Shen da (1975)

... aka: 神打
... aka: El mono tramposo sobre el fuego sagrado (The Monkey Cheater of the Sacred Fire)
... aka: Fists from the Spirit World
... aka: Naked Fists of Terror
... aka: Skillful Boxer, The
... aka: Spiritual Boxer, The
... aka: Wang Yu défie le maître du karaté (Wang Yu Challenges the Master of Karate)

Directed by:
Chia-Liang Liu

"Spiritual boxers" are enhanced fighters who've been blessed using magic, charms and special calligraphy to be invincible and impervious to conventional weaponry. The film opens with a demonstration of their special powers as a shaman (Wilson Tong) casts his spells, helping two of his men (special guest stars Lung Ti and Kuan Tai Chen) to withstand sword slashings, spear jabbings and even being shot point blank with rifles without shedding so much as a single drop of blood. We then move from the end of the Qing Dynasty to many years later as Master Zhi Chiang (Yang Chiang) and his young protege Siu Chien (Yue Wong) arrive in a small village. There are wanted posters around for a couple of vicious thugs who've been going around pillaging, murdering and terrorizing various areas. County police aren't of much help, so vigilante justice is recommended.

Master Zhi, who's a drunk, and Siu Chien, who's a clever troublemaker, go from town to town operating their own scam that involves pretending to invoke various animal gods, proclaiming they've been turned invincible by said gods and then using silver-painted wooden weapons instead of steel ones to demonstrate their "invincibility." Having proven their powers, they're then able to fleece superstitious locals. However, a local martial artist named Liu Yung (Han Chiang) has caught on to their latest attempt, which ends with Zhi getting thrown into jail and Siu Chien forced to run off to another village. There, he saves a little boy from being beaten after he steals some bread, refers to himself as "Dragon King of the Eastern Sea" and fake invokes a rain god, which scares villagers away. However, they eventually start taking to him and his strange ways.

Not so friendly is ruthless loan shark Liu Deruei (Chung Tien Shih) and his army of thugs, who don't hesitate beating, stealing from and even torturing the poor locals who don't pay up. Siu Chien manages to get on their bad side when he helps a couple get their money back for some stolen eggs and soon has the bad guys after him. However, they keep their distance at first as they believe his various tricks mean he has supernatural powers. Siu Chien also crosses paths with orphaned village girl Jin Lian (Chen Chi Lin), who lives on the outskirts of the village, makes money weaving baskets and many think is a man due to her short haircut and tomboy nature. The two become friends after she helps get him out of a jam with firecrackers and a slingshot, which gives him the reputation of possessing the powerful "thunder palm."

Once word gets around the village about Siu Chien, he finds himself getting free meals and other perks. He's even invited to the home of wealthy Master Lin (Shen Chan) and his wife (Teresa Ha Ping), who are having something of a problem with a ghost and in desperate need of an exorcism. Their daughter (Mei Hua Chen), who is being courted by cousin Ah Jin (Fei Ai) against the father's wishes, has also been seriously ill for several months due to the haunting. If he and Jin Lian, who is now functioning as his "student" / scam partner, can successfully rid the home of the ghost they'll receive a handsome reward.

Back in the village, all of the local men are starting to adopt the newcomer's unique martial arts techniques, which help them to successfully fight back against the thugs. Liu Deruei then brings in two of his "best" criminals (the same ones featured on various wanted posters in every village) named Shum (Hoi Sang Lee) and Jiu (Hang-Sheng Wu), who prove to be stiff competition for Siu Chien.

Director Liu (aka Kar-Leung Lau) started out as an actor and action director; amassing hundreds of film credits up until this, his feature debut. While Spiritual Boxer may not be the all-out action extravaganza some of his later efforts would be and is usually written off as a lesser film as a result, this is still a bright and entertaining starting point. It's also generally considered one of the very first kung fu comedies and thus proven to be very influential over the coming years. There's more than enough action scenes in here (including an excellent ten minute long climactic fight), likable lead actors, plenty of lighthearted comedy built upon characters and situations instead of the later over-reliance on noisy slapstick and even a few horror touches thrown in. It's handsomely shot, well produced, briskly paced and quite enjoyable.

After having already appeared in a handful of films for Shaw Brothers starting in his late teens, this film rocketed its young star (then about twenty) to stardom in Hong Kong. Though mostly a presence in action films, he would also appear in some other Shaw genre offerings like The Snake Prince (1976), Spirit of the Raped (1976) and the Spiritual Boxer sequel The Shadow Boxing (1979) from the same director, plus the non-Shaw films Dress Off for Life (1984), THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986; cameo appearance only), Blood Ritual (1989) and Spiritually a Cop (1991). The supporting cast is loaded with familiar faces, including Hark-On Fung as Liu's main thug, Lao Shen as a restaurant owner, Sau Kei Lee, Ching Ho Wang, Ching Tien and others.

There are numerous DVD releases of this one with English subtitles, including from Intercontinental Video Limited, and a Blu-ray from 88 Films.

★★★

Oni (1972)

... aka: 鬼
... aka: Demon, The

Directed by:
Kihachiro Kawamoto

Director / writer Kawamoto began his career as an assistant production designer at Toho before branching off on his own. Always with an interest in both puppets and stop motion animation, he co-founded his own commercial animation studio in 1958 and studied under both Tadahito Mochinaga in Japan and Jiří Trnka in Czechoslovakia. By the late 60s he was making his very own animated shorts, which melded model, cut-out and stop motion animation and usually involved puppets in some capacity. The Demon was the third of around a dozen shorts Kawamoto made before his death in 2010. He also made three feature films and was president of the Japan Animation Association for over two decades, starting in 1989. This seven-and-a-half minute short was based on one of the folk tales from Konjaku-monogatari ("Anthology of Tales from the Past"); a collection of 1000+ very short stories seldom running longer than 3 pages apiece that dates back to 12th-century medieval Japan. The authors of these stories, and origin of the 28 volume collection, are still unknown but these tales are still read, and sometimes even adapted for film, TV and theater, to this very day.

