KUNG FU WONDER CHILD (1986)

 

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

Although the film begins with an evil sorcerer stealing the souls of two righteous kung-fu warriors, this perilous situation is nothing but setup to allow CHILD's four protagonists all sorts of opportunities to bounce weird magicks off one another or to play pranks on their enemies. I saw one review that thought that the dubbed movie might not been intended as a comedy, but I don't doubt this for a moment. 

The first protagonist is one of two relatively serious characters. Chiu Hse (famous kung fu diva Yukari Oshima) sees the bad wizard capture her grandfather and sister (all three of whom can use  wild cartoon-animated magical powers). Chiu gets away, and proceeds to look for some way to liberate her relatives. At the same time, the bad wizard gets mad at the film's other somewhat serious character, a young man named Hsui (played by cross-dressing actress Lam Siu-Law). Hsui escapes the magician's wrath by taking refuge at a kung-fu dojo where his own grandfather works as cook. At the dojo Hsui falls in with the film's overt clowns, whose names I have not located. It hardly matters since the two are meant to be equally silly, and a lot of their anile jokes involve peeing, farting, and playing pranks on one of the more serious students at the dojo. (Somehow I got a very CADDYSHACK vibe out of their hijinks.) Anyway, Chiu meets cute with these three "boys" and they end up fighting the sorcerer with their magical kung-fu skills.

Though the film occasionally drifts back to the mission of saving the trapped souls, from whom the evil one can boost his already formidable powers, most of the time the script just trundles out one crazy thing after another. An outdoor bath that gets iced over, trapping its occupant. An animated dragon. The heads of the trapped spirits poking out from the jars they're imprisoned within. A face-hugger right out of ALIEN. And toward the beginning, there's a rotten-faced "hopping vampire" who actually has two vampiric kids who hop along after him when he tries to attack Chiu, who mostly kicks the hell out of him. But all the vamps disappear after that one scene, apparently because the script is determined to just keep throwing wild and crazy stuff at the viewer.

The profligacy of these miracles reminded me a bit of Chang Ling's 1981 WOLF DEVIL WOMAN, but none of the four protagonists are strong enough to dominate the struggle against the villain, and the overall mood is too jokey for anything to really seem at risk. CHILD can best be appreciated as a wild phantasia with no particular point beyond diverting images.