I’m no King Hu expert, but his final film feels flabby and dated, not so much a late masterpiece. Horny Wong (Adam Cheng, played twins in Zu Warriors) falls for hot Joey Wong (the year before she was White Snake) who is actually a gross ghost wearing a human mask while trying to escape from the limbo-cult she’s been trapped in. The energy decidedly picks up when monk Sammo Hung takes up her cause in the last half hour.

Watched this when I realized I’d get to see the Goodbye, Dragon Inn restoration in theaters. More focused on simple conflict and action than the other two King Hu films I’ve seen, the plot keeps accumulating unstoppably brilliant fighters who kill scads of flunkies until all the brilliant fighters finally converge against each other – or more specifically, five legendary heroes team up against the sinister eunuch army seeking to kill a slain general’s entire family.

The two who will later meet in Goodbye’s dying theater are lead hero/drifter Shih Chun (also star of A Touch of Zen) and the white-haired eunuch boss’s chief soldier Miao Tien (already a Tsai regular by the time of Goodbye). Shih joins the orange and blue sibling team of Hsieh Han and Shangkuan Ling-fung (the perpetually pissed-off woman in front on the new Criterion box art), and eventually another supernaturally fast duo joins up. It takes all of them to dispatch the lead soldiers and then the eunuch boss himself (Bai Ying). The subtitles say he suffers from “asthma” but it appears to be psychedelic migraines. Reportedly a game-changing film, King Hu breaking from the Shaw Brothers studio to independently reinvent wuxia cinema, it still holds up as a beautiful and kickass picture.

Competing groups arrive for a faithful abbot’s retirement, each scheming with one of the abbot’s protege monks to get their hands on the monastery’s priceless scroll. Such smooth editing, hard to find scene breaks as the whole thing flows together, and modern looking for 1979. Almost the entire cast was in King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain the same year.

Sailor Wen (Yueh Sun: City on Fire) brings thief White Fox (Touch of Zen star Feng Hsu) and tassel-face Gold Lock (Ming-Tsai Wu, a student in Fist of Fury). His rival The General (Feng Tien of Green Snake) brings cop Kuang Yu Wang (in a John Woo, a Wei Lo/Jackie Chan, and a “Bruce Li” the same year), who is archenemy to the newest monk, reformed criminal Chiu Ming (Lin Tung, the movie’s assistant director). Old master Wu Wai (Chia-Hsiang Wu, in movies since the 1940’s) may be up to something, or maybe just a distraction. Chiu Ming is made the new abbot and his first act is to destroy the scroll, and the villains go home unhappy.

Fox / Lock / Wen:

The cop gets his:

The first I’ve seen by the legendary King Hu – his followup to Dragon Inn. I kinda love him, great compositions and movement, and killer distortion when he pans with the super-wide lens, which I know is a defect but in the fisheye 2019 post-Favourite world it comes across as a feature. Apparently the first Chinese film to be awarded at Cannes (in main competition with Pastoral, Kasper Hauser and Chronicle of the Years of Fire).

We follow Gu (Chun Shih of Dragon Inn), who is a well-meaning but unambitious scholar and painter, with a tendency towards being clumsy and ineffectual. He’s the patsy witness to all the nearby political intrigue, falling for the hot girl next door, Yang (Feng Hsu of Legend of the Mountain, later a producer on Chen Kaige films), who is in hiding after her dad was tortured to death, then in the second half he inexplicably becomes a master of strategy and helps Yang and her loyal generals ward off the corrupt government attackers. Some invincible monks get involved, there are a bunch of good faceoffs, Gu wears too much makeup.