DARK LADY OF KUNG FU (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Well, once again I have to issue a correction. I said here that I thought the Chang Ling film MATCHING ESCORT preceded WOLF DEVIL WOMAN, but I mixed up the former film with a yet earlier film, CHINA ARMED ESCORT, also sold under the title MY BLADE, MY LIFE. This post by the late Todd Stadtman asserts that the order of films that Chang Ling both wrote and directed begins with the film reviewed here, DARK LADY OF KUNG FU, and that this was in turn followed by WOLF DEVIL WOMAN. In a separate review Stadtman attests that Chang also acted in a film she did not direct, MIRACULOUS FLOWER, which was in 1981 and therefore previous to MATCHING ESCORT. Therefore I guess MATCHING was Chang's starring swan song, since most of the rest of the listings on IMDB look like support roles. 

The database also asserts, contra Stadtman, that LADY appeared in 1983, not 1981. This is only important because I'm going to scoot out on a limb once more, and claim that LADY shows Chang as still being in her creative growing pains, though she had acted in eighteen films, as well as becoming a Big Name thanks to a Taiwanese TV show. I remarked upon my sense that WOLF DEVIL WOMAN was a very free-form adaptation of a famous wuxia novel (which I know only from summaries). This also appears to be the case with LADY, which loosely adapts THE BLACK BUTTERFLY, a 1968 Shaw Brothers film about a woman dressing up in a butterfly costume to play Robin Hood (which film I also have not seen).

Well, Chang does dress up as a black butterfly and she does play Robin Hood, but I couldn't discern in the dubbed version I saw either the conflict in the 1968 film, or any conflict at all. When her characters appears as The Black Butterfly, she poses a lot, gets in a couple of short martial fights, and flies around (possibly with some sort of kung-fu super-power, though of course the flying is supplied by "wire-fu.") Beyond that, I could not follow that part of the plot. There's a surly guy named Shadow (Tien Peng) who may want to make love to the costumed heroine, though it was hard to tell. There was a magician in there somewhere, but he may have been a fake one. Possibly there was no main villain, just the sense that the heroine's Robin Hood act was justified by social inequities. (I think it all takes place in some medieval era, but even that was hard to gauge.)

Chang seems much more invested in Black Butterfly's alter ego, though to be sure, the two characters are not definitely seen to be the same person. For most of the film, Chang appears dirty-faced and dressed in rags as "The Monkey King," an adult urchin who leads a gang of younger urchins in a life of pickpocketing. Again, there's not a clear plot here. The urchins run around making mischief and mocking authorities, at least one of whom wears a huge, obviously phony mustache. There's probably a lot of Chinese verbal humor in these exchanges that can't be translated adequately, so maybe in Taiwan all these scenes were screamingly funny. There's no plot in the Monkey King section either, and one review claimed that Chang is perceived as a guy in both roles, even though the Butterfly wears a lot of rouge on her face.

There are one or two memorably nutty scenes, like Monkey King taking a bath in what looks like a giant clamshell. But if one could transform craziness into light, LADY would be a tiny bulb, while WOLF DEVIL WOMAN would be a congeries of stars. So my guess that Chang decided to go full-tilt crazy with WDW after a fairly ordinary flick remains somewhat on target; I just had the wrong "earlier film."