What a crazy wonderful mess this was. Now I know what LSD can do to your brain on a bad trip. This is frigging nuts. In a good way. The plot is barely held together by a thin thread - incoherent much of the time - making little sense - edited in millions of little bits that lose track of one another - but it almost doesn't matter. It is an incredible kung-fu fantasy film filled with action, exploding stomachs, gore, gorgeous colors, torture devices, booby traps, morons, killers and great interior designs. It gets my vote for Best Villain Lair ever. It is ADS on steroids. The camera flies around as much as the actors do shooting from various strange angles. And as far as I know it is one of the Shaw's more obscure films. The only well-known name to me in it is Jason Pai Piao. This is 1983 and Shaw only had a couple years left as a film producer and a lot of the more famous talent had left. This is basically the B Team.



The director is Hua Shan with some nice credits to his name - The Super Inframan, Crystal Fist, Kung Fu Zombie and Bloody Parrot. He just piles on the visuals and violence faster than you can absorb them - it jumps from location to location, one scene to another with a myriad of characters and the editing just goes chop, chop, chop at lightening speed. It is great fun but don't ask me what it was about.



Ok - since you asked. It is well-known that if you are carving a sculpture made of crystal that if you get blood on it, it will turn into a spirit. Long Fei (Jason) laughs at this when his friend, Fatty (Chun Wong) tells him and then intentionally cuts his finger and spreads the blood on the finished statue. Then he puts it away. Not long after a female warrior encased in crystal kills three brothers of Poison Yama. Yama to his friends wears a cheap white rubber mask to cover his face. He produces exotic poisons from materials brought from all over the world. And tests them on his workers. The pay is great, the hours good but eventually he will kill you. His lab is always knee deep in fog and skulls. And intestines from the exploding bloated stomach.



He thinks that Long Fei is behind this and when this rumor gets to Long Fei he again laughs - the sculpture is right here in this closet - well it was - where did it go. So he and Fatty set out to find out what is going on and killers are right behind them. When underwater killers set their boat on fire, they shoot an arrow into a tree with a rope behind it and slide across to land. Cool. Where they find a wounded woman (Lau Yuk-pok).  Unknown to them she is the Crystal Killer. But with a good heart. Other than killing people. She goes but leaves them a map that leads them to the Du Residence where she lives. Sounds posh. It is if you are a psychopath. This is where the film notches it up another level.



Headed by the beautiful Du Sha (Chan Sze-kai) with her white hair pulled up like Marie Antoinette is a maniac. She puts all of the young women through a test and all but the Crystal Killer came out having lost their minds and are either in jail cells screaming in pain or robotic servants. The test is a tough one. No SAT for smarts but one in which you have to survive dozens of booby traps coming at you faster than a supersonic - most of them barbed to kill. And if Du Sha wasn't crazy enough for you her husband shows up - ties one of the women (Lam Sau-kwan) naked on a cross with cutting wires that dig into her flesh and then begins to cut off pieces and makes a shish kabab of them. Delicious. The movie. Not the pieces of flesh. This is too weird to be an art film but it is stunningly inventive and beautiful.