Holy Flame of the Martial World

Wild fantasy wuxia flick from the eighties. It checked all the boxes for a good kung fu flick: Revenge, training sequence, soap opera twist, vivid florescent 80's colors (I think I saw some headbands & leg warmers on a few female fighters). What a great walk down memories from my childhood.

Because of some of the plot beats present in Holy Flame of the Martial World, you might expect it to be a straightforward martial arts movie. This is because it contains main characters who are out for revenge, a magical object/MacGuffin that many of the characters are after, and people needing to participate in training montages around the halfway point in order to be stronger for the final action scenes.

However, the way Holy Flame of the Martial World plays out makes it very much unlike your average martial arts movie. It has some wild fantasy elements, it doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and it's all edited and paced together in a way that's so quick I sometimes felt overwhelmed. It feels like the horror-comedy Hausu/House if it also had action sequences, with frantic and very goofy scenes that make for great entertainment.

If anything, it might have been too much of a sensory overload for me, but I wasn't expecting it to be so crazy. If I'd had known, I probably wouldn't have watched it right before bed. Being a little more alert might not have made it make perfect sense (maybe it's not supposed to), but it might've helped a little.

Oh well. It was still a very fun watch, and certainly one of the crazier martial arts movies I've seen during my latest binge (might even be more flat-out ridiculous than Super Inframan, but I also don't find it quite as charming as that sci-fi spectacle).

Having watched many a Shaw Brothers, there are some I love for the action, some for the choreography, some for the story-telling and some for the humor; but this this I love for being their version of 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'.

Set bound martial arts / magic kung-fu insanity. Flying remote controlled swords, a woman who shoots explosive rays from her finger, the ghostly laugh power. At one point there is a fight with a corpse / mummy that speaks English! A lot of skeletons are tossed around. Overall the film moves along at a good clip but it really exists in an alternate universe. If strident unreality is not your thing avoid this film at all costs.

Some of the "outdoor" scenes seem to have been shot in a small garage. You can see the wall painted sky blue only a few feet away from the actors. It is a little confusing as the lead good guy "The Phantom" and the lead bad guy "The Monster" resemble each other.

Regardless, I enjoyed the film.

Eighteen years ago, the leaders of a number of martial arts clans captured and killed a young couple who refused to give them "the manual"; the couple had a son and a daughter, each of whom were taken by a rival clan to be raised and trained in the martial arts. Now, the youngsters are 18 and ready to find the weapon that will allow them to avenge their parents' deaths - but first they must fight, among other things, a black-clad English-speaking mummy, flying Chinese ideograms, treachery both within and outside of their clans, and maybe even each other…. This is one of the hilarious martial arts movies made by the famed Shaw Brothers in the 1980s, who attempted to revive interest in the form by throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix. By this time in their careers, they were also playing with special effects (as a result of the success of the original "Star Wars" film) and the results were sometimes spectacular and sometimes spectacularly awful! A great deal of fun, but don't try to find any logic or rationale in the story or your head will surely explode!