Runtime:
77 minutes (although the copy I had was only 73 minutes long)
Directed
by: Hsueh Li Pao
Starring:
Danny Lee, Ni Tien, Chen Chi Lin, Kwok Kuen Chan
From:
Shaw Brothers
Yep,
after all this time I have finally reviewed my first Shaw Brothers
film. Heck, this is the first one I've ever seen from the legendary
Hong Kong film studio of old. I believe I have seen a clip or two of
it before and heard discussion of it on a messageboard but I was
motivated to talk about it after it was featured on the Total Film
website in a great article of “50 Amazing Films You've ProbablyNever Seen”, where I hadn't even heard of many of the entries and
before tonight I had only seen one of them, which was Viy.
Their
description for the movie made me want to see it. To copy and paste
what they wrote up:
“20
years after having his legs cut-off by a warrior's laser-fingers, an
evil wizard takes revenge by sending his lobster-clawed henchman to
capture his enemy's son Tuan Yu, who has no interest in fighting.
Encouraged by a woman who throws snakes at people, Tuan Yu embarks on
a quest to learn fighting skills.
This
film also involves a scrap with a giant snake, a frog which can make
you invincible if you swallow it, and a kung fu gorilla. And a wizard
with metal chicken legs who can breathe fire.”
All
that they said on Total Film is true. All of this insanity actually
happened. The evil wizard was the guy who had metal chicken legs and
he did breathe fire. There's also things like knives being fired out
of what looks like a giant bone, that lobster-clawed henchman being
some sort of mutant, some really wacky stop-motion animation, and a
snake that carries a message as if it's a pigeon.
Sure,
the martial arts scenes you get are all fine, but it's obvious that
you should see it for how damn strange it is, as believe me it is as
strange as it sounds from description. It shoud be noted that Tuan Yu
is a goofball (at least in the first half, before he swallows that
frog) while he gets helped by snake-throwing dame and a kung fu
master girl (the one who fires those knives out of the giant bone). A
gender reversal, which is fine by me. Overall... what a weird movie,
but an entertaning one. It has quite the hysterial ending too, where
the special effects go wild.
Sometime
in the future I do need to see more films from the Shaw Brothers
Studio. Those include the weird ones like the infamous Crippled
Avengers/Crippled Masters/The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms or
whatever you want to call it along with their more normal fare that
isn't supernatural or bizarre in nature.
I'll be back Sunday night, where I plan on giving my review of Pacific Rim.
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