Tian shi zhuang xie

Absolutely bizarre.

This film wastes no time getting started and never really lets up. Lots of magic kung fu. Lots of crude silly 80's HK humor. Over the top acting, insane set design, lots of puppets and a giant poisonous frog! The filming is fast and cheap so some of the editing and continuity is haphazard. The martial arts are silly most of the time but the last big fight scene is very good in it's own weird way. If you like films with some sort of serious subtext then run fast from this one. Nothing is serious here. At one point early on, the Drunkard sinks into the stone floor until his feet are by his face! No explanation on what's going on or why he's doing it! If you can't stand a film this weird, you've been warned.

The same team did Taoism Drunkard and Young Taoism Fighter. All recommended.

there's two things one has to get past to like this film - first, there's no 'drunken boxing' style here; second, the first half-hour of the film is so loopy, you may want to know what planet you just stepped onto.

this film is actually part of a tradition that has no comparison outside china - part magic show, part low-brow comedy, part juggling and acrobatics, part martial arts, part folk-lore - basically a kind of circus-entertainment that was lost to the west long ago.

part of what makes this hard to follow is that the traditions of magic in china, besides being simply different than those in the west, are also far more complex, since china has been civilized longer, and to a greater extent, than the west has yet achieved. all magic derives from formula; but china's traditional formulas are a little difficult to grasp - there are four magicians in this film, but it is unclear to this westerner why they can each perform certain magic and not others, and why they need to perform straight-out martial arts on occasion, despite their magic.

in any event, after a while, the characters grew on me and i came to like the show - and as the film progresses, there's more and more action, more rapidly paced; so after a while, the cultural differences ceased to matter.

one historic note; beginning with snake in eagle's shadow, yuen woo ping made a number of classic, realistically staged kung-fu comedies and tragedies, culminating in the thinly veiled family memoir, 'secret master' - less than a year after that film was made, this one appeared, and began a set of films spinning 180 degrees in another direction entirely, before yuen regrouped with the classic 'hero among heroes', or 'legend of the red dragon' as it has been retitled for recent u.s. re-release. most of the films of this mid-period are, to put it mildly, a bit off-the-wall, at least according to western standards, and it's not sure why yuen went down this route. most of them - including this one - are not to everyone's taste, even among martial-arts fans; but they're all worth seeing, at least once. they certainly show a different and remarkable - if sometimes bewildering - side to a many-faceted talent of martial arts film-making.

We used to call this movie rabbit teeth 25 years ago when we were kids because we didn't know the title of the movie was. Watch for yourself. Action ,Comdey There is no boring part of the movie.

From the same people who made DRUNKEN WU TANG, and featuring some of the same characters, this is early 80s Hong Kong Kung fu, with blood-drinking demons, giant frogs, flaming fists, giant fire-breathing puppets, and a very surreal mumenchanz-like butt mask Kung Fu fight. Back flips and mayhem, a giant toad with glowing eyes and a tongue that stretches across the room and breaks a table, and a gruesome "walk on the nails" scene. whew.

At one point, the bad says: "Ha Ha Ha!!! I'm evil!!!"

Rat Face(the Drunken Toaist) drinks and fights with gusto, takes a sand shower, and always manages to survive to drink again.

If you like wilfully weird (Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel) check this one out.

Went on a bit of a martial arts movie binge tonight as a reward for working a lot lately. I think I kind of saved the weakest of the three I watched for last, Shaolin Drunkard, but this was also the craziest and most experimental. In fact, it's one of the most fever-dream-heavy martial arts flicks I've seen in a good while. I probably haven't seen something quite this weird within the genre since The Boxer's Omen... that one came out the same year, and was admittedly much more gross. Shaolin Drunkard is more bizarre than it is disgusting.

Strangely, for a Yuen Woo-Ping film, the action doesn't really jump out as the best thing in the movie. I think Shaolin Drunkard kind of gets by owing to its oddest elements, but other than some pretty crazy quirks, there's not a whole lot to it, nor its action (which I guess is appropriately weird, I'd have to concede).

I feel like something like this deserves its status as a martial arts deep-cut. Die-hard fans will probably find themselves stumbling upon it eventually, and those who would find it to be way too much will probably live their lives blissfully unaware of its strange existence.