Patchwork Earth Purposeful Solipsism, Nostalgic Ephemera

White Elephant Blog-a-thon: Taoism Drunkard

It's time again for the annual traditional self-flagellation of usually-respected film critics (and hangers-on such as myself) known as the White Elephant Blog-a-thon--usually held on April Fool's Day, writers on film the world over gather to subject themselves to metaphorical, and occasionally literal, footballs in the groin in the name of... science?

Everyone submits a bad movie, and everyone gets a bad movie to watch. Occasionally, there's a surprising nugget or two of interest buried in the dreck, and sometimes there isn't.

Taoism Drunkard (Or, Drunken Wu Tang)

In one line

If there is one line out of the many, in Mystery Science Theater 3000, one line that I've taken as my own in the way of the true fan, it would be this: In episode 511, while watching the agonizing Beverly Garland picture "Gunslinger," series creator Joel Hodgson lets a bit of sincerity slip out towards the end, just stating outright that "This movie is just sitting on my head and crushing it." I always thought it was the perfect turn of phrase for that feeling, of being trapped, of weathering something so inane and yet so depressing. I've used it during bad films ever since, often not even as a joking reference, just as a lament.

I was mumbling that line to myself from very early into this picture.

Yuen Wo-Ping made this as part of what I take to be a (loose?) trilogy of films. It's a comedy, sort of.

Story, of sorts

There's an evil wizard called Old Devil, who I think was a condemned man who rose back out of Hell? And he wants a secret and powerful writ for reasons that I think I missed--but it's clearly powerful, because it's in the control of a family of martial artists and mystics, including a nasty old granny and virginal Cha Le, who is in training in the house's labryinth of booby traps when he isn't romancing a local girl. Meanwhile, the titular drunkard has made such a mess of his brother's temple that he's charged with finding a "Cherry Boy," a virgin born on a particular date in order to perform a particular ritual. The two plots colliding is pretty much the only obvious thing that happens here; the rest is a mess of sidetracks and non sequiters, including a trio of corrupt tax collectors and a pair of adulterers who get tangled up in the whole thing.

Confession

I tried, I really did. I consider myself fairly sturdy, when it comes to cinematic disaster. It's true that I don't seek out what I don't think I'll enjoy (and I'm not a paid critic, so I can be as picky as I goddamn well want) but I grew up on MST3K and my wife and I own a pile of shitty-ass films purchased solely for the purposes of riffing on them, something that I've done with many friends over the years.

But what it's easy to forget, until you're "working," is how different it is to watch bad film alone. So yes, I tried, but my eyes kept wandering. The subtitles were atrocious to the point of cliche, and for an ostensible comedy, long sections of this thing dragged on and on. So I was not a perfectly attentive professional critic. This assignment was supposed to be fun, you bastards!

Rebuttal

Of course, I exaggerate for effect. I've seen worse. If anything, the only real problem is that bad shouldn't be boring, the real sin that Taoism Drunkard commits about 60% of the time. The other 40% though...

There's some fair so-bad-it's-good in here, and we'll get to that, and there's the what-the-fuck, and we'll get to that, but I've gotta give a shout out to my homeboy Shining Knight, who I swear fought his way tooth and nail from a better movie for the chance to save this one (failing miserably).

I couldn't find a picture of the real one from this movie, so here's Grant Morrison's to liven the article.

Anyway, Shining Knight is one of the tax collectors, partnered with an overweight woman whose martial arts moves consist largely of "sit on opponent," and he gets one of the only deliberately comedic moments to make me laugh, which was his "machine fist" style of fighting, in which he dances the robot. He also has a decent slapstick moment when he catapults himself by accident, and his "final battle" involves pulling his limbs inside his armor like a tortoise. It's not that Shining Knight is a brilliant character, or that his jokes are hilarious, it's that they're funny at all, and in a better movie I could see them fitting in better (sort of an understudy of a minor character in a Stephen Chow film).

So, speaking of the martial arts... it's fine, when it's happening (not often enough). Everything's rough, as befits a movie that must have been made for $8, but Yuen Wo-Ping is acclaimed for a reason, and so splitting down the middle... it's fine. Occasionally fun, occasionally blah. Certainly the only genuine highlights of the film.

East Side - West Side

What I kept thinking, while watching Taoism Drunkard, was how archetypal it felt to me. That might be an odd thing to think about a film where a man dresses as a penis, or where a demon uses a floating cannonball (filled with smaller floating cannonballs!) in battle, but honestly, there's something very obvious-seeming in between the ever-so-occasional grand flourishes. It was the prologue, if that's the right word, that did it for me, I think. This review runs down the details so that I don't have to. It's almost self-consciously bizarre, seemingly for its own sake, and the fight scene (while relatively engaging--many reviews cite it as the comparative high point for the film) is rote and arbitrary, with little build-up... I keep thinking of that old Simpsons parody of Bollywood films, which was both fair and unfair at the same time.

See, the thing about this "comedy," is that when it begins--and yes, part of this is no doubt the fault of the translators and their "Engrish" subtitles--is that you're not immediately sure that it is a comedy; it might just be, you know... "Asian." Hold on, now, let me finish.

There is a tension, not always spoken, sometimes over-spoken, in what I'm going to call "fan culture" for the sake of concision, in the West--this idea that things from the East are cool because they are from the East, and that the East is cool because of their cool things, and that's as far as the interest and the curiosity and the knowledge is ever going to go. Japan is where Naruto and Nintendo come from, and that's that, you know? I'm in that generation, I can say that. And my wife and I have piles of Tezuka and Urasawa, stacks of Evangelion and Satoshi Kon, Miyazaki, a Nintendo Wii and a DS, and I've spent a lot of time talking about that stuff here and elsewhere. We have martial arts films from Hong Kong, serious ones and silly ones. My friend Justin, who lives on and off in Tokyo, once told me a story about this Japanese girl he knew, she was dating a Western guy, and all he wanted to talk about was anime, which, you know, she wasn't actually interested in...

There's something sad and archetypal about this film, particularly in its opening scene, that gave me all kinds of creepy-crawlies.

Reactions

People seem to like it! Seems to be solely on the "What the Fuck" scale, but I scanned references to the film all over the 'net and there's an awful lot of thumbs-up for this. Is it just that it's a martial arts movie with weird shit in it? Is that really all it takes? See, this is what I'm talking about. Man, I quit.

Penis

This movie is obsessed with dick. Even for a lowbrow comedy, even for a lowbrow comedy set in a martial arts milieu with all its sledgehammer-obvious Freudian sword stuff, its obsession with the male member is a little too on-the-nose. I think it was the moment where our drunken "hero" is searching for Cherry Boys by examining the genitalia of young boys and is then "mistakenly" (?) believed to be a pervert, when I realized that maybe there was too much thinking about dick in this movie. The film even ends with a pregnancy--the "comedy" is over the second all this "dicking around" has consequences.

Which also leads into the last bit...

The only reason to see this movie

Watermelon Monster.

WATERMELON MONSTER.

WATERMELON MONSTER!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

This film has given me nightmares. This thing has tentacles, by the way. And it makes disturbing, unheimlich noises of the damned. Oh, and it feeds on dick. Seriously. "Banana addict," Cha Le calls it. It's the embodiment of the castration nightmare. This thing is so terrifying that the evil wizard faces it and takes off, utterly flabbergasted. It is the "What the fuck" moment that justifies the film's existence (in a sense, anyway) and is the only thing that makes it notable. There's a short bit where the drunken martial artists rides around in a little wicker car shaped like a rat, but it's instantly forgotten in the face of this... face. I hate all of you for making me watch this movie.