This film is set in the feudal period of China, when unarmed Kung Fu settled all conflicts. It's about royal intrigue, the murder of an Emperor, the fight for the throne, exiled daughters, marriages to chimpanzees, packs of attack monkeys, horse style kung fu, and much, much more. This is truly an amazing film, though not on purpose.
As with all my chop socky reviews, these scores are for the genre, and should not be compared to other films.
Kung Fu Arts, AKA (Kung Fu: Monkey, Horse, Tiger, AKA Zhui Ming Qiang, 1973)
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 1/9
Action: 3
Combat Realism: 4
Humor: 1/10
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 2/9
Replayability: 1/9
Overall: 1.5/8
What's with all the split scores? Those are actual/unintentional comedy scores. The first number is the real score, the second is what I gave it after spending most of this incredibly bad movie laughing at the horrible, horrible, horrible acting/directing/photography/special effects/etc. This is the fifth chop socky film I've reviewed, and the first one that really lives down to the worst reputation of the genre. It's astonishingly bad, in many, many ways. I'm talking MST3K quality stuff. In fact, I highly recommend this one for you if you're having those type of parties, where everyone watched a horrible film and makes snarky comments about it. This one is just comedy gold.
Production ValuesThese actually weren't that bad, originally. Everything's in focus, the costumes aren't horrible, and while the sets are pretty bad, with various supposed throne rooms and royal halls about the size of an apartment bedroom, it's not horrible overall. Unfortunately, I did not see the original film. I saw the English-dubbed release, with the wide screen cut down to full screen, and both were done horribly. The visuals were a wreck, with the sides of the screen chopped off and quite a bit of action and speaking faces simply invisible to the left or the right. The dubbing was astonishingly bad too, with the English voices in no way matching what the characters looked like, numerous voices done by the same guy with minimal effort to disguise them, and some of the most hilariously-awful dialogue I've ever heard.
If someone speculated that the acting in this film were the worst ever, I would not argue. And I don't mean the worst film acting; I mean the worst acting ever, like in the entire human history of publicly pretending to be someone you are not. It's truly awe-inspiring.
StoryAbsolutely brilliant, in its insanity. I could easily write twenty paragraphs just to summarize what happens, and twenty more deconstructing it. Whoever thought up this plot was some sort of mad scientist of movie scripts.
The film opens with a Kung Fu fight in the darkness. We can not tell who is fighting who, until eventually the two men wind up inside the first terrible royal palace set of the film, when the lights come on and we see them. The emperor wakes up and accuses the younger of the two men of attacking him, while the older one sneers. The young man looks shocked but says nothing, and when the other man renews their fight the young man is forced back into another room, where he eventually draws a poison dart and throws it at his opponent. It misses, and instead hits the pricess, who instantly collapses. The young man, who is now thought to be a rebel who wanted to murder the king so he could be king once he marries the daughter, escapes in the confusion. Inept guards are a theme in this film.
Cut to three days later, with the Princess in a poisoned state. No doctor can cure her, so the emperor has messengers proclaim that anyone who saves her life will be allowed to marry her. A healer is seen in the city square, but he is soon revealed to be the young prince in disguise. A terrible fight scene with city guards ensues, and ends abruptly when a baby chimpanzee (that is called "monkey" throughout the film) up on a roof grabs the poster-sized royal decree, and all the guards stop trying to catch the assassin in preference for shouting and begging the monkey not to rip the emperor's message. It's surreal.
The monkey is eventually persuaded to come down, (I'm talking 5 minutes of grown men shouting, "Please monkey!" while actually on their knees crying.) and they take the chimpanzee (it's been trained to walk on its hind legs, in rather disturbing fashion) to the palace where the vial of medicine on his hip is given to the princess. I guess they were desperate. She wakes up at once, and the emperor decrees that his word is law, and that she must marry the monkey.
It's a real chimpanzee, by the way, even in the film. It's not some fantasy type movie animal with voice over words coming from it; it's just a lightly-trained chimp who they clearly filmed all day so they'd have enough material to edit it into a "monkey sits on a cushion and throws a ball" scene, that they could then stick into the film. It's frankly appalling.
The plot gets more surreal when not only must the princess marry the monkey, but she must then be exiled, with her new husband. The budget didn't cover ocean scenes, so they stuck her and the monkey into a glorified canoe in a river, and away they go. They soon wash up on an island, which is then and ever after referred to as, "the island" and live there for... ten years.
When next we see the princess she's living happily on the island, but she's now got a 10 y/o son, who is dressed in a leopard skin toga, and who calls the chimp, "Uncle Monkey." Over and over again. The princess still looks exactly 20 years old, and she's still wearing perfectly clean and very elaborate silk kimono type gowns. How she keeps her clothing clean, and where she got a leopard skin for her son to wear is a mystery you're better off not wondering about. There's also no sign of what they've been eating for ten years, who built their shelter when the princess can hardly walk upright she's so delicate, or why they haven't left the island, or why no one has found them there over that time.
