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Two Taoist Tales: Taoism Drunkard/Young Taoism Fighter - Limited Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (23rd September 2024). |
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The Film
 "In the wake of Encounter of the Spooky Kind, the Hong Kong film industry launched headlong into a prolific genre cycle that drew upon Taoist folklore. Popular throughout the 1980s and into the next decade, these films combined elements of horror, fantasy, comedy and martial arts as they pit their protagonists against hopping vampires, vengeful ghosts and evil sorcerers. Here, Eureka Classics is proud to present two of the most mind-bending tales of Taoist magic ever committed to film: Taoism Drunkard and Young Taoism Fighter!" When the titular Taoism Drunkard (Tai Chi Master's Yuen Cheung-Yan) damages the statue of his temple's founder, his high priest younger brother (The Mystery of Chess Boxing's Hsiao Hou-Tou) charges him not only with begging for money on the street to repair the statue but to find a "cherry boy" to take part in the ceremony commemorating the statue. After a number of crude comic interludes involving an old man attempting to confirm the virginity of adolescent boys, the drunken Taoist lights upon Wu Shun-Chiu (Dreadnaught's Yuen Yat-Choh) whose Taoist priestess grandmother (also Yuen Cheung-Yan who had previously performed in drag as "Old Witch" in The Miracle Fighters) is grooming him to take her place in protecting the Holy Writ. Shun-Chiu continually rebuffs the drunken Taoist's attempts to recruit him which usually result in incidents that get them both into trouble; however, when Old Devil (Iron Monkey's Yuen Shun-Yi) attempts to steal the Holy Write – a crime for which he was once punished and exiled – the drunken Taoist may be the only one who can help him. Ostensibly a sequel to The Miracle Fighters – and marketed in some territories as "Miracle Fighters 3" following Shaolin Drunkard and preceding Young Taoism Fighter – the third and fourth entries produced by Lo Wei (The Big Boss) possibly hoping to make Yuen Yat Chor the next Bruce Lee even though he seems more like Jackie Chan – Taoism Drunkard shares some story elements with the first film including a young hero training under a wise elder with a secret – Yuen Cheung-Yan not only plays a dual role (one in drag) but also directs – a villain in the form of "Sorcerer Bat" in everything but name and bat wings, an attack on a Taoist temple, and a destiny for the hero. The attempted abduction subplot is here turned towards comedy, and the urn child here is replaced with a "banana monster" or "watermelon monster" – depending on the translation – that vexes both Shun-Chiu in his training and Old Devil when he attempts to steal the holy MacGuffin. Much is also made of the On a darker note, Old Devil's vengeance is brutal as is his compelling sorceress Starry Devil (The Battle for the Republic of China's Hilda Liu Hao-Yi) to work for him with a potion that causes rapid aging along with his ruthless disposal of her comic relief religious grifter cohorts (Till Death Do We Scare's Tsui Oi-Sam and Bloodsport's Mandy Chan Chi-Man). Characterization and any emotional engagement take a back seat to the martial arts – along with a lengthy tangent involving a potential love interest (The Shanghai Thirteen's Zhu Hai-Ling) whose sister (Calamity of Snakes' Lo Pi-Ling) and lover (Police Story's Tai Bo) have murdered her husband – but thankfully the film remains funny no matter how confusing and nonsensical it becomes. As with The Miracle Fighters, the film was a production of the Yuen clan's "Peace Group" whose multiple cooks in the planning of both script and staging is felt even if Yuen Cheung-Yan gets the director's credit and the better-known Yuen director/action director Yuen Woo-Ping's name is nowhere to be found.  The Young Toaism Fighter is Ko Sang (Yuen Yat-Choh again); but this time he is a student at the Yin Yang hall who gets into constant trouble along with his buddy Bohunk (Tai Bo again). Ko Sang exasperates the elder brother (Once Upon a Time in China's Yen Shi-Kwan) with his lack of interest in basic teachings, instead wanting to learn Yin Yang style of soul separation from the school's resident drunkard brother (The Boxer from Shantung's Lee Man-Tai). Ko Sang uses his punishment of testing out the devious inventions of imprisoned Brother Chung (The Devil's Tian Ming) to sneak into the scripture library to learn the Ying Yang style himself. He separates his body from his shadow only to discover it is just as mischievous as himself, and the drunkard brother then takes it upon himself to teach him lest he get in more trouble than merely showing up Bohunk. Ko Sang might have found a practical use, however, when he runs into female fighter Li Chien Ngo (Hilda Liu Hao-Yi again) of the Hai Ching Clan who is out to avenge her brother's murder by Fu Luen (The Clones of Bruce Lee's Jang Il-Do) of the evil Tien Wu Clan who has been perfecting his Purple Yen Wicked Style to become invincible. The least of the "Miracle Fighters" films in both recurring story elements and cast members aside from