SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

Within the corpus of kung-fu fans who love their chosen genre at its nuttiest, SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES is best known as "the one where the hot girls fight the gorillas." Being of that elect group myself, I'll happily admit that the "girls vs. gorillas" scenes are indeed the movie's highlight. However, from the standpoint of determining the film's phenomenality, the gorillas, like all the other uncanny elements, play second fiddle to one marvelous lunatic conceit: that the unnamed masters of the gorillas can "give tongue" like nobody's business.

I've used the term "uncanny" for a lot of bizarre body-effects in martial arts films because I felt that the core idea of these effects was that of bending, rather than breaking, the laws of causality. So I've stated that when martial artists "harden" their bodies to be immune to blows, that's "bending" rather than "breaking." I even made the same determination for a warrior who could stretch his limbs a few feet, in MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE. But hey, if you can stretch your damn tongue several feet out of your mouth, you're not just a martial artist with some extraordinary body-extension ability-- you're a bloody demon, or the offspring of one. INVINCIBLES never offers one word of explanation for these glossal abnormalities, probably because some FX-guy thought it up and the writers just quick-worked it into the script.

The conflict is straightforward so as to not get in the way of the fights and effects: a tyrannical emperor has a whole family killed for a minor offense. A kindly Shaolin priest saves two girls from that family, Lu Sziu (Chia Ling) and Lu Yu (Lung Chung-erh), and raises them to avenge their families with their kung-fu skills and their swordsmanship. (So, not one of the more peace-minded Shaolin priests.) The sisters separate for a bit and kill a few of the Emperor's minions, which serves to put the villain on his guard so that he can start sending killers after them. Then the girls get back together, and for some unknown reason, one of them starts dressing like a man for a while. On top of that, the obliging Shaolin priest sends two other kung-fu warriors (Carter Wong, Dorian Tan) to help the ladies out. This naturally makes for a very episodic flick, but INVINCIBLES succeeds more than many similar films at capturing the "anything goes" vibe.

Aside from the tongue-trainers and their gorillas-- who not only fight with kung fu but also can resist sword-blades-- other menaces include a castle with traps like poison gas and flamethrowers, a guy who fights with a gourd-on-a-chain (which can also snare a sword-blade), and a fighter in a fright-mask who reveals himself as a traitor to the girls' vengeance-quest. I've graded the mythicity as poor but it's still great fun, and both Chia Ling and Lung Chung-erh look great, though Chia's character gets more attention. (They meet a peasant on the road, and he raves about Lu Sziu while saying nothing about Sister #2.)