Streamers: Alamo Drafthouse Preshow Wizard Laird Jimenez Presents Taiwanese Fantasy Kung Fu

When we asked Laird Jimenez for some streaming recommendations, we knew not to expect the ordinary. In his capacity as head video honcho at Alamo Drafthouse, Laird supervises the creation of those often bizarre preshows that many of us are missing so much right now. And, as head programmer of the Weird Wednesday series in Austin, he provides even larger helpings of strangeness. So here, direct from the “Peach Boys and Ginseng Monsters” bookmark tab on Laird’s browser is a selection of Taiwanese fantasy bashers. Enjoy.

Taiwan was not untouched by the martial arts explosion that started in Hong Kong and swept the planet in the 70s. Hong Kong producers and talent looking to save money and work outside of the studio system boosted the homegrown film industry in Taiwan, and international audiences were hungry for kung fu bashers. It was a combination that led to a flood of exports clumsily dubbed in English or hastily subtitled, often given titles by distributors that evoked Bruce Lee either indirectly (see the 1000 movies with “Dragon” in the name) or directly (GOODBYE BRUCE LEE: HIS LAST GAME OF DEATH).

Meanwhile in the United States a special effects revolution was underway. Science fiction and fantasy spectacles featuring exciting new uses of rotoscoping and compositing were breaking box office records. STAR WARS, SUPERMAN, and E.T. were international hits, filling screens around the globe with brightly colored lasers, flying superheroes, and strange creatures.

In Taiwan the martial arts film and these new special effects spectacles came clashing together in a most wonderful and weird way. Movie heroes who before were only masters of a specific fighting style could now shoot lasers and/or fly and carry on conversations with singing, dancing humanoid ginger roots. Fantasy films were nothing new to Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema, of course, but this new crop of films were made with technology previously unheard of for audiences hungry for more Western style spectacle and martial arts action, making the older films seem downright stagey by comparison.

These movies are colorful pop art sugar rushes, full of narrative digressions, broad comedy, and a charm that stems from their low budgets and presumably short production schedules. Elements of folk tales butt up against elements straight up lifted from Hollywood productions (soundtrack cues especially), and it’s all anything but predictable. I’d place their existence somewhere between a game of exquisite corpse, collage art, and neon colored junk food.

The best of these movies star Taiwanese actress Hsiao-Lao Lin as a gregarious young boy, including at least two movies in which her character’s name is “Peach Boy” (or Tao Tai Lang, a boy literally born from a peach based on the Japanese legend of Momotarō). There’s nothing particularly unusual about an adult female performer portraying a young boy (these kinds of gender swaps are even written into the text of many martial arts stories as women surreptitiously infiltrating male spaces by posing as the opposite sex). Why Lin was so regularly cast as a young boy, however, is a bit mysterious to me, and I can only chalk it up to producers seeing it work once and repeating it the same way they would anything else.

CHILD OF PEACH (1987)

Dir. Chung-Hsing Chao, Chun-Liang Chen

Start with CHILD OF PEACH (a particularly zany clip from CHILD OF PEACH circulated the meme rounds without context a year or so ago, even popping up on Everything Is Terrible’s feed) then brace yourself for its superior and even weirder sequel MAGIC OF SPELL. Be prepared for ridiculous costumes, potty humor, and crude matting on the optical effects. There’s a third loosely connected film MAGIC WARRIORS as well, though a quick search on YouTube only resulted in copies that verge on unwatchable.

MAGIC OF SPELL (1988)

Dir. Chung-Hsing Chao

KUNG FU WONDER CHILD (1986)

Dir. Tso Nam Lee

Lars Nilsen favorite Tso Nam Lee, whose films played at previous Old School Kung Fu Weekend events at AFS, directed Hsiao-Lau Lin in the laserific KUNG FU WONDER CHILD (sometimes spelled KONG FU WONDER CHILD).