Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (1983)

Runtime: 92 befuddling minutes

Directed by: Alex Cheung

Starring: James Yi Liu, Cherie Chung, David Lo, Leung Tin, Tam Tin

From: Shaw Brothers 

This was NOT what I was expecting from “Shaw Brothers sci-fi movie that isn’t Super Inframan” It’s been almost six months since viewing anything from the studio; it’s mostly been oddities like this the past few years. Tomorrow I’ll finally review one of their traditional martial arts efforts; that should help wash out the taste of whatever this was. I mean, how can you explain something you don’t understand yourself?

A major problem: this has a lot of “Hong Kong Humor”, which is something that doesn’t always translate well for me and almost all of it here was as “funny” as rectal cancer. One scene here (involving a woman taking “an IQ test”) was HORRENDOUS beyond belief. To paraphrase a Letterboxd mutual, this had SIX writers-apparently each one wrote fifteen minutes of material independent of each other and it was all combined together. To steal a line from another source, the “plot” was more like a discombobulated bucket of body parts!

I’ll mention details as haphazardly as they were presented:

* The only “sci-fi” in the opening act: a drunk is burned by radiation from a UFO
* Sexism abounds as-among other things-the camera leers on a woman as wind blows up her dress a la The Seven Year Itch
* One of the private eye leads opens his shirt to reveal… not the Superman S but rather a blue shirt with the Shaw Brothers logo (!) as he makes a rescue
* A mad scientist accidentally drinks a potion meant for his caged gorilla. This guy becomes HORNY. That element further stains the film, how there’s “laughs” concerning sexual assault and “close encounters of the fourth kind”
* The opening credits are a blatant riff on Superman; that is matched by a theme song that’s a lightly-veiled disco riff of the John Williams theme. “Lightly-veiled” could be said by me often. In the second act, we see an insane version of the Millennium Falcon, along with what seemed to be Star Wars sounds directly lifted instead of mock versions.
* This isn’t entirely bottom of the barrel. There are two musical numbers (?!), the first featuring disco music, the other, the Cantonese attempting an imitation of an ABBA song! The music was better than the amateur nature of the numbers themselves. There are some scenes in general that looked real nice visually

The film does improve the longer you endure it; that’s mainly because the opening act stunk like yesterday’s garbage. The final act is when the sci-fi elements become more prominent. This includes Temu Darth Vader doing battle against a character I won’t name in a UFO. While that did go on for WAY too long, this did also give us a moment you’ll only see here: a lightsaber sword vs. lightsaber nunchaku battle!

The movie does have its moments & I can’t fault such aspects as the set design. However, the “humor” sank what could have been a fun sort of bonkers motion picture with a bizarre plot. Of course, your mileage may vary.