Xing tao tai lang (1987)

... aka: 捉鬼雜牌軍

... aka: 新桃太郎

... aka: Child of Peach

... aka: Shin Momotaro

... aka: Sword of Sun God, The

... aka: Zhuo gui za pai jun

Directed by:

Chung-Hsing Chao

Chun-Liang Chen

Yesssss! A warrior with magical powers (Fu-Chien Chang), his lovely wife (Bao-Lien Yin) and their newborn baby son live a peaceful and carefree life in the beautiful and fertile mountaintop Peach Garden, along with the child / animal guardians Tiny-Dog (Fu Lai), Tiny-Monkey (Chun Hsiao) and the unfortunately-named Tiny-Cock (Yu-Jiu Yang). In the Peach Garden it's always sunny and warm thanks to the father possessing the powerful, laser-shooting "Sword of Sun." They also have a giant magical peach that always drips nectar and that they can command to do their bidding. However, the evil, flame-haired, vampire-fanged Devil King (Chung-Yu Huang) wants the sword for himself. He and his green-afro'd minions manage to steal it. The garden instantly dies, it starts snowing and the sword is used to murder both the father and mother. Before dying, Madame Peach manages to seal her baby inside the magic peach and orders it to leave and go hide somewhere. She informs a visiting little girl fairy (Shadow Liu) to eventually find her child so he can avenge their deaths.

We then meet a goofy, childless elderly couple; Kung (Tu Chin) and his wife Ah Po (Mei Fang Yu), who keep bickering and blaming each other for why they could never have any kids. The old woman goes to wash laundry by a river and stumbles upon the big peach. During a hilarious scene, it ends up dragging her down a river, over waterfalls and through the forest, catches her ass on fire and then promptly pisses in her face! She ends up back home, where the peach causes problems for her and her husband but finally cracks open to reveal there's an infant inside. Thinking they've finally been blessed by Buddha after all these years, they decide to keep and raise the baby, christening it Peach Kid for obvious reasons.

Meanwhile, Devil King goes down to hell and rescues some eternally damned souls led by cackling old witch named Wu Po (played by male actor Kuang-Yung Lin) and her two dopey dwarf sidekicks. He brings them back up to Earth, where they're outfitted with new rainbow fright wigs and clown make-up (the witch is also given a nifty skull broom that shoots fire like a flamethrower!) and now has his very own army. Their first assignment is to attack a village, which they burn to the ground after slaughtering the parents and kidnapping the children. They then easily take over a castle and kill all the guards. Before long, they've successfully occupied, and now control, over half the land in whatever wacky world this is supposed to be set in.

Because society can't wait forever for the Peach Baby to grow up and it's his destined to oppose the Devil King, the fairy uses her magic to speed the growing process along. The baby becomes a toddler and then a little boy and then a young teenager (played by cherubic-looking actress Hsiao-Lao Lin, who was 17 or 18 years old at the time of filming). In all of his forms, Peach Boy is both amazingly acrobatic and amazingly strong and can do things like split wood with his bare hands and even carry entire trees.

When Princess Apple (Sze-Ping Chen) is kidnapped by the Devil King and his minions and taken to hell, her father announces that anyone who's able to save her will also win her hand in marriage. That offer sounds too good to pass up for portly, virginal King Melon (San Peng) and his men. They're joined by the cowardly priest Bowie (Sun-Young Chen) and his troops and set off on a quest to rescue the girl. When Peach Boy attempts to enlist in their army, he gets rejected and instead meets up with his animal-kid friends monkey, dog and chicken. The bad guys slaughter most at the army camp, save for Melon, who's then forced to follow the child warrior and her sidekicks into battle at Demon Island.

This is really everything it should be: colorful, fast-paced, weird, flashy, enthusiastic, imaginative, filled with action, stunts, wire work, good fight choreography, special effects, garish costumes, spirited performances, variable special effects and, underneath it all, a little bit of heart. There's also a lot of slapstick and childish humor thrown in for the juvenile target audience, like men accidentally drinking dog and monkey piss, farting in faces, biting an ass and the witch taking on the form of the princess so she can seduce "fatty" Melon and make him strip off his clothes. Of course, I could imagine more conservative parents sitting down with their kids to watch this and being aghast at some of the content (not limited to the surprisingly profanity-laden English subtitles), but for everyone else, this delightfully bonkers fantasy holds a lot of entertainment value.

There's a strange (and usually highly amusing) surprise around nearly every corner, including a bad guy who uses a large bag of captured wind as a weapon, laser-shooting skulls, shark-finned men with tridents, a muscleman with a huge spiked club, gory moments like an exploding head and, best of all, a big monster comprised entirely of peaches of varying sizes that does kung fu, fights with lasers and shoots exploding pits out of its mouth! The lead character and most of the story has been swiped from the Japanese folk tale Momotaro ("Peach Boy") and the music score has clearly been inspired by The Neverending Story, right down to the theme song.

Though this Taiwanese production has never even been officially released here in America and didn't set the box office on fire during its theatrical run in Hong Kong it made a lot of money in its home country and especially Japan (where it was re-titled Shin Momotaro and distributed by Bandai) and led to many more similar films. The immediate sequel, Tao da liang da xian shen wei / Magic of Spell (1988), was also made by Chao (who'd previously directed the successful Hello Dracula) and featured some of the same cast and characters. While not an official sequel (and not even containing the Peach Boy character), another Lin vehicle called Feng huang wang zi / Magic Warriors (1989) was released in some quarters as Child of Peach 3 and called Shin Momotaro 3 in Japan.

