THE INVASIAN: The Mad Monk AKA Chai Gong (1993)

 

The legendary Dragon Fighter Lo Han (Stephen Chow) makes a wager with the Goddess of Mercy (Anita Mui) that he can go to Earth and change the destinies of three people without using magic. The three souls in question: a prostitute, a villain, and a beggar, are cursed to be reincarnated and thus relive their awful lots in life unless Lo Han can help them change their ways. With the help of his pals Tiger Fighter Han Lo (Ng Man-Tat) and Unicorn (Wong Yat-Fei), Lo Han might, just might, have a chance to help these people and earn his place in Heaven.

After the passing of Ng Man-Tat this year, I decided that I needed to get back into the films of Stephen Chow and watch some unseen-by-me titles. Luckily, The Mad Monk (1993) was on Amazon Prime. Unluckily, that version didn't have the original Cantonese dialog. Now don't get me wrong, I don't speak Cantonese at all but a big part of Stephen Chow's comedy is his amazing voice and I'm pretty sure that all of his films are dubbed into Mandarin for the mainland. So if possible, I always watch the Cantonese ones (with English subtitles, of course). That being said, I still really enjoyed this film.

The screenplay by Sandy Shaw is funny, sweet, and bonkers. It really plays well with the collective comedic talents of the cast. But the thing that really impressed me most about The Mad Monk is the imagination that went into the special effects and set design. For instance, when the King of Hell tricks Lo Han and comes to Earth, he retains his giant stature and lays waste to a pint-sized city. I'm not sure if I'd say that I'm in a big hurry to watch this one again but I'm glad that I finally got around to it.

Wednesday Ramble: Movie Memory Mining

While I continue to mine the depths of my memory (without leaving any reliable support beams or adhere to any safety regulations as I go), it dawned on me to try and recall what my very first memories of watching movies are. The first film that I have a very tenuous memory of catching in theater is The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Since I was only four when that film was first released, it was likely during its 1981 or 1982 re-release. This sticks out for me because I remember being really confused how the empire was able to reattach Darth Vader's head after Luke cut it off. This plot confusion didn't get cleared up for many more years than I'd like to admit. I asked my mom if she remembers taking me to this film. All she recalls is something loud and scary happening. I was much too young to have seen Star Wars (1977) in the theater but my parents got me The Story of Star Wars record which I listened to constantly.

Now I can't confirm the following but I believe that my family enjoyed cable television while I was little lad in Montana. The first movies I remember watching were Popeye (1980) and Clash of the Titans (1981). I don't know if HBO (or whatever channel or channels we had) still does this but when they had a new movie, they would play it all day long. So if memory serves (unlikely), I watched Popeye and Clash of the Titans over and over again all weekend long. I also remember that they played Hardware Wars (1978) and I laughed my head off at it after my dad explained to me why it was funny.

In the vein of things cinematically tragic, I was utterly freaked out by another short film called Recorded Live (1975) which is about film reels that come to life and devour a guy. This poor bastard shows up to a movie or TV studio looking for a job and dies horribly. This could be a metaphor for my social life and how it has been utterly decimated by my love of movies. Or it's about how I feel about showing up for work.

Robert Altman's Popeye is just grotesque and weird. I tried to sit through it once many years later but I was struck by how wrongheaded it seems to be. Maybe it captures the spirit of the original cartoon too well. What is the spirit of the old cartoon, you ask? Imagine if you cut open the rotting carcass of a bull, climbed inside, and did push-ups on your knuckles while listening to the 1812 Overture on 78rpm. That's how I feel about it. So anyway, I have a feeling that if I put the 1980 film on right now, I might actually enjoy it just because it's so goddamned weird. Chances of me actually doing that are around 12%.

Leave it to something as silly as Clash of the Titans to introduce me to the magic of Ray Harryhausen. Later, I'd have my mind blown by his work on the Sinbad movies but this epic 1981 um... epic was just what the doctor (I assume a pediatrician) ordered. My fondest memory of this film is the nighttime scene where Calibos sneaks into Perseus and his crew's camp in order to kill them. This sequence haunted me in the best way and is the closest thing to that European horror vibe that I love coming from a fantasy movie. I recently bought Clash on Blu-ray and haven't revisited it as of yet. However, I have been listening to Laurence Rosenthal's score while writing this. I've seen the 2010 remake but all I remember is that it wasn't terrible. Oh and Medusa was truly lame.

