Wild Wild Wuxia: Amazon Prime Streams the Shaw Brothers

1. BAT WITHOUT WINGS 

*** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

(1981) Dir. Chu Yuan

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

It's pretty to look at, with some funny and strange characters and complex machinations so over-the-top they're like every old dark house mystery from the 30s pureed together with Wilkie Collins frosting, but the greens glow valiantly and Bava fans should rejoice - once again director Chu Yuan keeps the fog machines and colored gel lights on, enriching nearly every frame with mood, as a man in a dark red cloak and lizard skin keeps carting a coffin around with a talking wooden effigy of swordman Lung Fei's fiancee inside. The indefatigable Derek Yee is a detective swordsman swept up in an intergenerational mystery having to do with an ancient curse by a black lizard demon living in a misty lake -- has he emerged and possessed a young son (in a flashback he looks like a giant black lizard with green eyes but--- well, anything is possible). There's also another mysterious woman, this one all dressed in white, who disappears and appears with dire pronouncements. The lizard zips around, women become wooden statues and back and forth; people are buried alive in wooden effigies of themselves by a madman. A man wearing lipstick, sheathed in fog, warns our hero his fiancee is going to die; there are secret panels and an array of disguises and intrigue, and--jeeze--don't even worry about the byzantine inter-family paranoia that evidently underwrites the weirdness. Just do like Kim Newman tells you in his Mark of the Vampire DVD commentary, just soak in the ample atmosphere and savor the horror elements and don't let the Scooby Doo denouement sour it with a lot of twists and reveals. It may not all add up, but does it need to? If you said yes then I'd suggest an hour of deep meditation on the transience of all things. Even the web, in its full entirety, shall pass in time.... I think. 

The love between a fox spirit and a martial artist, carrying a parallel to one gone on in the previous generation without either of their knowledge - the scenes taking place in the spectral world are so gorgeous and ethereal that you'll want to find your way there more than you would Shangri La (I love that it's always night and the ornate soundstage indoor/outdoor magic of it all. And the spooky comeuppance against earth's rival - this just makes it all the more heartbreaking when our hero becomes a dick obsessed with fame, but such is the way of men). Derek Yee stars as Ding Peng who gets hoodwinked on his way to a big duel for mastery of martial arts when his rival's wife seduces him and steals his martial arts manual in the middle of the night -thus informing the treacherous Ruo Song (Wong Yung) of how to counter the chumps' moves, and to imply then that the martial arts manual was his etc. It all sets poor egotistical Ding into a suicidal despair but--as so often in these things--he's prevented at the last minute by ghostly intervention, in this case, a green-lit fox spirit (in the Chu Yuan universe, the realms of the dead are always bathed in a haunting green light) named Qing Qing (Lisa Wong). She takes him to her mysterious land between the living and the dead, a kind of secret Shangri La paradise all shot on those marvelous expansive soundstage landscapes of cherry blossom and lantern lit night -- who would ever want to leave? Well, once he starts practicing with Qing Qing's magical scimitar, Ding Peng does wants to leave - he convinces his now-wife to come with him and help arrange revenge on Ruo Song, and for some reason she takes the upper hand, posing as her own treacherous sister (?) and betraying Song with supernatural trickery that ensures an easy victory. But naturally old Ding isn't satisfied. He wants to keep going and be the best in the martial arts world, little knowing how much damage he's doing to his home life in the pursuit of wealth and fame and just how truly treacherous Ruo Song really is. Naturally it all ends in a big grievance-airing international duel.

Love that setting sun spotlight

And though that's kind of inevitable for a Shaw Brothers movie, once again it's the mist-enshrouded magical ancient landscapes, like gorgeous life-size dioramas, that haunt the mind and make these so worth seeing on a big HD screen with deep blacks. On my 60" Sony Bravia they're impeccably haunting. And his dick moves to Qing Qing (he even remarries claiming he can't be with a fox forever) carry a rough sting but you know it will end happily. Alas, like all the Shaw Brothers films, the ending is--for my money--way too abrupt. They should have a groovy party afterwards, but Shaw Brothers movies tend to end within seconds of the final bad guy dying. Such is the way of the Tao.

