The monkey King has upset Buddha by trying to eat Longevity Monk and is disguised as a man named Joker. He leads a band of robbers who are attacked by immortal sisters. A time travel box is found and Joker must prevent one of the sisters from committing suicide, but when he does, he goes 500 years back in time. His marriage to the immortal sister is taking place at Bull King's home, but people's bodies get switched. Joker puts on the crown and becomes Monkey King again to fight Bull King.
Stephen Chow as the Monkey King in a 1995 wuxia is the answer to my heart's desires. It was 3 hours of fast paced action comedy in classic Chow dead-pan delivery. The plot reads like the mess that flies across the screen on Hong Kong wire. Characters? Forget trying to keep track of them. As long as you know who Stephen Chow is at the moment and which sister is which, you're set. The guy from India and the pig man appear at some point... It seems to me that there is more than what is apparent lost in translation between Chinese and English. Anything involving phrasing is immediately gone, among countless other things. Do you know comedic Chinese speech inflections? I don't. What survived of the comedy was mostly physical: crotch-stomping, smashed by rocks, pig man with woman's voice type humor. Alright, that is pretty funny. The sets looked like they took years to build. We had giant set pieces for less than a minute of some special effects. The heart set looked like Jim Henson made it while in an altered state of mind and the big pole set was way over the top for how little it was used. The smashed by a rock door set even had a hidden trick up its sleeve. Camera-work looked a little inferior, but that was mostly because of the extremely low video quality. There were also some shakes, jumps and blurs besides pixellation. It did conform to wuxia imagery standards. There was lots of contrast and strong lighting, back-lighting and overly color corrected scenes. As stated above, the special effects were one of the main focal points. They were mostly done in-camera with set pieces, but there were some digital size manipulations and compositing scenes as well. In Chinese audio situations, dialogue volume is not my top priority. The music and sound effects worked. I got mostly good subtitles that I didn't try switching because I didn't want to lose what little functionality there was. Style was like mixing Bride with White Hair, Legend of Liquid Sword and Jim Henson's The Storyteller (crazy, cheesy and good!). Part 1 got 7.9/10 on IMDb and part 2 got 8.1/10. Rotten Tomatoes gives the whole deal 87% audience score. 82.3% average sounds pretty high for a general population/mainstream website grade. I rate this awesome! If you like Stephen Chow, Hong Kong wire flying, comedy, fantasy and special effects to the point that it becomes absurd, you will agree.
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