Old Man, Your Kung Fu is Useless! Part II
by Walter Jon Williams

Moon Legend (1991), directed by Peter Mak, is a stellar example of the neo-hero film.

Our swordsman neo-hero, Tak (Jacky Cheung), is plagued by recurring dreams of a beautiful woman, dressed in a bride's costume, who is in some desperate trouble. During one dream, he reaches out to her and snatches her bracelet, which breaks in half. When he wakes, he finds half a jade bracelet in his hand.

Oooooh.

Tak talks to his master, who informs him that something pretty cosmic is about to happen. "Maybe you'll have to save the Earth," he remarks-a bit casually, I thought-and then sends Tak to the Old Sword Mansion to consult with the wise folk there.

Meanwhile, a beautiful shapechanger, Ching'er, is luring a local rustic to his doom. He thinks he's going to rape her, but instead she whips out a hollow bamboo rod, jabs it into his throat, and commences to drink the blood that gushes up as from a fountain. Before she can properly finish him off, a troop of cavalry ride up and shoot her with a peculiarly-designed Holy Arrow. She changes into a white fox and runs off. (Which makes her a fox spirit, a classic Chinese bad guy, not necessarily vampirical but generally pretty nasty.)

Meanwhile, Moon-Cher (Joey Wong, aka Joey Wang or Wong Ki-Chang or Wang Zu-Xian, depending on whether you prefer English, Cantonese, Wade-Giles, or Pinyin) is dressed as a bride, put in her litter, and carried off to her wedding. In the litter she finds a wounded white fox. She pulls the arrow from the fox, and it runs off.

Moon-Cher's litter is carried to a huge neolithic Easter Island-style idol, and the wedding ceremony commences. Apparently she's getting married to the idol. She runs off, just as Tak comes riding by. He recognizes her as the (literal) woman of his dreams, and carries her off. They ride together just long enough to fall thoroughly in love, and then she decides that she owes it to her village to go through with the marriage after all, and Tak brings her back.

Tak continues his ride through the woods, but encounters the wounded Ching'er, who (in female form again) commences making her moves on him. But he heals her wound, a process involving sucking her blood and spitting it into some medicine, and he declines to have sex with her. She promptly falls in love and confesses that she's a "fox goblin." "I know," Tak says. "Your blood didn't taste human." She only falls more thoroughly in love. In the meantime, Moon-Cher's new hubby shows up. He turns out to be the Ghost King, masked, airborne, and dressed in the cerements of the grave! She wigs out and jabs him with the Holy Arrow. He screams, turns into a typhoon, and wipes out her village. When she comes home in the morning, she finds everyone dead, and then in a fit of remorse walks into the local lake and drowns herself.

Meanwhile, Tak shows up at the Old Sword Mansion, which houses an order of warrior-monks, or at any rate something very like warrior-monks. (They were the group of cavalry who shot Ching'er with the Holy Arrow.) The Old Master tells Tak that the Ghost King has always wanted to marry a "lively woman" so that he can unite her power to his and destroy the world. (Bad subtitling rather marred the old guy's explanation, so I never did catch what was actually going on.) The only thing that can stop the Ghost King is a jade bracelet, of which Tak has half. Sunlight is deadly to the Ghost King, and he can only function at night. Tak rushes off to find Moon-Cher, but ends up finding only her ghost by the lake shore.

(It should be pointed out that Joey Wong's characters generally have a lousy afterlife. In the Chinese Ghost Story series she starts dead, and ends up being betrothed to the King of Hell.)

Tak and Moon-Cher manage a few tender moments before Ching'er and the Ghost King turn up, and a battle royal ensues. The Ghost King ends up with Moon-Cher's ghost, but Tak ends up with the body.

The Old Master then tries an ingenious magic spell to send Tak into the afterworld to rescue Moon-Cher's spirit so that she can reinhabit her body, but after a lot of fine special effects and some nifty flying fight scenes, the plan goes awry and Moon-Cher stays dead. (What did I tell you? A lousy afterlife.)

The Old Master then decides to send Tak back in time to stop Moon-Cher from killing herself in the first place. (Due to bad subtitling, I never understood the explanation for what was actually going on.) Tak attaches a chain to a Holy Arrow, then uses a Holy Bow to shoot the arrow into the past. He and Ching'er grab the chain, and are hauled into the past as well. They manage to prevent Moon-Cher's suicide, but the Ghost King turns up, and manages to get the Moon to cover the Sun so that he can operate in darkness.

"Shit!" Ching'er remarks. "A solar eclipse!"

Battle ensues. Ching'er manages to get both halves of the bracelet and flies up into the sky, where she places the round bracelet over the sun's image. Snap! Eclipse over! The Ghost King is destroyed, but Ching'er is blinded when the sun snaps on right in her face.

At the end, everyone's still alive but the Ghost King, who was dead to begin with. Moon-Cher loves Tak. Ching'er loves Tak, and is blind. Tak loves Moon-Cher, but he likes and feels sorry for Ching'er. The films ends abruptly before any of this is resolved, however.

