Medium (1985)

... aka: Ling yu an jian (Supernatural Cases)

... aka: Mediet

... aka: Медиум

... aka: Mysteria replica di un omicidio (Mystery - Replica of a Crime)

... aka: Un misterio llamado Aleksander Orwicz (A Mystery Called Aleksander Orwicz)

Directed by:

Jacek Koprowicz

Setting: 1933, Nazi-occupied Poland. Greta Wagner (Ewa Dałkowska), the powerful psychic sister of veteran parapsychologist / occultist Ernst (Jerzy Nowak), tunes into strange visions that are actually the current activities of another unknown medium. The medium is using his or her powers to control four different people, entrancing them and leading them all somewhere to do different tasks. Andrzej Gaszewski (Jerzy Zelnik) travels from Warsaw to the autonomous city-state Sopot / Gdańsk via train and has no idea how he even got there, but vows not to leave until he finds out. Schoolteacher Luiza Skubiejska (Grażyna Szapołowska) walks right out on her students mid-class, goes to a museum, steals a turn-of-the-century dress and then ends up in a park with no clue how she got there or why she has the dress. She then immediately returns the garment to the museum. Since this hasn't been the first time this has ever happened, she's on the radar of the police and could potentially lose her job. Likewise, out-of-town banker Georg Netz (Jerzy Stuhr) keeps waking up in a strange house, despite the fact he's simultaneously paying for a hotel room in town. He has no idea how he got there, why he's there or why he's been writing gloomy lovelorn poetry while entranced.

Superintendent Selin (Władysław Kowalski) is not only in charge of investigating the above weirdness but also happens to be directly involved. Every night after work, he mysteriously ends up on a beach, where he gets drunk and goes to sleep. When morning comes he doesn't remember the evening before and then turns up at the office every day unbathed, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. His young assistant Krank (Michał Bajor) is something of a sadist who worships Hitler ("it's logical to side with the stronger," he claims) and is conspiring against Selin behind his back. He secretly goes to their higher-ups to report the superintendent's bizarre behavior but they refuse to fire him for it. At least for now.

The strange home that appears to be the centerpiece of the action belongs to a Polish man named Aleksander Orwicz, who suffers from diabetes and is later found in a diabetic coma. While in his hypnotized state, Georg had been showing up there to give him shots of insulin and claims there was another guy present at the time... a guy who looks suspiciously like Selin.

Everything links back to a love triangle (square?) gone wrong that occurred in the same house 36 years earlier. In the late 1890s, extremely rich forty-something banker Stefan Orwicz married beautiful 22-year-old Zofia. He built her a luxurious Italian-style home and the two soon welcomed a son named Aleksander. Things then took a turn for the worst when Stefan went blind due to his diabetes. A live-in doctor named Malicki moved into the home to care for him full time. Soon after, he and Zofia began an affair. That arrangement would soon came to a bloody end when Wiktor Arlt, Stefan's hunchbacked secretary and personal assistant, went crazy and murdered all three of them with an axe. See, he too was in love with Zofia, and would often write her poems about how grueling his unrequited love for her was. After the murders, Wiktor committed suicide, and history may very well repeat itself in the present day unless our heroes can stop it.

This is often cited as one of the best Polish genre offerings from this time, which very well may be true. That's not an endorsement of its quality so much as it is the simple fact that not many horror films were produced in Poland in the 80s and two of those were THE SHE-WOLF (1983) and I LIKE BATS (1986). Some of their other genre films from this time sound promising so this may even end up on the lower half of the scale for me by the time I see the rest. Nevertheless, being slightly better than the two middling films mentioned above doesn't mean Medium is inspiring or noteworthy itself. It's not. Things open well and the intrigue is maintained until about the midway point. That, combined with the competent directing, acting and production values, keep everything watchable even after it starts becoming something of a mess. The true undoing of the film is that it's never able to make its myriad plot threads work together harmoniously.

