Chess Boxing Matrix (1989)

aka Chivalric Tornado

aka Labyrinth of Death

aka Vampire Strikes Back

Original title: 小俠龍捲風

Seven hundred years before the start of the main narrative, a character that appears to be called Sword God or Sword Master but is very clearly female (Ti Yu-Neung), traps one Evil king (who is indeed as not very nice as his name promises) in some sort of magical contraption that also connects him to a family of jiang shi. After a thousand years, the jiang shi will apparently be purified and allowed to go on to something better.

Because watching people squirm below movie laser shows for a thousand years would get a bit boring eventually, the jing shi and Evil king are freed three hundred years too early. Evil king, not surprisingly given his name, does start in on a new reign of terror, subjugating random weirdos with his laser shooting eyes. His first goal is to get ahold of the little boy of the jiang shi family, for the Sword God has deposited some sort of magical sword in the bad guy’s heart that only the little boy can melt or something.

A group of, mostly kid, heroes does come together to fight Evil king and his minions, while the jiang shi child says “pa-paaaaaaa” a lot.

This bit of Taiwanese martial arts/wuxia/what the hell madness may or may not be meant as a piece of children’s fantasy – the humour and the protagonists suggest as much – but one can’t help but worry about what any child would make of this series of fights, fights, laser shows, non-sequiturs and utter weirdness. Probably art.

For most of the time, this grown-up viewer had only the slightest idea of what was going on, who any of these people were, and what the hell they thought they were doing – a state of affairs certainly not helped by the sort of classic Hongkong and Taiwanese subtitles that seem to have been written by someone who does understand neither Mandarin nor English. Though, to be fair, I don’t think getting more detailed exposition would make this thing more explicable, seeing as how director Wang Chih-Cheng doesn’t like scenes of people talking for more than twenty seconds, and basically runs from one fight full of cheap and cheery visual effects of the good old drawn on lasers and other colourful explosions type to the next, with characters popping in and out of places and scenes seemingly at random. Most of the time, things are very weird indeed, so weird that stiff-armed jiang-shi kung fu and the running “gag” in which Mother Jiang-Shi gets sexually aroused during various fights hardly register on the strangeness scale. A lot of this comes so fast, so furious and with so little sense of control at you, it becomes hard to even describe much of that stuff without becoming reduced to making infantile noises.

So let’s just say that this movie contains a scene where a little boy jiang-shi plays torero (complete with a little red cape) against a gentlemen in a costume which at once suggests a ram and a train (what with smoke coming out of the ears and from the horns), only to get rudely interrupted by an evil tree person. If that doesn’t scream quality, I don’t know what does.

But seriously, while Chess Boxing Matrix makes not a lick of sense, is of dubious taste and has all the dramatic instincts of, well, a ram, it is a pretty incredible experience when a viewer is in the right mood; specifically if that mood is one where you only want to look at lots of backflips, Taiwanese people jumping and kicking non-stop for ninety minutes, and whatever weird flourish the filmmakers come up next to make one minute of non-stop fighting distinguishable from the next, all shot and edited with a violent hatred of anything ever standing still.