Buddha's Palm

  How's your tolerance for terrible humor, incomprehensible stories, terrible acting and wildly uneven special effects?

 Yes, we're back to Wuxia - or Xianxia, to be specific - with 1982's Buddha's Palm, a clear forerunner to Zu Warriors and a fellow Star Wars infuencee*. It's based on a long-running Chinese comic series, and has a somewhat lighter tone than Tsui Hark's film. Mostly because it's got a lively narrator who talks to the audience and the characters as if they could hear him; Very old-school comics, or pulp serial.

 Trying to explain the plot would be an exercise in futility, so of course I'm going to take a stab at it.
 An old master retired to a cave to cultivate himself and over the years developed a deadly martial arts style, the titular Buddhist's palm. But people came from far and wide and... I guess they harassed him to death? So his distraught apprentice, Flaming Cloud Devil (Alex Man) went on a rampage and started shit up with all the kung-fu clans in the land. He got beaten down eventually, and disappeared.
 Enter Long Gianfei (Derek Yee), who some years later gets thrown off into a chasm after angering his ex's new boyfriend. He's rescued from the fall by a flying lion/dragon thing (a fantastic creation that's basically a two-man Chinese processional dragon) and taken to Flaming Cloud Devil's (FCD from now on) hideout cave, there to reluctantly become the old man's apprentice. Really reluctant - he turns down offers to be trained enough times that even Joseph Campbell would give up on him. But FCD is heartened by that, because he decides he only wants to teach people who don't want to learn. Turns out spending a long time in a cavern with nothing but a winged lion dragon thing for company is not great for your mental health.

 Then you get the usual crazy adventures: The newly minted apprentice goes to get a mystical pearl to heal his Sifu's blindness, meets and befriends two apprentices (Kara Hui and Candice Yu) of one of FCD's old enemies, and also becomes a student to another crazy kung-fu master (Lieh Lo), one who bellows his name every time he enters the scene and gets a cheesy theme tune. I love that guy.
 As for the plot , it kicks in pretty late in the movie when Gianfei unwittingly uncovers a plot to... well, I'm not sure what the hell that's all about but it involves massacring a whole town and framing him to draw out FCD. Then the final bad guy reveals himself and fights everyone.

 It's busy as hell, none of the characters are interesting, and the reveals are poorly developed. There are attempts at tragedy that are about as poignant as a pie to the face. Some piss-poor bad acting (FCD's love interest takes the cake in that department). But none of that matters because there's always something crazy going on; It's absolutely batshit insane.
 Of course it's full of stunts and wirework, most of them great. There's a couple of terrific fights, but most of the rest involve twirling around or Harry Potter Kung-fu with people shooting different-coloured rays of energy at each other, poorly rendered with charmingly daft visual effects. Fun, but not very exciting.

 There are so many laugh-out-loud moments: A guy called Heavenly Foot (Kien Shih) has a telescopic leg he uses to kick people across a courtyard - he even enlarges his foot to the size of a rhino and stomps on someone (for extra effect, hum the theme from Monty Python's Flying Circus). Alex Man has a tendency to burst out his Thundercats laugh at the slightest provocation. There's a ridiculous fight against a flying 2D mylar buddha. It's pretty wild, and while it's definitely not a comedy, it's not entirely serious either; The actual comedy elements are, as ever in this sort of thing, pretty fucking terrible, but I dig its tone, which is entirely tongue in cheek. More so than usual.
 Speaking of cheeks: one of the people Long has to fight has a huge cyst on his left cheek, which he squeezes during the fight to shoot giant jets of acid. How can you not love that?

 It's also got tons of legitimately awesome stuff. Besides cystboy mentioned above, there's a fight against four... vampires, I think? Anyhow, it's really cool - their masks keeps getting cut to reveal further masks underneath it and when you finally get to see its face it looks like a plate of porridge gone bad. Later there's an extremely well made earthquake that collapses a bunch of buildings and a couple of instances of (very mild, but cool-looking) gore. A lot of the sets and costumes look amazing.

 Director Taylor Wong manages the madness well enough; Like the rest of the movie, it varies a lot in quality - from stately to cheesy, often within the same scene - but I found it slightly less manic than other movies in the same style**. I also have to a lot of respect for how he manages to convey all the crazy action clearly.
 If I have to be honest, I think I prefer this to most other movies in the same style; It might not be as slick or as well-made, but the appealingly silly tone makes it go down easier and it's got very little filler. 

*: If influencer is a word that people use, then I'm going to stand by influencee.

**: Check out Johnnie To's Mad Monk sometime if you want to see how crazy and incomprehensible these things can get; it defeated me, I couldn't finish it. The Miracle Fighters movies are a much more watchable example.