★★★

A Mulher Que Põe a Pomba no Ar (1978)

... aka: Woman Who Makes Doves Fly, The

... aka: Woman Who Put Doves In the Air, The

Directed by:

"J. Avelar" (José Mojica Marins)

Rosângela Maldonado

Here's one from the Coffin Joe universe you may have missed. Unlike some of his better-known / distributed cult titles, this has never been released here in America nor is it available in English. I actually couldn't find evidence of a VHS release in any country, including Brazil, and ended up viewing this on Youtube using their auto-translate function for the Portuguese subs. As per usual, these translations are a mess and often incomprehensible but they were just enough to get me through this. Furthermore, the only available copy of this title isn't in very good condition (soft picture with a green and sometimes yellow tint) and has a time clock near the bottom of the screen at all times so I had to both enhance the image and crop the bottom third off of all these screen caps. I did this for the same reason I erase film company logos and such whenever they're present: aesthetics. I simply don't like looking at them!

Marins is listed as "technical director" under the name "J. Avelar" but he has a co-director on this outing: Rosângela Maldonado. Maldonado had been a collaborator with Marins starting with his Finis Hominis ("End of Man") back in 1971 and also appeared in his 1972 adventure Sexo E Sangue na Trilha do Tesouro ("Sex and Blood on the Treasure Trail") prior to this. Though she shares directorial credit, this and her follow-up, A Deusa de Mármore / "The Marble Goddess" (1978), which involves a 2000-year-old woman preserving her youth through a Satanic pact, are technically the very first genre features made by a female director in Brazil. In addition, she also has the lead role, wrote the script, produced, did the art direction AND composed some of the music!

Things center around a platinum blonde lesbian scientist named Adelaide (Maldonado) who runs a secret organization of women who work out of her mansion. She has three faithful assistants - Rosângela (Luandy Maldonado), Diana (Dallas Kayan) and another whose name I didn't catch (Marta Lupiani), plus a chauffeur named Nelson (Arlindo Xavier) and a flamboyant male servant (Ivan Lima) in lieu of your traditional female maid. The gay servant is used for extremely embarrassing comic relief as he prances around dusting, singing and acting like a sex-crazed queen. He's secretly in love with Nelson (who slaps him in the face and pushes him down at one point cause he keeps coming on to him) and even has a homemade Nelson sex doll in his bedroom.

Adelaide is working on some kind of secret formula that will help cure men of their wandering eye. To gather data, she also runs a feminist support group full of angry women whose husbands have all been caught cheating on them. Their stories are all written down by the assistants. While working in her lab one day, Adelaide accidentally drops a test tube and the fumes infect her and Rosângela. The result? Well, it appears the formula has somehow transformed them into flying dove monsters who then go around attacking unfaithful men and their mistresses!

The hilarious dove costumes include round papier-mâché bird heads with floppy beaks, white feathered crop tops and panties, fabric flapper wings, body paint and go-go boots. They show up at a "picnic" of one of the cheating husbands and karate chop him and his mistress. They then go to a bawdy banquet / swinger's orgy (where Coffin Joe makes a brief cameo being fed grapes) and start beating people up. A dove woman breaks into a hotel room, cock blocks a man by climbing into bed and pecking his mistress and then is seen flying above the city by pedestrians. Word soon gets around town and newspaper headlines are wondering whether the creatures are ghosts or beings from Mars and wondering whether or not the dove women's reign of terror will end adultery once and for all.

If only this would have kept its focus on the dove women it may have been pretty consistently hilarious but sadly much more time is spent elsewhere. There's a long and seemingly pointless scene at a soccer match where a fight breaks out in the audience. The gay servant has a bizarre erotic dream where Adelaide and her girls are dyking it out as he (dressed in drag) and Nelson watch, which prompts the object of his affections to finally accept his love. After waking up and finding out it was only a dream, he destroys his sex doll during a temper tantrum. Three cheating husbands rent a boat for them and their mistresses to mess around on but their party is crashed by the wives, who attack them with whips and force them to abandon ship at gunpoint. And so on.

Adelaide has a flashback to when she was seventeen and in love with a boy who (kind of?) raped her by a waterfall. When his parents found out they sent him away to live elsewhere. Presumably this traumatic event has turned her into a man-hating lesbian (cause that's how it always works in real life, right?) and so she's taken Rosângela, who is young enough to be her daughter and may actually be her daughter since the actress playing her has the same last name, as her new lover. A white pill is introduced that seems to give the dove girls special powers but it's only shown in one scene. This just completely peters out by the end when the police get involved.

More of a lightweight sex farce than anything else, this has lots of terrible juvenile comedy and topless nudity plus serious underpinnings that they're completely unable to pull off in any kind of interesting or compelling way. It doesn't help matters that this is horribly-made across the board, with especially awful photography and editing. There are tons of close-up shots, zoom shots, shots going out of focus, jerky camerawork and rapid fire cuts. The acting is terrible and the script is poorly-written. There are too many characters and the attempts at humor are almost always embarrassing. While this provides a couple of unintentional laughs and crosses into WTF?! territory a number of times (and I know it sounds pretty amazing), it's not consistent enough in either area to really make it a good SBIG film.

The cast includes Heitor Gaiotti (from The Extra-Terrestrial Cat in Boots) and Marins film regulars David Húngaro and Walter Portela. Instead of your usual boring text opening credits, this has an announcer clad in a leisure suit and bell bottoms at a disco reading off the names of the stars, who then enter from off-stage and wave as animated birds fly across the screen with their names on banners and an audience cheers. That was a cute touch at least. I also laughed out loud when test tubes in the doctor's lab are shown spinning on a record player instead of a centrifuge.

★1/2