A high ranking general and Kung Fu instructor for the royal army (Eddie Ko) secretly marries a Han woman. This being the Quing dynasty, once the... well, I think it's supposed to be the emperor (the subs disagree and call him king) finds out about it, he calls the general to court and orders him to kill his poor wife; The Manchu and Han lines must not cross.
The general refuses, and when the woman is killed anyway, he goes nuts and starts killing the imperial guard- which I believe is a pretty serious faux pas in court etiquette. When he raises his sword against the emperor, evil warlock bat (Yuen Shun-yi) swoops in from the rafters (as you do) and... gets the general to fight against a cutesy mime in a vase who uses paper swords.
This movie, by the way, is amazing. Also, fucking nuts.
The general barely escapes by taking the emperor's son hostage; however, the royal scion accidentally dies during the escape.
Years later, the general resurfaces in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. He's adopted a kid, Shu-kan (who grows up to be Yuen Yat-cho), and gifts him the emperor son's necklace; No way that's going to come back later in the story, right? In any case, years after the fiasco at the emperor's court, the general drunkenly blows his cover, resulting in a bunch of assassins coming after his (and Shu-kan's) head.
The first attempt on his life is that old standard, the wire dropped from the ceiling with a drop of poison running along its length. The general discovers it and in the ensuing fight kicks all of the assassin's asses, but he's left blind after his face is burnt.
Young Shu-kan goes for help, and runs into a previously established pair of sorcerers - an old man (Bryan Leung) and old woman (played by Woo-ping's brother, Yuen Cheung-yan) who live in a house divided and constantly engage in looney-tunes-style martial arts and magical pranks against each other. They take pity on the kid and give him some medicine for his master after he braves a few optical illusions at their place.
The medicine works, but the cure is short-lived as sorcerer bat appears and kills the general. He plans to forge the boy into an impostor under his control, but Shu-kan escapes and is taken in by the old sorcerous couple.
Sorcerer Bat (I will never get tired of typing that) is not deterred; he casts himself Mission:Impossible-style masks and manages to kill the old woman with trickery. The old man doesn't fall for it, but to it's clear that bat in not going away any time soon. So he sends Shu-kan to a sort of sorcerer Olympics, where if he wins he will be granted supreme command which he can use to order Bat to fuck off. And you can bet sorcerer Bat's going to try and sabotage that plan.
There's not a lot of movies out there as full of invention and wild ideas as Miracle Fighters - and with master Yuen Woo-ping at the helm, they work beautifully. On the negative side, it's an early eighties Chinese comedy, with all the corny slapstick and broad humor that entails. There isn't that much offensive stuff, save for an unfortunate gay caricature - even the one fart joke is extremely funny - but there is so much manic mugging...
It might also be too casually cruel for some kids at a couple of points.
On the positive side: none of its bad qualities matter. The film is an absolute delight, and even if the more up-front humor fails, there are still a ton of great jokes left; I wish I could share with you one sorcerer's hair-brained attempt to retrieve a key from a bat of boiling oil with his pet fish. "I die before you, my boss!"
In the world of miracle fighters, all - or the vast majority - of magic is achieved with trickery, even when said trickery is based on cartoon physics. So it's always lovely to see what Woo-ping manages to pull off, and even if it sometimes the budget restrictions show through, it feels thematic somehow, and part of the movie's more than considerable charm. There's a fight with a wooden building block automaton, tons of infractions against the laws of physics, a few fights where dummy body parts are used to great effect, optical illusions, phantasm-style killer spinning tops, a cat's cradle combat... the list goes on, and on and on.
There's quite a few fights, too, of course - all rapid-fire and precisely choreographed. I adored this one when I was a kid and it's just as much of a joy to watch as an adult.
It's unfortunate, then, that the film is pretty ugly to look at. The cheapness of the sets and the artlesness of the filmmaking stick out like a sore thumb - again, not a deal breaker, and probably more due to production constraints than to Woo-Ping's direction, who already had much better-looking movies like Drunken Master under his belt. He's directed his share of classics, before and since, but none get quite as crazy as this one does.
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