Foreign Guffaw

Today I went and saw Lord of the Wu Tang starring Jet Li. Not your ordinary martial arts flim. The 1993 film was remade into a DVD in 2000 which had no menu. So it's more of like a VHS that runs in a DVD player. It came complete with white subtitles which could not be visible 20% of the time due to not having a border when placed over white backgrounds. The subtitles had a gratuitous amount of spelling and grammar errors, with such phrases like, "Women is cunning" or "Why did you assassinate me?". They also simplifed things with English slang, for example summarizing three separate insults into "Bitch". The fight scenes came included with many men flying on wires and were obviously fast-forwarded to make them seem more intense.

The story was rather inclement, with the absense of the 10 minute prologue left in the other versions. (This is the third episode of a series). It involved many rival martial arts clans, a martial arts monk embedded in a boulder, horrible jokes about morning erections, magic powder dubbed "Scent" which would take away your kung foo powers if inhaled and left untreated, and two particularly aroused men whose mission is to rape every woman they come upon. Wow.

To cap it all off the ending is a cliffhanger which just smacks you in the face and leaves you there confused. There was supposed to be a sequel, but due to spending too much on all the fight scenes (probably for the wiring) they gave up.

Thank you Wong Jing for that unforgettable experience.