MOONLIGHT SWORD AND JADE LION (1977)

 

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

Here's another of many HK films in which the FX team couldn't resist injecting some modern-day technology into the medieval goings-on, even though almost all the other metaphenomenal content is uncanny.

There is a "jade lion" in the story, and a criminal type wants it to "control the kung-fu world" or something like that. But heroine Chiu Siu Len (Angela Mao) doesn't use a sword, but a spear, and most of the time she utilizes that weapon more to bludgeon than to stab. Chiu, orphaned long ago, is asked by her teacher to go looking for her teacher's lost brother. Somehow finding this individual may help Chiu find the slayers of her parents.

This Taiwanese chopsocky doesn't attempt to meld martial arts with mystery-solving, Chiu just runs around stirring up trouble, and various criminal types seek to kill her. One of her enemies (Wen Chiang-Long) is slipped poison in order to make him fight Chiu, but the heroine's dominant opponent is Su Yen (Lung Chung-erh). Her personal fights with the hero are compromised by the weapon Su wields-- some sort of odd stick with a whisk attached. She fares better using other menaces. One is a group of women wielding what look like artificial flowers mounted on staffs, with the flowers able to sprout needles or to explode like grenades. Later Su traps Chiu in a hall of automated menaces. Most of the mechanisms are uncanny, like a metal tube that shoots acid. But then the FX people threw in a flying razor-edged top, which means that this part of medieval China excelled in gyroscopic science. 

Mao receives a fighting-assist from an ally played by Don Wong, but he doesn't alleviate the incoherence. MOONLIGHT's only virtue is that Mao does a better than average amount of fighting, even if there are no big standout scenes. That puts MOONLIGHT in the middle range of the actress's films, better than the ones in which she only has one or two battles. (One exception: RETURN OF THE TIGER, a Bruce Li flick in which Mao has one standout scene, beating up a gym full of opponents.)