lead Yuen Yat-Choh and in tone, Young Taoism Fighter is so scattershot as to feel like two films edited together, particularly with the abrupt cuts from one story line to another or brings up an idea only to drop it shortly after. The first part of the film is typical "young master" stuff as our protagonist gets up to hijinks rather than training followed by the expected training in the underground chamber; however, the first scene between Ko Sang and Brother Chung is on the thirty-first day of his training and he appears to make daily visits rather than being sentenced to spend the entire time down there and can sneak out on the town at night. It is at this point that the film suddenly cuts to the exploits of the Tien Wu Clan junior brother (Fire Dragon's Kwan Chung) contributing to the series' bad taste humor by collecting children's urine through which Fu Luen drains their life forces from afar to build up his own while perfecting his fighting style (the actual training takes place offscreen). Li Chien Ngo first seems a skilled fighter who easily bests Ko Sang and his offer to teach her a new fighting style a romantic overture but things get muddled as the line between dreaming and waking is blurred and, as with the vignette of Bohunk demonstrating his mastery of the Yin Yang style, we are uncertain of just how much of the last several minutes of scenes is supposed to have been all in the head of one of the characters. Once the running time is reached, there is a final confrontation, not between Li Chien Ngo and Fu Luen but between Fu Luen and Ko Sang in which one character is "separated" limb from limb and still puts up a fight. The film was directed by Chen Chi-Hwa who directed Jackie Chan in his early Lo Wei productions Shaolin Wooden Men and Half a Loaf of Kung Fu but survived the toxic parting of ways and co-directed Chan's Police Story. With a separate release of the better-known Miracle Fighters and the lesser but not un-entertaining third and forth entries in Two Taoist Tales, one wonders what became of Shaolin Drunkard and whether it has more in common with the first film or the latter two. 
Video
Taoism Drunkard and Young Taoism Fighter were unreleased theatrically in the United States, the martial arts grindhouse craze having waned by the mid-eighties supplanted by television and video (bootleg or otherwise). Ocean Shores' cropped laserdisc of the former film had Cantonese and Mandarin tracks but no subtitles while their laserdisc of the latter had burnt-in Chinese and English subtitles. While both films had authorized U.K. tape releases in the late eighties, stateside they could be found in unauthorized form under the respective titles "Drunken Wu Tang" and "Wu Tang Temple" in the nineties as part of the "Wu Tang Collection" capitalizing on the hip hop group's referencing of the films in their music. Both films got Fortune Star remasters and were released in Hong Kong as PAL-converted anamorphic widescreen DVDs with optional English subtitles. Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-rays of Taoism Drunkard and Young Taoism Fighter both come from new 2K restorations. Taoism Drunkard is the better-looking of the film, with much of it shot in controlled sound stage settings including village exterior backlots while the Taiwan locations appear to have been mostly shot in bright daylight. Grain coarsens during opticals including some effects shots and transitions – as well as some over- and under-cranked shots where exposure might not have been adequately adjusted to account for the differing shutter angle and frame rate – and there are some soft shots that appear to have more to do with shooting on a fast schedule with no video assist.  Young Taoism Fighter was shot entirely in Taiwan by one of Lo Wei's (and Jackie Chan's) jobbing directors and there are more optical effects including multiple superimpositions in some shots which are grainier and contrastier than the surrounding shots. The studio interiors look bright and eye-poppingly colorful for the most part; however, there are two credited cinematographers and one of them made heavy use of gauzy diffusion in some shots as well as backlight and smoke in others. It is, nevertheless, doubtless that the 2K scan and grading probably shows the film's elements off to their best given the circumstances of shooting.
Audio
Unlike some of the other Eureka releases of Fortune Star product that have multiple dubs and variants of dubs, both films here feature a pair of uncompressed Cantonese and English LPCM 2.0 mono tracks. The English tracks have a certain goofy quality but the Cantonese tracks not only sound better cast but also cleaner and a tad louder (we have no idea if the English tracks were sourced from lesser materials or were just recorded with less care). The sometimes abruptly edited music sounds mostly like library cues apart from some stingers that were used to highlight comic gags (although it is possibly that they too were recycled). Optional English subtitles for both film are free of errors and do at least confirm that some principal characters are not given names while others really have names like "Old Devil" in Cantonese. 
