Wolf Devil Woman (1982)

Wolf Devil Woman (1982)
Aka: Wolfen Queen
Chinese Title: 狼女白魔
Translation: Wolf White Demon

 

Starring: Pearl Chang Ling, Sek Fung, Wang Hsieh, Wan Siu-Man, Ho Hing-Nam
Director: Pearl Chang Ling
Action Director: ???

 

Pearl Chang Ling is an interesting figure in the history of the Jade Screen, as she seems to have been a particularly ambitious woman in the Taiwanese film industry. While women like Hsu Feng and Sharon Yeung Pan Pan turned to producing when their respective genres (70s wuxia and Girls n' Guns) had more or less run their course, Pearl had only appeared in a handful of movies before she appeared in a series of of vanity projects that she herself wrote, produced, directed and starred in. While her initial movies look like pretty typical genre fare for the 70s, these later projects appear to be among the most bonkers movies being made at the time. Three of those movies form what Thomas Weisser refers to as a "conceptual trilogy," partly due to the fact that they were released in some territories as the Wolf Devil Woman series, while two of the movies were released in other places as the Phoenix the Ninja series. All three of them were Chang Ling's pet projects, and deal with her avenging the death of her parents in one way or another.

The story for Wolf Devil Woman is inspired by the same tale that gave rise to The Bride With White Hair and Li Bingbing's character in The Forbidden Kingdom. There's a evil cult led by a man in a golden wizard costume, complete with a cone-shaped Merlin hat with a red skull-and-crossbones that I think Pearl's young nephew cut out of construction paper. The sorcerer is known as the Devil (who is dubbed by a man with a strong Texas drawl), and when we meet him, he is crucifying and torturing some random victim via voodoo/Maoshan magic, in which he sticks pins in a doll and even places the doll's head in boiling water. Two of the Devil's followers, a swordsman and his wife, get fed up with their master's antics and take to the hills with their newborn child to find a better life. They are tracked down by one of the Devil's generals, who looks to be wearing a Halloween mask of Bela Lugosi-by-way-of-a-fanged-gorilla, and his army of ninja. Outnumbered, the two escapees stab themselves, covering the baby in their blood (meant to keep the child warm), and then ram their heads into a wall of ice until an avalanche occurs. The baby is rescued from a snowy grave by a pack of wolves, who proceed to raise her in whatever way a pack of wolves could raise a human.

Twenty years later, the baby has grown into a wolf woman, meaning that she growls, kills small rabbits with her mouth and devours them raw, and can perform wire stunts as needed. She also has a curvature of the spine from walking around on all fours for most of her life. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the snowy mountain where she lives, a young swordsman named Rudolph (yes, that's how he's named in the credits) and his annoying sidekick Rudy (I swear I'm not making this up) is looking for a plant called 1000-year-old ginseng. This special ginseng is the key to surving the Devil's freezing spells (very similar to the Jinxes freezing attack in Jet Li's Kung Fu Cult Master), which is important, since in the past 20 years, the Devil and his armies have been on a killing spree, massacring any kung fu master who doesn't agree to join him. Rudolph and Rudy meet the wolf girl, whom the former names "Snow Hibiscus." He teaches her language and uses his kung fu chiropractor skills to correct her spine. She eventually informs Rudolph that she herself ate the Thousand-Year Ginseng when she was a little girl, which is bad news for everybody back home. Rudolph does perk Snow Hibiscus's interest in his quest by revealing a chamber in her snow cave where the frozen corpse of her (human) mother is.

Long story short: Rudolph is kidnapped by the Devil's men, who subject him to the hypnosis skills of the Devil's female witch companion. He becomes the Red Devil, a servant to the our faux Merlin. After some fish-out-of-water scenes involving Snow Hibiscus, she learns the truth of her parentage and swears revenge against the Devil and his army of ninja.

This is one of those movies that looks totally awesome when reading a plot synopsis of it, but the actually movie falls a little short of one's expectations. I mean, Thomas Weisser gave the movie a four-star rating in Asian Cult Cinema and Keith Allison of Teleport City said, "With a decent helping of comedy, tons of martial action (most of it average but enjoyable swordplay), and Cheung Ling in a little wolf outfit, you simply can't go wrong with this film. After all, it has all those things in spades." I didn't quite feel the same way. After the first 10 minutes or so, the movie sort of drags until the final 20 minutes, which are admittedly extremely entertaining. But too much time is spent with the "domestication" and integration of Snow Hibiscus that I found myself busying myself with other things while waiting for the action to kick in again.

And then you get to those glorious final moments, where Hibiscus puts on a nice white dress (I can only assume Rudy paid for it) and whips out her signature weapon, a long, fur-covered cord with dessicated animal claws at each end. She tracks the evil ninja through forests, deserts and other terrain, hacking every last one of them to pieces with her weapon. Sometimes she wraps the cord around a poor sucker's neck and yanks his head off. There's one doomed sap whom Hibiscus literally tears limb from limb with her bare hands. All of this is filmed with wires and quick cuts, much like the way that Ching Siu-Tung filmed his wuxia films during the 90s. Purists should indeed beware, but people who simply like "weird fu" will certainly get a kick out of all this.

She finally storms the Devil's lair, who unleashes his army of zombies (which hop around like guanxi). The idea is that the Devil collected dozens of kung fu masters from his raids and imprisoned them. He then placed golden needles inside Maoshan-enchanted dolls, which paralyzed them. I assume that being the one to place the golden needle in them also meant that if he removed the needles, they would become zombies. That's what happens. So you have this final showdown where Snow Hibiscus is ripping these hopping zombies to shreds with her claw weapon while Rudolph, now on our side again, is flying around on wires shooting golden arrows (as in arrows made of gold, which he just happened to have on hand near the convenient forge) at the zombies, which is also their weakness. The Devil also keeps part of his lifeforce inside of a doll, which results in the tragic lesson of "if you're going to make a Chinese equivalent to a horcrux to house your soul, don't keep it in plain sight of everybody."

So there's a lot of weirdness and bizarre supernatural shtuff on display, plus some animal dismemberment for [bad] measure, but I wish it was spread out a lot more uniformly through the film, instead of clumped together during the first and last 20 minutes of the movie.