Slow and talky most of the time, this attempts to dress up its average mystery plot with various needless complications. The script makes room for psychic powers, doppelgangers, leech treatments, telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, human lives linked to sea turtles (?), immortality, physical regression to childhood, horoscopes that combine astrology and math (birth dates and times) to predict the exact time and day of death and a solar eclipse that's somehow needed to bring the bad guy's plot together. Why? You got me! There are a LOT of ideas crammed in here; too many, and this doesn't do an adequate job explaining most of them. The overcast cinematography, funeral pacing, lack of personable characters and humor and Nazi era setting also gave me bad flashbacks to Luca Guadagnino's tedious SUSPIRIA remake from a few years back.

Stripped down to its bones, what this really is is a rehash of the mediocre Aussie film PATRICK (1978), which was a big hit in much of Europe a few years earlier. Both involve a coma patient who's fully conscious inside their unresponsive body and using their telekinetic abilities to strike out against others. There a number of other similarities between it and this one, only this opts to gum up the works with numerous ill-explained supernatural detours.

Outside of its home country, this was given a theatrical and VHS release (on the Penta Video label) in Italy under the title Mysteria replica di un omicidio ("Mystery: Replica of a Crime"), but that appears to be it as far as 80s international distribution was concerned . A West German co-production, it may have also played in some other European cinemas, or on TV, as well. It's now pretty easy to find with English subtitles and is on Youtube, Daily Motion and other websites free to view, and was even available on Netflix for a spell, though I don't know if it's still there or not. Studio Filmowe Tor / Studio Blu offer region free Blu-ray and DVD versions with English subs.

★★

Tao da liang da xian shen wei (1988)

... aka: 桃太郎大顯神威

... aka: 新桃太郎２

... aka: 驅魔童

... aka: Child of Peach 2

... aka: Magic of Spell

... aka: Magic of Stell

... aka: Momotaro Shows Off His Power

... aka: Qu mo tong

... aka: Shin Momotaro 2

... aka: Tao tai lang da xian shen wei

... aka: Xin dai tao liang

Directed by:

Chung-Hsing Chao

Usually sequels are a marked downgrade from the original, but this sequel to the previous year's CHILD OF PEACH (1987) is thankfully about on par and every bit as bizarre, entertaining and fun! Peach Boy (again played by young actress Hsiao-Lao Lin) has managed to stamp out most of the evil in the world and now merrily spends his days feeding orphaned baby birds, saving bunnies from hunters and rescuing children with lazy mothers who are unwilling to wade into 20 feet of water to save their drowning offspring. However, a small group of evil survivors are congregating in a castle called The Devil's Palace, where they plot to find a way to "control the human beings." Led by a powerful, old white-haired devil-sorcerer (Shan Chang), who spends much of his time lounging in a giant bubbling blood bath hoping to regenerate himself and has no issue zapping his own followers with his laser finger when they piss him off, the group have their sights set on terminating Peach Boy, who's the only one currently getting in their way of world domination.

We then meet a well-intentioned idiot (Pao-Ming Ku) who is not named in the English subs but is apparently called Yat-Tuan in the original version so that's what I'm calling him. Despite having a rough childhood, constantly getting bullied and being a societal outcast, he appears blessed with at least some good dumb luck. After making his way through the woods to a graveyard, Yat-Tuan somehow manages to defeat two zombies and a walking skeleton in such an accidental manner that he doesn't realize two zombies and a walking skeleton were even ever around him. The orphaned Yat-Tuan basically worships Peach Boy and, despite being quite a bit older and with only experience as a puppeteer, is desperate for his hero to become his new master so he can teach him how to be brave and fight back.

Yat-Tuan finally tracks Peach and her now-widowed elderly mother (Mei Fang Yu, also returning from the first film) down, and does everything in his power to kiss up to them: running baths, cleaning, serving, massaging, etc. They take him into their home, though he'll have to overcome his cowardice and build up his self-esteem in order to prove himself, which, oddly enough, he never actually does!

