REVIEW: ‘The Battle Wizard’ (1977)

In the same year that George Lucas was taking world mythology and audiences to a galaxy far, far away, Shaw Brothers put their spin on Chinese mythology with this highly imaginative and special effects-laden martial arts fantasy. Brimming with outrageous monsters, super-powered magic and blood-soaked mayhem, this is definitely a crowd pleaser.

The film is based on Chin Yung’s novel THE DEMI-GODS AND SEMI-DEVILS and depicts a violent confrontation of super-powered martial artists in the boxer world that begins with an illicit affair. Tuan Yu (Danny Lee) is a wealthy young scholar with no interest in martial arts, who sets out into the martial world to discover if he can survive on his own.

Yu encounters Zhong Ling-erh (Lam Jan-kei), a beautiful woman in command of deadly snakes capable of burrowing through a victim’s body. She ends up trapped by members of the Poisonous Moths Clan, but not before allowing Yu to escape and seek aid from the notorious female warrior Xiang Yaocha (Tim Lei), wielder of the deadly Bone-cutting sword. Yu doesn’t know it yet, but the woman is actually Mu Wanqing, his elder sister, born of his father and the scorned wife of the notorious Yellow Robe Man (Shut Chung-tin).

When this affair was previously uncovered, the two men fought and Yu’s father blasted the Yellow Robe Man’s legs off with his Yi Yang Finger technique. Now, the Yellow Robe Man plots to take his revenge by abducting Yu and his sister with the help of a vicious man-beast (Kong Do) with a metallic skull and claw hand. Their only hope resides with Yu, who has absorbed incredible internal power by sucking the blood of the giant Red Python. Combined with another power source, he will have to confront a nasty gorilla, while locked in a prison lair, and escape to face the Yellow Robe Man’s fire breath and extending mechanical bird’s feet.

It’s a wild premise to be sure, but not difficult to follow along with when you’re watching it. In a way, it’s much like a Chinese-flavored combo platter with ingredients from the STAR WARS saga and THE MATRIX. Mu Wanqing is like a female Luke Skywalker, who doesn’t know that her real father is her mortal enemy. Yu and Mu get cozy without knowing they’re brother and sister, just like Luke and Leia. Then you have Yu, the unlikeliest of heroes, who is instantly endowed with supreme powers, much like a martial arts training program downloaded into Neo’s head in THE MATRIX. The point here is that Shaw Brothers were working with pretty universal themes, despite the strangeness of the production.

It is the strangeness of THE BATTLE WIZARD that makes it such an enjoyable movie. The studio goes all out to create some fairly impressive special effects considering that it was 1977 and Hong Kong filmmakers generally lagged far behind Japanese and Hollywood special effects work. I’ve actually seen far worse from subsequent Hong Kong and Hollywood movies.

My favorite effect is the use of the Bone-cutting sword. It’s actually not a sword, but what looks like a fake human thigh bone that shoots daggers from one end. It starts out being used fairly conventionally, but then action directors Tang Chia and Wong Pau-gei start getting creative and have actress Tim Lei blasting her enemies all over the place with it. It’s the combination of wire work, visual effects and acting that make this scene a lot of fun.

There’s more. One clever overhead shot of the man-beast chasing our horse-mounted heroes on foot combines time-lapse footage with real-time footage to show him outpacing the horse. The scene where actress Lam Jan-kei commands a snake to perforate a man’s body is pretty stinking convincing, enough so that it might gross out those with weak stomachs.

At the end of it all, nothing comes off as stranger than the metal bird’s feet that the Yellow Robe Man uses as artificial limbs. They extend like the Foot Monster’s legs in BUDDHA’S PALM and glow with power. But the fact that they look like chicken legs is pure genius.

Visually, THE BATTLE WIZARD is about as colorful and creative as it gets with any SB production. That’s saying a lot when one recalls the highly fanciful sets they managed to create for many wuxia pian over the course of thirty years, especially with Chor Yuan’s wuxia novel adaptations. Yet unlike some of these films, the seams and corners in the sky are fairly well hid. Even the transitions from location shoot to “outdoor” set are smooth. Director Pau Hsueh-lieh, who notably worked with Chang Cheh on a number of martial arts classics, displays a keen eye for detail and able skill in managing unconventional filmmaking.

The main cast all handle themselves well with Danny Lee providing a little humor as the reluctant martial artist. Tim Lei gets the lion’s share of the action by dishing out some terrific conventional swordplay in addition to her dagger-firing skills. In elaborate makeup, Kong Do is the film’s nastiest villain, a hideous sex fiend who impales victims with his giant claw or tears their clothes off. The claw can also be fired at enemies and retracted with an attached chain, thus making the character the perfect model for a spring-loaded action figure. The one sore spot on the cast list is the gorilla. It’s just a dude in a Halloween monkey suit that could have been left over from a GILLIGAN’S ISLAND episode. They created a spiffy giant snake for Danny to wrestle with and other imaginative creatures, so it seems they ran out of ideas or money when it came to this critter.

With a title like THE BATTLE WIZARD, expectations could be pretty high for a violent fantasy flick. It turns out to be just that, but not in great enough quantity with a slim running time of just over 70 minutes (possibly trimmed further from an alternate print). Tsui Hark may have stolen the show internationally several years later with ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, but Pao’s film is just as strong when it comes to fantasy action and is arguably even more entertaining.