ratings.³

Retrospective reviews are mixed. Far East Films rated it 3.5/5, finding the low-brow humor at times more successful than in the previous entries and praising the action, though noting that the two storylines operate almost independently and that action is in shorter supply than before.¹¹ The standout action set piece is a frenzied encounter between Andy Lau, Sammo Hung, and the Japanese kicker Tetsuya Matsui (松井哲也), who plays the villain Yukio Fushime.¹¹^•¹ A Rotten Tomatoes audience review criticizes the film as a retread of My Lucky Stars with a new cast and only half the Aces present, while crediting the stunt work of Sammo Hung's stunt team.³

Place in the series

The Lucky Stars series ran through the mid-1980s at the center of Hong Kong's commercial cinema boom. Its first two sequels, My Lucky Stars (福星高照, released 10 February 1985) and Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars (夏日福星, released 15 August 1985), both directed by Sammo Hung, placed first and second in the 1985 Hong Kong box office, earning HK$30,748,643 and HK$28,911,851 respectively.¹³^•¹⁴ Lucky Stars Go Places followed in 1986 with a new director and a largely new team, and the series continued afterward with How to Meet the Lucky Stars (運財五福星, 1996), produced by Eric Tsang.¹⁵

The film is available on streaming services in the United States, including fuboTV and WeTV, and can be rented or bought on Amazon Video.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026