Meanwhile, the old sorcerer is getting impatient because his daily blood baths have not been restoring his youth. His black magician assistant (Ching-Wei Shen) suggests they instead try "1000 virgin's blood and a magic stuff" to restore him, so the sorcerer sends his army out to slaughter villagers and kidnap their children. And, in case that fails, the magician picks up a few pointers from the locals, who use pinwheels around a cave to attract the legendary, thousand-year-old Ginseng Boy, who pops out of the ground after it's shot by a yellow beam from the moon (?!) The magician hopes that adding the dancing ginseng root will restore his master's youth.

Parents start showing up at Peach Boy's home begging for him to help find their kids, though seeing how they're never mentioned again or seen after this scene, we can safely assume they ended up in the blood bath! Either way, Peach Boy is dragged back into the action, which becomes personal after they attack his home, kill his mother and leave him and Yat-Tuan for dead; who are only spared from death because Peach Boy's large magical peach pops out of the well to make a surprise and very-well-timed cameo. The two are able to recuperate from their injuries and are later joined by Peach Boy's monkey (Yu-Ta Tsu), doggy (Chi-Chiang Chen) and chicken (Yu-jiu Yang) friends, who are never shown in full animal form this time out but still have a few tricks up their sleeve.

The sorcerer (who is just called “Devil” or “Elder” in the English subtitles) has four main minions who do most of his dirty work. Aside from the aforementioned magician, there's also a green, ogre-looking dude who has a mini-bazooka that blows stuff up, a muscleman called Stone (Hsiung Yang), who uses a boulder as a weapon and is able to transform into a red-eyed rock monster with razor teeth and Miss White (Li-Chang Peng); an ugly, white-haired, white-faced ghost / witch.

If this is harmed by anything, it's recycling too many plot points / gags from the earlier film, including having Peach Boy yet again trying to get revenge after his parents are killed and Yat-Tuan basically being a copycat of the previous Knight Melon character right down to attracting the attention of the ugly witch, who's again played by a man in drag. This also does retain some of the toilet humor and childish slapstick (like crotch hits and an ass getting set on fire) from the first film. Despite that, this feels much darker in tone, which is probably hard to avoid considering the main baddie spends half his screen-time lounging in a giant pool of children's blood!

This also dishes out an extraordinary amount of punishment to the hero, who gets the absolutely snot beaten out of him numerous times yet still emerges victorious during the truly spectacular final 20 minutes. It features well-choreographed and clever fight scenes, impressive acrobatics, wacky special effects heavy on the lasers and a surprising amount of gore for a kids movie, including an eye gouging, ears ripped off and a sword shoved down a throat. While this whole scene takes place on just one set, there's also some nice outdoor scenery thrown in earlier on.

When I was writing this review, I noticed that I kept referring to Peach Boy by female pronouns since he's played by actress Lin. Despite attempts to "butch her up," Lin looks much more like a young adult female than the preteen boy she's playing but it hardly even matters. She's basically impossible to dislike in the role; skilled at action scenes, extremely charming and very good when they give her more dramatic moments. Mei Fang Yu, as the mother, is also a delight while she's around, and most of the rest of the cast are extremely enthusiastic about what they're doing. The only person I wasn't too enamored with was Ku in the more blatantly comedic role, though that's not really the actor's fault. It's just that the mugging oaf has already been done to death in these kind of films and too much time is wasted setting this character up for a redemption / growth arc that never comes.

Considering the popularity of these titles in certain areas of Asia, it's quite surprising this has yet to receive any kind of legit, remastered DVD or Blu-ray release. There were however plenty of VHS and VCD releases (including a widescreen print with English subtitles) for it, though none here in America. While technically a part of the series, the Lin vehicle Feng huang wang zi / Magic Warriors (1989) was released as Child of Peach 3, or Shin Momotaro 3 as it's called in Japan).

★★★