Extras
As with many Eureka Hong Kong titles, Taoism Drunkard is accompanied by a pair of commentary tracks. The first is an audio commentary by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng, NY Asian Film Festival who notes the involvement of Lo Wei as seeming to differ from his more controlling presence on earlier films. He also discusses how the first three films in the loose series feature the common elements of Yuen Yat-Choh and Yuen Cheung-Yan in drag and dual roles, pop culture meanings in the anachronistic dialogue including references to songs and "goldfish men", Hong Kong's attitude to Mormons and early anxiety about the 1997 handover, as well as information on some of the lesser-known presence in the film like Yen Shi-Kwan (The Story of the Drunken Master) and Lo Pi-Ling who became known as the "big sister of gossip" on television before her early death. The second track is an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who describe the film as a "live action cartoon" from the period of "spooky kung fu" films that threw in everything but the kitchen sink. They clarify that the "banana eating" of the melon monster is a euphemism for "dick biting" and suggest during the scene of the drunkard trying to find a virgin reasons that some of the cruder comedies did not translate well to Western audiences. They also pontificate that Yuen Yat-Choh was less successful as a Jackie Chan clone than the Bruce Lee pretenders because Chan was still alive and at the top of his game. Like Djeng, they also explain some of the pop culture references including some of the open secret of Hong Kong prostitution and other illegalities that people pretend not to notice, as well as several of the less overt penis jokes and more sex jokes than seen in brother Yuen Woo-Ping's films. In "James Mudge on Taoism Drunkard" (17:53), he is rather reluctant to call Lo Wei a "spent force" by the eighties but suggests of the films that the producer had gone from being ahead of the curve to jumping on trends that were winding down (noting how the spooky kung fu genre had shifted to the technically-ambitious likes of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story). He also discusses the "two" Yuen Clans – the one that adapted the name that included the likes of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Donnie Yen (whose mother was the founder and teacher) and the ten children of Simon Yuen (six of which were in the film industry) – and cites the uneven "Miracle Fighters" series as most demonstrative of their collaborative talents before Yuen Woo-Ping stood out as a director and action director and the others were still present in various roles but less prominently-credited. The disc also includes the Hong Kong theatrical trailer (4:21).  Young Taoism Fighter also has a pair of commentary tracks with the same parties. The first is an audio commentary by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng, NY Asian Film Festival who notes that while the film is connected to the other loose entries in the "Miracle Fighters" series, it only has one onscreen Yuen, is not directed by one of the clan, and was shot entirely in Taiwan (he also reveals that the film only played a single day in theaters). He notes that the film was scripted by actor Tse Chi-Sheng and has a lot more Taiwanese juvenile humor – he does reveal however that there really are people who think children's urine has healing properties – and none of the Cantonese word play of the other films. He identifies several of the less familiar Taiwanese players as well as Korean actor Jang Il-Do who was also known as "Bruce Lai" and appeared in some of the Brucesploitation films in the previous decade. The second track is an audio Commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who discuss Chen Chi-Hwa's role in the Lo Wei Jackie Chan films, films he ostensibly directed on which Chan did the choreography but did not star – including one film where behind the scenes footage of Chan was used to promote it and Leeder's recollection of showing the footage to both Chen and Chan – as well as his work behind the scenes and in bit parts on later Chan films. They also again ponder why Yuen Yat-Choh did not take off as a leading man and why he left the industry as well as expound upon the prevalence of piss jokes in Taiwanese cinema. In "James Mudge on Young Taoism Fighter" (10:35), Mudge notes that the filn was released in 1984 but may have been at least partially filmed as early as 1981 and that the presence of only one Yuen onscreen makes it difficult to assess just who else in the clan was involved in the fight choreography given the "Yuen Brothers" credit. The disc also includes the Hong Kong theatrical trailer (3:54). 
Packaging
The first pressing of 2,000 copies includes a limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling and a collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Southeast Asian horror expert Dr. Katarzyna Ancuta, and Daniel O'Brien, author of "Spooky Encounters" (neither of which were provided for review).
Overall
With a separate release of the better-known Miracle Fighters and the lesser but not un-entertaining third and forth entries in Two Taoist Tales, one wonders what became of Shaolin Drunkard and whether it has more in common with the first film or the latter two.
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