4. THE BATTLE WIZARD

It's so insane it has to be based on some old legend - Dan Lee plays a young scholar son of a respected general runs away to avoid learning kung fu (he'd rather read books). On the road, naive and even a trifle thick-headed, he meets a pretty young girl named Lin (Chen Che Lin) who uses snakes as weapons/couriers, and after some antagonistic bickering they team up, and then promptly run afoul of 'the poison gang.' There's much back and forth of poisonous attacks (she launches a venomous sneak into the leader's body) the scholar must find her ninja sister (Ni Tien) to rescue her and then well, he winds up gaining super powers through drinking the blood of a giant red snake while hiding out on one of those mysterious hidden cliffside oases. You got to respect a guy who--when a girl tells him to drink the blood of a giant red snake that's trying to suffocate him in the middle of a pond, he promptly bites down on its neck like a vampire, and then, later, when he tells him to swallow a  poisonous toad whole--he does too! No questions asked! Dude, drinking snake blood is one thing, shooting a live, venomous (glowing) toad like it it's a cold oyster, that's crazy courage. Other foes include a gorilla (a hilarious ape-costumed dude in a pit), the titular battlesome wizard (friends of Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China will recognize he's got a lot of the same skills, including fire breathing), a crazy rapist bald green fanged monster with a detachable claw arm who can outrun horses, and a complicated tale of brothers and sisters across two family dynasties that--through some uncool philandering 20 years earlier--led to the original confrontation and all the bad blood that must out in the children, etc. Based on a fantasy novel by Jin Yong.


With a great 80s synth score, lots of animated fire and magic effects, this is a fine companion piece to THE BATTLE WIZARD. Like that film, our callow lead-Lung (Tung Shing Yee) starts out a churlish heartbroken brat but the dopey dragon that rescues him from a plunge off the cliff looks like a kind of mix of a parade Chinese dragon and a muppet, and on a mysterious outcropping halfway down a cliff (Asia must be full of these little magic oases you can only access by jumping off a cliff) he meets the fallen hero Flaming Cloud Devil (Alex Man) who wants to teach him the unbeatable Buddha's Palm precisely because he doesn't want to learn it (churlish brat that he is). Here's a film that's clearly got some Star Wars influence to it, but Lucas would never have so many strong female characters, nor an evil henchmen kid with a huge acid pus-spraying facial tumor, or a villain with a super extendable giant killer foot, of course I mean Heavenly Foot of the 10,000 Swords Clan (Shih Kien)! Other foes are named: Flying Bells (Chen Szu-chia), Flying Loops (Yum Yum Shaw), and The Thunderbolt Devil (as he uses sound wave combat). Now that he knows the Palm, and has partially restored Flaming Cloud Devil's sight (via a magic dragon egg), he must help bring them all down in spectacular laser, sound wave, and spinning kick-filled brawls.


Special shout out to the great Lieh Lo -- a joy as the mysterious, ever-clowning (but never obnoxious) martial artist who tends to arrive at just the right time, proclaiming "Bi Gu of East Island is here!" as in now the party can start. Far too much crazy stuff happens to tell, and there's even the old all-girl Er Mei school again, but a standout is the sight of Heavenly Foot using his percussion set up to drive his daughter crazy (turns out he controls her via a poisonous internal centipede). Just watching him in sped up motion playing with his foot and hands, dopey grin on his face, is a priceless privilege. He's so evil! And that crazy foot! Flaming Cloud Devil ends up converting a few of her cast-out girl students (they help Lung after he helps them steal a relic for their master to fix her acne). And eventually they all even patch up their differences without fighting - and have a big celebration - but there's still trouble a Foot!