Director – Chen Chi-Hwa – 1986 – Taiwan – Cert. 15 – 84m
***1/2
A lazy martial arts student experimenting with magic finds himself helping a girl warrior against a sorcerer and his master – on Blu-ray from Monday, September 23rd
At the Taoist martial arts training school Ying Yang Hall, two students are wont to skip rigorous training to hang out with the drunken sorceror in the
It’s probably a mistake to attempt to describe this in terms of its plot, because while it borrows lots of staple generic ideas from all over the place, it frequently abandons one to go off and develop another. It’s ostensibly a story about students from a martial arts school confronted by an evil sorcerer, but it’s nothing like as coherent as, say, the Mr. Vampire films. In fact, it’s just an excuse to throw together fight scenes, special effects and knockabout humour, all of which, against the odds, somehow cohere into some sort of whole to prove spectacularly entertaining.
Two slacker students bunk off to hang out with a drunken master in the kitchen, in the course of which he momentarily sets one of them on fire while the other one pulls a live snake from his trousers, and prepares it as a culinary delicacy. One of them, Ko Sang (Yuen Yat-chor) later surreptitiously administers hair restorer to another member of the senior staff, seen in due course sporting unkept, spiky hair. This gets our hero sent to the dungeon, where he verbally outwits the staff member in charge whilst engaging in a series of exercises and fights in which he must avoid falling face-first into a pile of excrement on the floor. Inevitably, he fails, and his face is covered in the stuff.
In search of a spell to split himself into several people, he inadvertently goes through a secret door in the school library to find himself in a chamber with turtles and a small pool.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, a nefarious sorcerer clad in white (Kwan Chung) practices black magic on dolls causing many young boys to sneak out at night and urinate into a channel so that he can use the liquid in a spell against his master Li Tien Tao (Yen Shi-kwan), who is ostentatiously clad in out of place yellows, reds and oranges.. A suspicious local, female warrior clad in black (Hilda Liu Hao-yi) follows one of the boys and confronts the sorcerer. Our hero, seeing a black figure fighting a white one, mistakenly assumes her to be evil and her white adversary to be good, so goes to the aid of the dastardly sorcerer. Later on, realising his error, he switches his allegiance to help the girl against the sorcerer.
It’s pretty hackneyed stuff, and ought not to work at all. And yet, there’s something at once touching and compelling that all concerned in the production, without enough resources to pull it off, are trying terribly hard to throw as much as they can into each and every moment to keep the audience watching, so that the film becomes a series of showstopping set pieces, each picking up the moment the one before it begins to wane.
Groups of turtles enact bizarre routines. A student practices a spell dividing himself into several people, then realises he’s got it wrong, and they may not be able to re-enter his body. One of them shrinks to about a foot in height to give him a hard time. In a dumpling-making session, pastry is converted into an animated flying bird so that it can fly into a machine and come out as dumpling balls. A couple of Jiangshi (hopping vampires) appear for a scene or two, only to vanish from the film soon afterwards.
The student defeats the evil sorcerer, then realises it was only a dream. Following the long tradition of martial arts movies being full of bizarre fighting styles, the girl suggests the pair of them try this “weird dreaming style” to defeat the sorcerer.
The film was made at a time when such supernatural shenanigans had had their day at the Hong Kong box office, and didn’t make much of a dent. Quite why it was made at the time it was remains something of a mystery. Yet, viewed on a home video set up almost four decades later, it definitely has something. Such is its sheer entertainment value that you’ll be glad you sat down and spent time watching it.
This review was from watching the subtitled version of the film, which is on the disc.
The Young Taoism Fighter is out alongside Taoism Drunkard as one of the titles on the Two Taoist Tales on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, September 23rd.
Trailer (dubbed):
Clip (dubbed):