Three and three-quarters chops. Action, romance, FX, fantasy, pathos. Not quite as outright weird as Chinese Ghost Story or Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, but very solidly done.

Which brings us to the splendid Wicked City (1992), produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Hark and by Mak Yai Kit. This was based on the Japanese anime Supernatural Beastie City (which, confusingly enough, is also called Wicked City in some English videotape release versions) which is actually quite a different film.

Wicked City doesn't belong to any traditional Chinese genre, because it's science fiction. Not like any SF that we've ever seen, mind you, totally lacking in any kind of coherent narrative or logical background but beautifully done, great acting, great sets, first-rate direction, incredible action, fine (if very low-budget) SFX.

Not only was it not like any SF I've ever seen, it was unlike any movie I've seen, anywhere, ever. It's like they took out everything that's been done in cinema since DW Griffith, then evolved a whole new style of cinematic expression equally as sophisticated as contemporary film, but using a completely different vocabulary.

We open in contemporary Tokyo. Taki [Leon Lai], a businessman, has picked up a gorgeous hooker and is heading for his hotel room. "Aren't you worried about the crazy killer who's murdering prostitutes?" he asks. "I'm not when I'm with you," she says, "you're such a gentleman."

Now is this a setup or what?

Taki excuses himself to take a shower, then assembles a heavy Dirty Harry-style revolver in the bathroom. Aha! we think. Crazed killer! He returns to the hooker, and they embrace. She begins to grow talons and her limbs alter in articulation to resemble a spider's, or maybe a crab's. Turns out she's an inhuman predator! He blasts her with the gun. She keeps transforming into yet more menacing forms. He runs out of ammo and is about to be destroyed, but his buddy Ken [Jacky Cheung] busts in through the window and guns her down.

Turns out that Taki and Ken belong to an international organization dedicated to the extermination of the alien "rapters" [sic], shapechanging killers who feed on human blood, and who live among us indistinguishable from humans. (During the course of this film, we never find out who the rapters are, how they got here, exactly what their powers are, or why they kill people. They just sort of exist. Deal with it.)

Taki and Ken return to Hong Kong to report to their boss, the Sergeant. All the operatives in the Sergeant's organization dress like Japanese businessmen, in suits, ties, and glasses. They all carry big revolvers, and gun down rapters wherever they find them. Apparently no one else finds this behavior the least bit odd.

Taki wants to make Ken his partner, but the Sergeant says no, Ken has "a bad background." He orders Taki to go after Daishu, a 150-year-old international businessman who is suspected of being a rapter. Taki is also told out to look out for the source for Happiness, a rapter drug that is being sold to humans. It makes humans stronger, but if they ever stop taking it, their muscle tissue literally evaporates- steams away. Taki infiltrates Daishu's 150th birthday party disguised as a musician. (The banquet features a lot of glistening, steaming organ meats.)

Daishu has made so much money that he is now invaluable to the human economy. He wants to call off the war between humans and rapters.

Meanwhile, in the next room, his son Shudo is slicing up a PR lady in a hot tub. Taki tries to rescue her. There is a huge battle in which Taki encounters the gorgeous Windy, a rapter with whom he once had a lengthy love affair. Windy [Michelle Reis, aka Michelle Lee] is now Daishu's mistress. But all is not harmony in Rapter Land. Many "bad" rapters think Daishu has gotten too cozy with the human world. Ms. Mechanical Rapter shows up to kill Daishu and his henchmen by choking them to death with liquid rapters (don't ask) in their drinks! Daishu manages to exhale his rapter martini, escapes with Windy to an electrical substation to regenerate himself, and is captured while Windy escapes. Daishu is taken back to headquarters, where he is confined by some sort of extrasensory "human electric field" which prevents him from changing form.

We discover that the rapters have the power to cause a "rapter vacuum," in which bits of our world are sucked into the rapter world, causing lots of surreal things to happen at once. Meanwhile, Ken and Taki get together to talk about their problems. Taki's depressed about Windy. Ken confides that his "bad background" consists of the fact that his mother was a rapter. We now look in on Daishu's son Shudo, who is having sex with Ms. Mechanical Rapter, who has transformed herself into a pinball machine, in which solenoids and bumpers are displayed on a background resembling glistening, steaming organ meats. "I'm going to rack up a record score!" Shudo proclaims. He tells his girlfriend that he's the rapter that's distributing Happiness to humans, that he's going to kill his father and take all his money, and that he's going to make war on humans forever. At this point Windy turns up to ask Shudo to rescue Daishu, in return for which Shudo demands sex. Windy complies.

From here it just gets stranger. Bloody carnage, weird plot twists, bizarre transformations, surreal violence. In the climax, Daishu and Shudo are riding 747s through the sky over Hong Kong as if they were horses, and flying them straight through office buildings as if they were insubstantial. Ken reverts to his rapter heritage. Shudo gets fed to an aircraft turbine. A huge "rapter vacuum" reverses time. Taki and the Sergeant ritually shatter the eyeglasses that are part of their uniform.

Four and a half chops. Has to be seen to believed. My entire reality base may have undergone a paradigm shift while watching this movie. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. You'll never look at a pinball machine in the same way again.