Imperial Sword, Crouching Devil (1981)

Imperial Sword, Crouching Devil (1981)
aka Imperial Sword Killing the Devil
Chinese Title: 御劍伏魔
Translation: Imperial Sword and the Devil

 

Starring: Mang Fei, Ching Li, Chang Yi, Hsia Ling-Ling, Ku Feng, Chiang Sheng, Liu Ping, Chui Suk-Woon, Chin Po, Lung Fei
Director: Fang Hao
Action Director: Chiang Sheng

 

Crazy, low-budget wuxia flick that falls on the "high fantasy" spectrum of the genre. The stars have aligned which means that an evil demon (Chang Yi, of The Victim and Challenge of Death) and his ninja-like minions have been released (or are at the height of their power--the subs were hard to read). Some demi-god sends his demi-goddess student (Ching Li, of Twelve Golden Coins and Duel of Fists) to stop it. We then switch over to a band of adventurers, including Chiang Sheng (of the Venom Mob) and Lung Fei (of One Armed Boxer and Tiger and Crane Fists) entering a trap-filled cave to find a map to a scripture that holds the key to a powerful esoteric style. Chiang Sheng is the only one to make it out alive, but he's attacked by the ninja demons and ends up drowning. The map is found by a swordsman (Meng Fei, of The Prodigal Boxer and The Unbeatable 28) and his girlfriend (Chin Po, of Ape Girl and Kung Fu Girls), who take it back his master/her father. He sends them on a mission to find the treasure, and is killed by the devils while they're gone. The duo pick up an annoying girl (Hsia Ling-Ling, of The Gold Chasers and The Thrilling Sword) on the way, and eventually meet up with the demi-goddess. 

The girlfriend is injured in a fight with the bad guys, so they leave her at Meng Fei's house with his mother and continue the journey. When demi goddess is injured, they go to the cave of the Nine Note Demon (Chui Suk-Woon of Hong Kong Godfather and The Ghost Snatchers) to get her Silver Ginseng fruit and heal the demi goddess. She allows them to pick the fruit under the condition that Meng Fei marry her. He relents and the demi-goddess is healed. In the meantime, the villain has killed everybody at Meng Fei's house and taken the (former) girlfriend hostage. Somehow--the movie doesn't show us--the map was tattooed on her back so the Devil needs her to find the cave where the scripture is hidden. The three good guys show up at the cave, but are too late...the Devil has gotten the scripture. Then things start to get weird...

Imperial Sword, Crouching Devil comes across as a 90s wuxia flick made a decade too early. It feels like 500 pages of story crammed into a 90-minute film and then edited with a chainsaw down to 79 minutes. Thus, you have moments where the characters declare that they need to go somewhere, and then arrive at the destination in the next scene, but what you don't find out until later is that several months have passed since the previous scene because the place they went to is so far. Or you have those random plot developments where the character declares, "The only thing that can save him is the 1000-year lotus." And it turns out that it's located at the bottom of a pool in the same character's cave. But the pool is an "endless pool," so a character dives in to fetch the lotus and comes out looking like an old woman. And the entire movie is practically one long string of seemingly random and contrived events that the film (generally) treats with utter seriousness.

I was interested in the film because the action direction was supplied by Chiang Sheng, who was working solo this time. And the action is a two-edged sword: purists will absolutely hate this because the action is all wires and special effects. There are lots of flying people and wire-assisted acrobatics. Cel animation is used to represent energy-infused swords and chi blasts by the combatants. Camera tricks are used to make Chang Yi split into several "shadow" versions of himself in order to confuse his opponents. The madness here is cranked up to 11! And there are two fairly long House of Traps sequences where the characters walk around caves filled with flying projectiles, poison gas cages, pools of acid, throat-biting skeletons and flying golden snakes! It's just berzerk!

On the other side of the coin, Chiang Sheng does a really good job choreographing it all. Grounded or not, there's still a trick to pulling off good fantasy-fu and Chiang Sheng shows a natural knack for this sort of action. While we know him for his acrobatics and complex Venom Mob choreography, and wish that he had adapted those talents (on both sides of the camera) to the modern age like the Seven Fortunes did, here he shows aptitude for the sort of film that would reach high levels of respectability with films like Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story. It's then a shame that Chiang Sheng wasn't able to parlay this natural talent into bigger, more prestigious projects and instead drifted into obscurity in the second half of the 1980s. His co-star Kuo Chi (or Phillip Kwok) had parlayed his talent into different sorts of New Wave films (modern kickboxing, 90s wire-fu, wuxia, bullet ballet, etc.), so there's no reason that Chiang Sheng shouldn't have been able to do something similar.

So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys films like Buddha's Palm, Battle Wizard and Holy Flame of the Martial World, you should check this out. It's barely coherent, but it is wild.