Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

aka The Thrilling Sword

aka Heaven Sword

Original title: 神劍動山河

When his wife dies giving birth to a red, oval, pulsating flesh egg, the ruling king of wherever this takes place (Chin Han) decides to get rid of the thing by doing the old Moses bit. The egg (cocoon?) finds its way to The Seven Dwarfs of the Happy Forest (seriously) who quickly learn there’s a healthy human baby girl inside of the fleshy exterior. They decide to raise her as their daughter.

Seventeen years later, our heroine (I believe the delightfully named Fanny Fang Fang-Fang) has grown up to be beautiful, morally pure, and so on. She becomes involved in her birth father’s business again by fate: meeting a heroic prince (Liu Shang-Chien) of the king’s realm and falling in love with him are one. Her feelings are reciprocated, and things could be set for a very quick happy end, if not for the fact that the king has invited two heroic exorcists to his court who are actually a couple of evil, devil worshipping magicians. These two are trying to usurp his throne by all means necessary, after having won the king’s trust by beating monsters they have conjured up themselves and by attacking his counsellors in front of him. Turning heroic princes into embarrassed looking bears, mind-controlling lost daughters and other acts of bizarre fiendishness are all in the program. Fortunately there’s help for the lovers: apart from the dwarfs, who are actually transformed generals, there’s a tiny, magic-wielding fairy willing to go out of her way to help, as well as a ridiculous looking sword that shoots laser beams (paired with an equally ridiculous looking armour), and other whacky nonsense.

Apparently, this Taiwanese fantasy wuxia variant of Snow White (or a Taiwanese version of the same folk tale model) directed by Chang Hsin-Yi is meant as a kids movie. This certainly tracks with other kids movies from the country I’ve encountered, seeing as it is both inexplicable and weird, and seems to be made for the kind of kids you probably wouldn’t want to encounter in the dark. Or really by day – they might shoot laser beams at you.

The whole thing is a WTF movie of the highest degree: it makes its folk tale sources as weird as possible (as if folk tales weren’t already strange enough), adding inexplicable flourishes, scenes of the kind of goofy nonsense some grown-ups believe kids find funny, bits and pieces of other popular fantasy movies – apart from Hong Kong, Chinese sources and Disney, I bet somebody here has seen their share of Harryhausen films and peplum – and random stuff whose reason to be in the movie – or anywhere else - is dubious and inexplicable (in the sense of “please, don’t explain”).

There are so many questions here, from the obvious, “what’s with the horrifying looking chicken bird/whatever muppet pet the dwarfs keep?” to more exalted ones like “why do the devil icons with the lightbulb eyes our baddies converse with have additional mouths in their crotches?”, or “where does a bear costume so bad, it looks actually embarrassed by itself even come from?”.

The movie is certainly not going to answer them, and I’m a little afraid to speculate. It is easier, and certainly more entertaining, to just let the film wash over one’s psyche like radiation. Very possibly, joy will sprout from your brain, like a flower in a Clark Ashton Smith story, when you realize the magic mirror from the folk tale has been replaced by a devil statue talking through its crotch mouth, or encounter the frog person sirens and their buddy the mini-Rodan while our prince is on his quest, or simply try to keep up with bizarre leaps of logic and genre.

Added bonus joys are an awesome needle-dropped score, special effects that clearly care not a whit about how ridiculous they look, and so become impressive in their ridiculousness, a plot that can’t help but do everything, even a simple hero’s quest, as weirdly as possible, and direction that really goes out of its way to make everything look as weird as it should be.