MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical* I confess I only checked out this subtitled streaming item because I looked it up on IMDB and didn't really see much information on it, aside from the name of the director and three of the actors. The plot description was entirely generic, and I thought, "Maybe I'll play explorer and find out if there's some hidden quality in this thing."
Surprise, surprise-- the reason almost no one on the Net has written about this oddity is because there's nothing much to it, even in comparison to the daffy old chopsockies of the 1970s. The main plot does have something to do with reincarnation. A swordsman called "Sage of Sword" in the subtitles and "Gong" on IMDB (Bernard Sen Jun) has a chance encounter with Yue, a nutty young woman (played by an actress with the risible name of "Haha He") who can throw darts with deadly accuracy. She drugs Gong for some reason so that he's out of it when she's attacked by the henchmen of her father. Seems that august gentleman wants Yue to marry someone she doesn't love. Yue escapes her pursuers and gets separated from Gong for a bit, and then for no reason I can see, the two of them team up for various comic adventures that go no place fast. At some point, Gong divines that Yue-- whose martial skills are nowhere near as good as his-- is the reincarnation of his lost love-- I think. Then there's an end fight with the henchmen of the father and Yue dies.
The most interesting thing about this flick-- which admittedly is colorful and pleasant to look at, as long as one doesn't try to comprehend the plot-- is that it's a total fakeout with its allusions to the popular "Monkey King" narrative. Only a frame story, in which Monkey is suffering some sort of torments from some goddess, possibly Kuan Yin, alludes to the traditional story at all. I think someone tried to sell the movie by adding the notion that Monkey became incarnated in the body of the mortal Gong so that he could learn about love, or something. I think I need a dose of Brucesploitation to get this one out of my system.
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