At the same time the young prince is seen practicing kung fu on "the mountain" where he basically kicks earthenware jugs hanging from ropes. He's evidentally been up there for the whole ten years, and has not spoken to a single other person, since when he goes back down to the palace and sneaks into the grounds, he meets an "aunt" (Of whom? Exactly.) and she tells him the emperor is dead and the general, the older man the prince fought at the start, has been named the new emporer. At that point we finally find out, through the use of mood-music-enhanced flashbacks, that the prince was actually trying to save the emperor a decade ago, and that the general was the actual assassin. The "aunt" belives this at once, and arranges to drug the guard's wine in ten days, at which time the prince can return and kill the emporer. He's cool with that, but when the auntie tells him the princess has been gone for a decade and that her boat was found wrecked on, "the island" he says he'll go look for her first.
Predictably enough, the would-be prince reaches the island in about five minutes, immediately runs into the chimp, who was his old pet. A surreal scene follows in which a python is shown on the ground, then in some bushes, and then we see the chimp rolling down a grass embankment with a rubber snake wrapped around it while chimpanzee screech-overs blast through the soundtrack. Through all this the prince watches emotionlessly, before saying, "Oh poor Koko. You're dead." I imagine Koko, whlie being suffocated and fighting for his life, watches the prince walk away while thinking, "Thanks for not pulling this fucking snake off of me, asshole."
The prince walks about five yards, enters a cave, and low and behold, there's the princess... folding clothing. She turns around, sees him, and immediately turns up her nose without a word. Yes, it's been 10 years, he's the first person she's seen in that time, and her first words? "Go away." She's still mad about the poison dart, apparently. Better yet, her Tarzan-outfitted son walks in a minute later, and starts whining about how he still can't find Uncle Monkey. Who was killed, but not eaten, by a python like two minutes earlier. Only after a minute or so does the kid notice a full grown man standing there, and what does he say when he sees his first living human? "Why are you being mean to mother?"
She says, "He's not. Go and get Uncle Monkey's body in the bushes." The kid cries, but apparently that's plenty of direction for him, since the next scene has the three of them standing in front of a wooden gravestone with hanzi that, like all the other hanzi in the film, is not translated by a subtitle. "Here lies Uncle Monkey." would be my guess.
Why the snake didn't eat the chimp would be a fair question. You might also wonder why no one else, in 10 years, has looked on "the island," located about an hour from the capital city, and found the princess and her son, given that they're you know, the heirs to the throne and all. It's also kind of a, "So, did the chimp knock her up, or what?" issue, since we only know the young man was the bridegroom to be in retrospect. There's nothing said early in the film about the princess being anything other than perfectly virginal, and certainly nothing about her being pregnant. Fortunately, once the son goes to look for Uncle Monkey in the bushes, the prince blurts out, "Am I that boy's father? Or is the monkey?"
Princess: "You are. Of course."
Even more so than in most chop socky, I wonder about the dialogue. The actual script and dialogue in Chinese simply could not have been this awful. It's not possible. An autistic 5th grader could write better conversations, and give the characters more appropriate emotions. Characters constantly see something horrible, or frightening, and then immediately turn around and act completely normal. Like when the guy sees his pet monkey after 10 years, recognizes it, watches it get attacked by a constrictor, doesn't seem to even consider going to help, and then walks off five seconds later as it if never happened. Or the kid doesn't even react to a living human male, something he's never before seen in his life.
Anyway, the prince leaves the princess and the kid there, since he's got to go back and kill the emperor. Before he goes, he tells them if he's not back in three days, they should live there forever. He fails in his attempt, falling victim to a cargo rope trap readied by the well-guarded emperor, who says, "I knew you would try something like this!"
So he's been waiting for ten years with squadron of extra, hidden guards to replace the ones the aunt drugged, but the aunt (who I assume was the sister of the ex-emperor) didn't know? And this is despite the fact that the prince has been secluded in the mountains for all that time? Well, you've got to admire the usurper's paranoia, I guess.
They take him down to the dungeon, tie him to a rack sort of thing, and immediately ask him about the princess. How the hell do they know about her, since she's also been presumed dead for a decade? They even ask about her son... how? The prince won't talk though, and soon enough the evil emperor sends guards to... "the island." They also have no trouble finding the princess, even without any ridiculous "death of a chimpanzee" scenes, and they immediately take her away, while somehow missing her loudly-singing son, who is wandering the island and shouting, "Mom, I'll be home soon." every three seconds.