Living a miserable and impoverished life, two young hunters who live at home with their sickly old mother, venture out into the woods with their bows and arrows to hunt a deer. On the way to a good location the younger brother hears noises and sees a pair of gleaming red eyes off in the brush that the older sibling writes off as, respectively, wind and fireflies. When the younger brother positions himself in a tree, a pale arm reaches down and grabs him by the hair. The elder then shoots the demon's arm off with his bow. The two take the severed arm back home where they make a startling discovery. Seeing how the story itself is very predictable, one's enjoyment of this will depend almost entirely on how much they take to the visual presentation and animation style.

This has been released on DVD several times, including as part of the 2007 Geneon release "The Collected Works of Kihachiro Kawamoto" and as part of the 2008 Kimstim release "The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto." While both sets contain optional English subs for all of the shorts, the Geneon release is the more complete of the two and has three additional shorts not found on the Kimstim one.

★★1/2

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

... aka: Reise nach Transilvanien (Trip to Transylvania)
... aka: Transilvânia - Hotel do Outro Lado do Mundo (Transylvania - Hotel Across the World)
... aka: Una notte in Transilvania (One Night in Transylvania)
... aka: Ursäkta var är Dracula (Sorry, Where Is Dracula?)

Directed by:
Rudy De Luca

After receiving a videotape titled "Frankenstein Lives" that purports to be an actual monster attack, tabloid newspaper editor Mac Turner (Norman Fell) purchases two airplane tickets to Transylvania for his brown-nosing, awkward son Gil (Ed Begley Jr.) and intelligent but cocky reporter Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum). The objective? Come back with a headline-grabbing story about a monster terrorizing the area. Upon arrival, Jack makes it clear that he doesn't take the assignment seriously and makes a mad dash for American tourist / single mother Elizabeth Ellison (Teresa Ganzel) instead while Gil makes a laughing stock of both of them when he point blank inquires about Frankenstein. They are ushered off to a castle hotel owned by shady Transylvanian Mayor Lepescu (Jeffrey Jones), who uses a mini guillotine to cut eggs, and populated by an oddball staff that includes thoroughly obnoxious doorman Fejos (Michael Richards), faux hunchback butler Radu (John Byner) and his klutzy cook wife Lupi (Carol Kane), who have a bizarre love/hate thing going on.

While Jack hassles Elizabeth on the phone to try to get a date, Gil gets to work on the actual assignment. That leads him to the shooting location of the video as well as an old gypsy (Inge Appelt) who points them in the direction of a supposed werewolf that turns out to just be a philandering man. After that dead end, the monster story starts coming to them all by itself, starting with sexy female vampire Odette (Geena Davis), who pays nighttime visits to Gil in his room through a hidden passageway. Secretive behavior from a local police inspector (Bozidar Smiljanic), the mayor and the heavily-guarded asylum of Dr. Vittorio Malavaqua (Joseph Bologna) arouse suspicions. Jack and Gil eventually realize there's a cover-up of sorts going on.

The director / writer, who also has a cameo as suspected werewolf Lawrence Malbot, was a co-founder of The Comedy Store and frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks' so it's quite surprising how spectacularly unfunny most of this mess is. It seems to want to do for the entire Universal monster collective what Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974) did for Whale's classics but doesn't work at all due to terrible jokes, awful dialogue (much of which was clearly improvised or sometimes looped in later... and horribly so!), grating overacting from nearly the entire cast and a monotonous noisy / obnoxious tone from start to finish. And yet it's not for lack of trying. They manage to make room for a mummy, a vampire, a wolf man, a Frankenstein monster, a hunchback, a mad doctor with Jekyll & Hyde tendencies and more, but seldom come up with any clever gags to involve these "creatures" in. As an added insult, the entire film is flat and ugly to look at.

The cast is a huge selling point - perhaps an even bigger selling point now than when this was first released - but even this front loaded comic ensemble can't save writing this bad. While Begley Jr. at least adequately feigns being in the spirit of things, Goldblum seems utterly disinterested in the material. Richards, already fine-tuning his spastic form of ungainly slapstick this far back in his career, is nothing short of annoying, and I found Kane (who I usually like) every bit as irritating. There are awful attempts at Eastern European accents, with Jones and Bologna being the worst offenders there. While this may even be intentionally bad, it's still not funny in the least. Ganzel is at least cute and Davis looks great in her vampire costume but neither are given enough to do. And poor Donald Gibb aka Ogre from the Revenge of the Nerds films, ends up with some of the worst one-liners ("I'll tear every bit of hair out of your ass!"). I did at least enjoy Fell's cameo in the opening scene.

This 3-million-budgeted, PG-rated New World Pictures release was financed by Dow Chemical Corporation (!!) solely so they they could unfreeze some locked assets they had in Yugoslavia. The investment returned just over 7 million in a domestic release and this didn't even crack the Top 100 for its year. Critics also hated it. Over thirty years later, all it really has left are nostalgic "fans" who saw it on TV when they were younger. And it's probably true that this may play better for children than adults; at least adults who don't enjoy things like Paul Bart: Mall Cop and Dumb and Dumberer.

The title is a play on the famous Glenn Miller song "Pennsylvania 6-5000" which had already been used for a 1963 animated short featuring Bugs Bunny in a vampire count's castle. That short is just six and a half minutes long and is funnier and more clever than this.

★1/2