Alternative Titles: Qi men dun jia (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
Trailer: Click below to view the trailer for The Miracle Fighters.
Plot Synopsis
China , 1677: Kao (Eddy Ko) is the government’s senior Manchu guard who is discovered to be planning to wed a Han woman. His wife is then slain before his eyes, so Kao unsheathes his sword to fight back against an entourage of the King’s best guards, including Sorcerer Bat, the mad magician with evil supernatural powers. Kao steals the King’s young son as hostage and legs it out of the palace, only to accidentally kill the future heir in the process.
Flash forward a good twenty years and Kao is now a hairy alcoholic spitting drunken nonsense at passers by in the street. He has since adopted Shu Gun (Yuen Yat-chor), a likeable, wet-between-the-ears sort who plies Kao will alcohol in loving exchange for his martial arts skills. But Sorcerer Bat and his spooky cohorts soon discover the Master’s whereabouts and cause death by magic, killing Kao and taking Shu Gun hostage. The Sorcerer is convinced that Shu Gun is the dead Prince, and stamps him with the royal seal of approval, keeping him locked away and guarded by a child clown in a giant urn. The urn can barrel-roll towards adversaries and fend them off with a paper sword, only Shu Gun makes the poor unfortunate trapped inside feel so damn insecure he simply climbs out of the window and escapes.
He is taken in by a pair from Carry on Sorcery, a disgruntled and degenerate husband and wife combo played by Leung Kar-yan and Yuen Cheung-yan in drag, whose amazing feats of magical expertise involve manipulating weather patterns, extending limbs to some twenty feet, seeing people from an eyeball lodged in the palm of their hand and surprising adversaries with a disguised third leg. Shu Gun doesn’t seem at all perplexed by his new foster parents and proceeds to lecture them instead on issues of respect and loyalty, before Sorcerer Bat returns with his yin-yang mirrors of death and evil bat wings to rue the day that Shu ever thought he could escape his fatal grasp.
Once the Bat’s prized pair of ghostly lemmings are slain by the old codgers, it’s up to the Bat himself to trick the spinsters by donning identical face masks of the pair of them, which works surprisingly well for the old lady, who is slain by a flying drill to the head. The old man isn’t quite so easily fooled, and combats the Bat’s extendable hidden limbs by blowing a poisoned cloud back into his nemesis’ hairy face. The Bat then disappears in a cloud of smoke.
Shu Gun’s final retribution comes at a Sorcerer’s convention where the best magicians in town are challenged by a succession of deadly tests and trials with makeshift props and haphazard set design. It’s quite astonishing to find Shu Gun lighting Taoist scriptures and utilizing paper butterflies as weight dispensers given that he is shown to have done very little training beforehand, yet these inherent skills come in perfectly handy when one of his final opponents turns out to be (surprise, surprise) the Batman himself! The Bat pins Shu Gun’s shadow to the floor while he splits into two separate versions of himself, both of which continue to fight Shu Gun at the same time! But by unsheathing the sacred sword of his spiritual elders, the Bat faces a laser bolt from the mouth of a ceremonial lion and bites the dust with his eyes bursting out of his head, leaving Shu to return home to the old man’s place and pay his respects to his dead wife. And if you want one final twist in the tale - it turns out that she’s not dead after all, a somewhat minor discrepancy, much to her husband’s annoyance.
Review
Yuen Woo-ping’s response to Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind is the most delirious, frenetic and wildly imaginative chopsocky that the director ever put his name to, and even by HK standards this is a bit crazy. He certainly outweighs Sammo on the bizarro factor, with more tricks and tenacity, and all the rabid spirit of the Looney Tunes on speed. As with much of Woo-ping’s product from around this period (this being his most eccentric pattern of films which he made alongside his many brothers), the story gradually takes second place and is swallowed whole by the sheer exuberance and enthusiasm of the manic fight sequences.
The Miracle Fighters comes at a time when Woo-ping was continually sidelining the traditional aspects of his martial arts choreography in favour of the quirky, zany, slapstick variety, much of which is either loved or loathed in varying quantities. Either way, it can never be said that Woo-ping’s work is ever boring. Much of this inherent knack of colourful imagery and screen manipulation stems from a background at the Peking Opera training school that the Yuen family was so accustomed too, and it is this prominent theatrical training that comes across so broadly from his films of this period. The camera acts as a window onto the stage, not the other way round, and it is clearly evident in the sort of makeshift special effects used by a budget-stricken crew that many of these tricks and gimmicks have been designed for the stage, not the screen. Indeed, much of the disappearing acts utilize quick edits and smart camera angles, but the more constructive use of props and gadgets is what makes the special effects in the film so endearing: here we have a window into a much more innocent time before computer generated imagery swept the board and buried a lot of the hands-on, behind-the-scenes talent capable of physically manufacturing these sorts of cinematic illusions.
And with an imagination set to overdrive, Yuen and his brothers (Sunny Yuen, Brandy Yuen, Yuen Cheung-yan and Yuen Yat-chor) concoct of spiraling mirage of ridiculous set pieces, each more outer-worldly than the next. There’s a bit where a magician chops off his own legs with a paper axe, only to then telekinetically make the stumps walk so that he can glide effortlessly above them. The clown child trapped in a giant urn is one of the film’s more memorable highlights, with only space for his head, arms and legs to protrude out of his ceramic enclosure. Then it gets really silly, when fish start talking to their owners, and Shu Gun picks a fight with Sorcerer Bat while dressed as a puppet. This is Woo-ping at his most genre-defining and innovative, and it’s true to say that no one, not even Sammo, could compete with this level of visionary insanity. The resulting film is therefore a pleasingly demented experience, even if Woo-ping does get completely carried away with his own inventions.
“What do you think about my third leg?” Leung Kar-yan gives the Bat a little more than he bargained for.
Yuen Woo-ping’s response to Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind is the most delirious, frenetic and wildly imaginative chopsocky that the director ever put his name to, and even by HK standards this is a bit crazy. He certainly outweighs Sammo on the bizarro factor, with more tricks and tenacity, and all the rabid spirit of the Looney Tunes on speed. As with much of Woo-ping’s product from around this period (this being his most eccentric pattern of films which he made alongside his many brothers), the story gradually takes second place and is swallowed whole by the sheer exuberance and enthusiasm of the manic fight sequences. 
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