He finds her gone and some of their stuff knocked over in the balsa-wood cave, and immediately resolves to head to the capital to rescue her. Here's where it gets really surreal. The kid's apparently half-Tarzan or something, since he runs out to some pack of monkeys, real ones this time, and kneels down with his back to the camera. He's obviously feeding them, as they run up and take food and turn around to eat, but as this happens there's a relentless voice over from the kid about how his friends must come and help him save mother. (I don't belive she or the kid are ever named; they're just son, mother, princess, etc.) So this kid is kneeling on some tree branches, feeding a frantic pack of monkeys, and his voice is over it all, giving them orders like a general. "You take the right flank. You climb on the roof. You stay with me." and so on. To monkeys! And meanwhile, the kid's never been off the island, has no idea where he's going, doesn't know what a palace is, has seen exactly 2 humans in his entire life, etc. Which should all be irrelevant, since he's got no boat and if he could swim off the island, wouldn't he have done so already?
Needless to say, he's soon at the palace, hiding on the roof, while his monkeys go to work, providing some of the best humor in the film. They proceed to piss on the guards, claw out their eyes, kill them with a bite to the ankle, and most memorably, bite off one guard's balls. The guard was taking a crap, and he proceeds to hop around, shout about his pain, and then lapse into a Scottish accent as he screams that his "wedding tackle" has been chewed off. How recent is this dubbing? That has to be an Austin Powers allusion, right?
The plot continues with the kid freeing the prince and princess, the prince fighting the new emperor/evil general, the "blood letter" the old emperor wrote as he was dying (with one finger, in his own blood, like 60 perfectly-calligraphied hanzis on a scrap of parchment, while he's dying too quickly for a doctor to come and save him) turning up and implicating the evil general, who the prince finishes off before the truly surreal ending.
After the evil general-turned-emperor dies, the film cuts to a throne room. The princess is in the middle, the would-be prince on the right, and her son, now dressed like royalty, on the left. Servant girls bring them gold-jeweled cups of wine, which the kid complains about tasting unlike fruit juice. The prince laughs and says it's wine and he'll get drunk, at which point the kid rushes outside and finds a flock of monkeys sitting around some tree roots and sniffing at an earthenware urn. The kid runs to them and starts feeding them some sort of sugar tablets, while his voiceover talks about how they should take these pills quickly, and how monkeys should not drink wine or the corruption of men, and how when they "hear no speak no and see no evil, they should not drink wine either."
It's just an excruciating two minutes of "what the hell?", all while the string-heavy music wails away; the music they play every time a monkey is onscreen in the entire film.
Mercifully, the scene finally freezes, and the film ends.
I honestly don't know if the film was supposed to be a comedy, or a tragedy, or an action movie. Malaya and me laughed non-stop during most of the scenes, but the characters seem to largely be playing them straight. I assume the monkey scenes are comedy, but really, who can tell? The special effects, mostly fake blood, were so poorly done they looked like orange ketchup, and every time someone got hit, a scratching type sound played, and then the hit character rolled over to display the scratch, or cut, or whatever. Never... never even remotely convincing.
Martial ArtsThis film has very little martial arts, and what's there is all empty-hand Kung Fu. Weapons are not allowed when you fight for your life, apparently. The actual fight scenes aren't good, but they're not horrible either. There aren't very many of them though, and they take up maybe 10 minutes in total, leaving a good 75 minutes of incredibly bad acting and wacky plot stuff. The last fight scene is the best or comedy, since during it the prince seemed to be remembering some sort of horse-form Kung Fu, and every time he starts clopping his hind feet or curling up his hands and waving them like a rearing horse, the movie cut to a scene of an actual horse rearing up and whinnying, at tremendous volume. Just a half second shot of the horse though, and during the fight scene they played that same clip literally half a dozen times. It got funnier each time, I assure you.
The horrible cinematography did its part to ruin the martial arts too, since quite a few scenes were shown in tight close up, and with that and the awful hackery of the widescreen to fullscreen transfer, numerous shots consisted of nothing but a couple of crossed arms, or a leg kicking with no sign of what it was aiming at, etc. That's on top of probably half the conversation scenes in the film cutting off most or all of one of the people talking.
There was also some very obvious stunt double use, when the prince would fight, then suddenly become partially obscured behind book shelves, low trees or bushes, etc, and at that point he always unleashed pointless gymnastics; flips, handsprings, etc, which would end with a return to a direct shot of the actor punching and kicking the stunt men. It was never less than hilarious, since it was so obviously a double, and there was no point at all in the doubling. His flips and such weren't integrated into the rest of the fight, and they never actually did him any good.
OverallIf you're looking for good martial arts action, put this one last on your list. Last. Like below
Kung Pow,
Gymkata, etc. On the other hand, if you enjoy unintentional humor, this is the best chop socky I've yet seen. I certainly laughed far more than I had at any other film of this type, and while my laughter was mostly of the "Oh Jesus that's bad." type, it was definitely laughter.
I can't imagine repeat viewing any of the other chop socky I've seen. This one though, I will definitely watch again sometime, maybe even when we're hosting some friends, since the comedy gold in these hills simply must be mined in the company of others.
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