The Peacock King (1988)

Let's be realistic.

Admirable film.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Blistering performances.

Manga based Chinese film about two men, Lucky Fruit and Peacock who are the only two people who stand between humanity and the resurrection of the Hell King by the evil Raga and the daughter of the Hell King.Old school action fantasy horror film mixes stop motion, forced perspective, wires, rubber and other non computer effects for use in a slam bang fantasy film. This is a movie that just starts and goes and never worries about all the details, it just pulls you along like a crazy friend who has this idea of how to do a road trip. It may not be the perfect road trip but you can't say you're not having fun. With Monsters that run the gamut from something from John Carpenter's The Thing to Korda's Thief of Bagdad to Krull to schlocky 1980's glowing eyes horror films this movie is a great deal of fun for people who don't mind less then perfect monsters. The martial arts sequences are well done even when they sprinkle in magical aide. Best of all are the characters who seem to all belong together and who banter about with a nice level of wittiness that doesn't fall into cliché or stupidity.I just really like this movie in a rainy afternoon popcorn sort of way. How good is it? I'm thinking of replacing my perfectly fine dollar VCD with a more expensive DVD copy so I can have more options where I watch this.Worth a bowl of popcorn and a soda.

A lot of people seem to misunderstand this type of film. It is fantasy, based on a famous Japanese Manga and various Japanese legends. It was very popular in Japan (making a huge star of Gloria Yip in this her first film), average in HK and poorly received in the rest of the world. Glad as I am to see it in such a good print I was surprised HK Legends released this film above others (like Pedicab Driver, still not released). It is not a straight kung fu film and to expect protracted one on one human fight scenes is to miss the point of such a film. Enjoy it for what it is, fantasy with reasonable (for the time) special effects and Yuen Biao as an actor.

If you watch this movie to get some kung fu action out of Yuen Biao, you'll be pretty disappointed. Except for a couple of evasive flips and spins here and there, the is only one fight sequence in this movie, and it comes about an hour into it. This is a supernatural tale, neither funny nor scary, but with lots of pretty bad special effects.The story is unclear and messy; yet another example of the fact that Hong Kong commercial cinema has never discovered the importance of a clear plot. Action, helpless women and funny effects seem to be all they think the audience wants.Also, an already weak story is completely destroyed by the horrid English subtitles. Why can't they get someone who actually knows the language to at least rephrase the subtitles into something that makes sense? My theory is that the English subtitles are not for Western audiences at all, but for those Asians who happen not to speak Mandarin or Cantonese or any of the other five Asian languages this DVD was subtitled in.Anyway, a main reason to watch this movie is Gloria Yip, perhaps the cutest Asian actress of all time. But she hardly has any lines here, nor much of anything to do - you should catch her in Flying Dagger (1993) instead, or Saviour of the Soul (1992).All in all, this movie really hasn't got a lot going for it. Amazingly, it spawned a sequel, Saga of the Phoenix, where the entire cast returned. I haven't seen it yet, and, truthfully, I may not bother, because it looks like it's more of exactly the same.Peacock King is yet another movie in which Yuen Biao is pretty much wasted. Why has he done so many bad movies? Was it just bad luck that none of them were hits, or does he actually like this kind of thing?My rating: 3 out of 10.

Yuen Biao is a great, underrated martial artist, and personally I prefer to see him fighting against human opponents with his body (which he does ONLY ONCE, after a full hour, in this film) rather than weird stop-motion animated creatures with supernatural fireballs (which he does a lot more often here). The ambitious, large-scale special effects and sets of "The Peacock King" are worth seeing (even if they show their age sometimes, and they're not as good as those of the same director's "Seventh Curse"), and when the Hell King himself appears at the end, he looks pretty impressive. But the story, which has Biao as a sort of adventurer-exorcist-demon hunter who tries to prevent the end of the world with the help of his equally skilled brother, is just incomprehensible claptrap. (**)