Shen jian dong shan he (1981)

... aka: 神劍動山河

... aka: Excalibur Moves Mountains and Rivers

... aka: Heaven Sword

... aka: Thrilling Bloody Sword

... aka: Thrilling Sword

Directed by:

Chang Shing-I (Hsin-Yi Chang)

You know what Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was missing? Laser fights, demonic creatures, blood, ghosts, living skeletons, fire-breathing dragons with nine heads, talking chickens encouraging mob violence, fart humor, decapitations, bisection, swords going up asses and weird biblical allusions. Thankfully, this warped Taiwanese children's fantasy is around to remedy those oversights.

At a royal palace, Queen I-mei (Fanny Fong Fang-Fang), is in the middle of delivering her first child when a flaming meteor flies down from the heavens, hits her in the stomach and forces her to push out a giant, bloody, pulsating cocoon, instantly killing her! The king, Gau-shien (Han Chin), then orders his men to put the infant in a basket and send it down river a la Baby Moses. The basket floats through the Happy Forest and right to the village of the seven dwarfs. They initially plot to eat the "flesh ball" but after stabbing it, it spits out smoke and opens to reveal a (human) baby girl. Thinking she has been sent from the heavens, they name her Yaur-gi. Seventeen years later, Yaur-gi (also Fanny Fong) has grown into a beautiful young woman. After almost falling off a cliff trying to grab a flower, she's rescued by handsome Prince Yur-juhn (Shang-Chien Liu) and it's love at first sight.

Meanwhile, a duck-lipped cyclops monster is going around slaughtering people, so the king calls for reinforcements. Female exorcist Gi-err (Elsa Yang) shows up and demonstrates her formidable powers by making an imperial minister's head do 360 degree spins and levitating a sword and impaling a warrior with it. She calls forth her friend, black magician Shiah-ker (Yi Chang), and the two are easily able to defeat the monster. Against the wishes of chief advisor Minister Gan (Shih Chin), the king then promotes the two exorcists to head up his security detail. What he doesn't realize is that his new friends actually sent the monster there to begin with just so they could kill it and then infiltrate the kingdom. The two are working in cahoots with a master demon called Ah-Du and their ultimate goal is to take over the king's empire.

Back at the dwarf village, the love-struck Yaur-gi becomes depressed because the prince, who's been busy slaying a nine-headed sea monster the evil infiltrators have conjured up, hasn't returned to see her. She saves a white bunny with an injured leg, which then transforms into a giggly white "fairy of the forest" (Ling-Ling Hsia) who then offers to grant her any wish she wants. Any guesses as to what she wishes for? In order to get close to the prince, Yaur-gi poses as a maid but her cover is quickly blown since she's a dead-ringer for her mother - the late queen - and is wearing a necklace left in the basket with her when she was sent upstream. She does manage to briefly talk with the prince, who agrees to come see her. Unfortunately, he comes in the form of a man-in-a-suit bear after the evil sorcerers cast a spell on him.

With help from the little fairy, Yaur-gi and her dwarf dads concoct a magical potion in a giant barrel and place the bear prince inside. The kicker is that he has to stay submerged for an entire week for it to work. But since this movie just loves to make stuff up as it goes along, the barrel is opened early when Shiah-ker shows up to kill him and the fairy then whips up an "elixir" to save him. Shiah-ker kidnaps the princess and takes her to hell, where she's possessed by a demon and then agrees to marry him instead of the prince. The only way to put a stop to the madness is by retrieving "the thunder sword," which is said to be hidden in an underwater cave, and a few other essentials needed to defeat the bad guys, which also requires beating a vast array of monsters.

Monsters, you say? Yes, this has them... and tons of them I might add. Aside from the aforementioned cyclops, multi-headed "siren" and demon master, there's a man in a pterodactyl suit, frog monsters played by men covered in black spandex with flippers on their hands and feet hopping around on their butts, four near-indestructible bronze muscleman statues come to life, each with a unique weapon and just one vulnerable point on their bodies (including up the ass!), a bloody corpse that can detach its arms and feet, a set of large flying dentures (!) and a giant genie with heavy eye makeup and a plastic butt (!) on its head.

Aside from all of the fx work (which is technically awful if we're to be honest with ourselves yet still fun) and the fact this is all just too weird to outright ignore, Sword also benefits a lot from nice bold colors and surprisingly good production design, sets, props, weaponry and costumes. But then we have the rest of the movie to contend with...

The story takes forever to really take shape and lurches along for the first hour or so until it finally settles into a hero's quest type of scenario. Some of the main characters are also extremely annoying, starting with the princess, who's a complete nitwit. She's always moping around, just stands there and refuses to ever help anybody, casually knocks over a protective statue that she's been told to stay away from countless times and has to be told repeatedly not to open the lid to the healing bath for the prince or else it will KILL him. I'm not sure why everyone's jumping at the bit to try to marry this chick. She'll probably end up getting whoever does killed! Hopefully no one ever gives her access to nuclear codes or allows her near a button that says "Only hit in case of emergency" in the future or we're all in trouble.

Even worse are the dwarfs. They're loud, klutzy, dumb and obnoxious, spit food into each other's mouths, fart in the talking chicken's face ("It smells bad!") and constantly smack, kick, push and punch each other accompanied by goofy Three Stooges-style sound effects. I doubt even small children would find their antics amusing. The music is all stolen from other sources. I noticed The Burning and Battlestar Galactica but there's other familiar music here that I've heard before but can't quite place.

Up until recently all that existed for this one was a cloudy full screen VHS print. That is until a 35mm print was finally located. It's been given a 2K restoration from its original camera negative for its Blu-ray release from Gold Ninja Video. There are lots of scratches and damage on this print, not necessarily a bad thing in my eyes (or perhaps yours either), but a lot of the visual effects that were added in post cause the background detail to blur. There's talk of a full restoration coming soon.

★★1/2

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.

★★★