The Yuen Brothers' Drunken Wu Tang from 1984 is one of those films that simply has to be seen to be believed. Everything I said about the animated flick Chinese Gods being a journey into madness goes double for this movie because it's live-action! Watching it for the first time is a truly cathartic experience, bordering on enlightenment. This is truly a brilliant film. It transcends its cheap B-movie, kung-fu wackiness and becomes something more.
The curtain opens on China back in the old days where a palm reader is looking at the hand of a woman who wants to know when she'll get married again because her fifth husband has just kicked the bucket. When told that she has the husband-killing line in her hand, she gets offended and leaves without paying. Old Devil (Yuen Shun-Yi), a rather sinister-looking dude in a stylish red outfit with a cape, just happens to be hanging upside down from the ceiling when this happens and offers to pay the money. As he takes the money, the palm reader notices that Old Devil doesn't have any lines on his hands. For this, Old Devil beats the cr@p out of him.
It goes without saying at this point that Old Devil is obviously the villain of the movie and that his speciality is popping up out of nowhere and beating the cr@p out of people. This rather simplistic approach to evildoing could only work in a B-movie. Imagine if Saddam Hussein just decided to stroll into Kuwait by himself and randomly punch pedestrians he found walking down the street. Just doesn't cut it.
While killing the palm reader, Old Devil coincidentally encounters a nemesis from his past, who I'll refer to as Porcupine Guy (played by the main villain from Jackie Chan's Fearless Hyena, sorry can't recall his name). Suddenly, and this is less than a minute into the film, we have a flashback! It seems that Porcupine Guy was part of a council awhile back who prosecuted Old Devil for trying to steal the "precious, secret document". For his crime, he's sentenced to the "age old punishment" of skin-peeling, expulsion and death. What? Peeling his skin off isn't enough? The punishment is carried out the way the ancients always did it: by making Old Devil travel down a burning hot, metal slide on his ass. During the flashback, we also discover that Old Devil's name used to be Master Ruthless. And, naturally, anytime you meet a guy named Master Ruthless, you entrust sacred documents to him. We have to assume that Master Ruthless died that day but it's never explained how he came back from the dead as a devil. My guess is that he simply beat the cr@p out of the right people in the afterlife.
After the flashback, Old Devil fights Porcupine Guy, who tears his shirt off revealing armor with lots of needle-like spikes on the back (hence the name I gave him). Tragically, a weapon of such practicality is unable to save him because Old Devil is himself armed with a magical cannonball, which can fly through the air wherever Old Devil wills it to and can shoot out little tiny cannonballs at targets. The grace with which the magical cannonball is handled here should earn it a place in the pantheon of truly great martial arts weapons.
We next meet Ratface (Yuen Cheung-Yan, who also directed this movie), an elderly, drunk, buck-toothed taoist who drives a wicker car shaped like a rat's head. Accompanied by some funky guitar music, his drunk driving menaces the village until he reaches his brother's temple, where he accidently runs into a statue of a dragon god and breaks it. For this transgression, Ratface's brother tells Ratface that he must find a virgin (or a "cherry boy", as they call it) born on the 15th of August in order to help him perform a forgiveness ceremony to the gods. So Ratface heads out into the village where he makes people (kids & adults) drop their pants so he can check if they're just right for the ceremony. How Ratface is able to tell just by looking is probably just one of his many talents.
Elsewhere, we meet young Yuen Chu (Yuen Yat-Chor), who is being awakened by his Granny, a psychic witch who seems to be played by a man. Whether or not Granny is supposed to be a transvestite is never made clear. Anyhoo, Granny seems to own an elaborate training center filled with dangerous traps that block the path to that precious, secret document Old Devil was searching for. Yuen (who later receives the nickname Cherry Boy because of his virginal ways) has to try and get the document as part of his training to become a monk. First, he has to walk over hot coals with his bare feet (which he manages.....by insulating his feet with a sheet of paper). Then he has to avoid the sharpened bamboo sticks that thrust out of the ceiling and walls. Finally, he has to fight the infamous Watermelon Monster.
The Watermelon Monster deserves a paragraph of its own. See, it's sort of a large, green Pac Man-style entity with razor-sharp teeth that bounces around the room and tries to bite your crotch. It also has these retractable tentacles that it can entangle you in and they each have suction cups at the end that it uses to press against your nipples so that it can drain energy from a trapped individual. At least, that's what the Watermelon Monster says in its high-pitched, screechy voice. From what I saw in the movie, it looks as if the nipple-grabbing is used to identify whether or not an individual is a man or a woman (if it's a woman, the Watermelon Monster goes back to it's resting place without further conflict). In any case, nipple-grabbing has certainly never been a legitimately recognized part of offensive kung-fu skills until now.
Drunken Wu Tang was re-released by Arena Home Video recently and it's rather deceptively marketed. For one, it has nothing to do with wutang. Arena has taken a number of old school Chinese kung-fu films and renamed them things like Raiders Of Wutang or Wutang Vs. Ninja in a strange attempt to cash in on the popularity of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan (whose members include Method Man and Ol' Dirty Bastard). The original title of Drunken Wu Tang is Taoism Drunkard. And if you look at the video box, you'll notice that almost none of the pictures are from the actual movie itself. Instead, you get snapshots of two generic grandmaster types wearing white wigs. Who would you rather see: Ratface & The Watermelon Monster or these old fogeys? And the description even erroneously refers to our melon pal as "The Banana Monster"! Argh! Did Arena even watch the movie before they decided to release it?
This flick is one of several whacked-out kung-fu films made in the mid-80's by the Yuen Brothers. The Yuen clan is made up of eight brothers, all sons of the old school martial arts actor Yuen Siu Tien (Snake In Eagle's Shadow, Drunken Master 1), most of whom work as directors or fight choreographers in the Hong Kong film industry. The most famous of these is, of course, Yuen Woo-Ping (who worked on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but probably not this movie) but Yuen Cheung-Yan did make something of a breakthrough himself recently doing the fight work for Charlie's Angels. Other films in this trippy fantasy kung-fu series, some of them sharing the same characters, are Miracle Fighters, Young Taoism Fighter (renamed Wu Tang Temple), and Shaolin Drunkard (renamed Wu Tang Master). The latter two are supposed to be even more insane than Drunken Wu Tang.
I've only covered the setup for the main characters. I haven't even mentioned things like the Princess (who attacks people by firing off deadly streams of fabric from her clothing), the fat lady (who has a hair-style that looks like two antennae are coming out of her head), the turtle armor guy (he spontaneously starts breakdancing in the middle of a fight!), or Sugar Plum (the woman who has sex with her boyfriend at her late husband's funeral). The characters are obviously comedy in and of themselves but the dialogue doesn't disappoint either. My favorite bit is near the end when Old Devil is standing on top of the temple and screaming for the monks to give him the document or die. One of the monks responds, "Don't threaten us.....and get off our roof!"
What else can I say? This film is pure genius. I've never seen anything else quite like it. Maybe Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD or some of Wong Jing's output but those aren't nearly as spastic. I have to check out more from the Yuen Brothers. Drunken Wu Tang isn't just for kung-fu fans. It's for anyone who ever believed that a drunken rat-man and a virgin could battle the forces of evil and win!
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