Leda: The Fantastical Adventures Of Yohko

Leda: The Fantastical Adventures Of Yohko
AKA Genmu Senki Leda
Directed by Kuhiko Yuyama
1985
70 minutes

So this teenage girl named Yohko has a crush on a dude but he doesn't know she exists. She writes him a love song and chickens out when she's about to hand him the tape. Suddenly, Yohko gets whisked away to Ashanty, a magical land with fantastic beasts, bizarre creatures, and weird mecha. She makes friends with Ringhum, a talking dog, loses her walkman with her precious love song, and falls into a plant that transforms her from boring plain ordinary Yohko into scantily-clad badass sword-wielding Yohko.



You see, her love song isn't just some ordinary pop jam. Hell no! In Ashanty, her dumb old song is the source of something called "Leda magic". And it is been prophetized- oh that's not a real word? sorry- prophesied that if the "Leda magic" falls into the wrong hands, a warrior will come to set things right. Obviously, Yohko is that warrior and those wrong hands belong to Zell, an androgynous duder who looking for "Leda's heart". Zell wants to take advantage of the hole (tee hee) in space and time between Ashanty and Earth. Why? Brace yourself. He wants to conquer our planet!



So Zell has this army of robots or whatever. Sure Yohko is pretty cool and all with her newly discovered super sword-fighting abilities but she is only one person. How can she hopefully hope to defeat all this freakin' evil and get home to Earth so she can confess her love to that dude? Enter Yoni, a shrine maiden who pilots a giant mecha (that looks like the Tin Man), to help Yohko bring the pain to Zell and his weird cronies.



I like how the people behind this animated feature couldn't decide if they should do fantasy genre or mecha genre or whatever-the-fuck genre then they said, "Fuck it, let's do all three!" I expected this to be a lot more sleazy (don't worry, someone actually animated a porn version) and violent. There's no blood in the action sequences but they aren't hurt by it's absence. This movie also features the least annoying talking dog in the history of animation. I like Leda despite the fact that the plot is embarrassingly stupid. The 80s cheese and accompanying soundtrack are big bonuses. Before he went all Pokemon on us, director Yuyama did one of my childhood favorites: Windaria.

Queen Millennia

Queen Millennia
AKA Sen-nen Joo
Directed Masayuki Akehi
1982
121 minutes

The place: Tokyo. The time: 1999. You know what though? Tokyo 1999 looks like Pittsburgh 2076. Anyway, Yukino is just your average young lady who also happens to be a friggin' alien space queen (or whatever). She stays on the Earth to keep an eye on us stupid humans. Her one thousand year reign is up and it's time for one of her sisters (chick has a lot sisters) to take over. On Lar Metal, Yukino's planet, all of its people sleep during winter -which is a thousand years long- and they only wake up during the "momentary spring".



Well, these guardians are sick of the warlike, moronic humans who are always destroying the Earth and they want it for themselves so they can stay awake all throughout the millennium. They trick Yukino and the humans into thinking that Lar Metal is going to collide with Earth by throwing the entire planet into chaos with a wicked meteor shower. BUT IN REALITY, they are just going to get the planets close enough so that they can cross the "ephemeral bridge" (?) and take our planet for themselves. Bastards!



Yukino says, "Fuck you, fuckers!" (I'm paraphrasing) to her alien comrades and decides to rescue as many humans as she can and go to war against her own kind. With her student Hajime (one of those damn pygmy-sized male lead characters that you see over and over again in manga artists's Leiji Matsumoto work), her badass sister Selen, and a continent sized warship on her side, Yukino gives her all to stop the plot that her dumb dickhead alien shitface friends have concocted.



One of my favorite things about Queen Millennia is the score by Kitaro. It is electro-fabulousness of the highest order mixed with the most melodramatic orchestra in the universe. I fucking love it. For a 2 hour movie, I'd say the pacing is pretty good. Once you get through the first half hour or so, you'll probably get hooked. And when you've got all the gothic overtones and straight-faced, pretentious, and hokey dialog under your skin, it's hard to shake and that's a good thing. There is also some nice atmosphere, great animation, and some pretty spectacular disaster sequences.