Doctor Yang (Yu Rongguang of Supercop 2, which is a different movie from Police Story 4 even though Supercop 1 was Police Story 3) goes around in disguise acting like Disney’s Robin Hood, with assistant Orchid (Jean Wang, kicking much more ass here than as 14th Aunt), making mockeries of corrupt governor James Wong (a major songwriter, also in Twin Dragons) and his lead cop Yuen Shun-Yi (of Drunken Master). Wong Fei-hung’s dad Donnie Yen (confusingly, he’ll play the title role in the sequel) is passing through town, the governor holds his son prisoner so he’ll help them catch the righteous bandit. But of course they all team up to defeat the evil master (also the evil master of Heroic Trio the same year).

Twin monkeys:

Much action ensues. I saw this on VHS or something back in the day, but it’s extremely helpful to have seen a bunch of kung-fu movies leading up to this, getting used to their plots and moves and sound effects, to appreciate this one’s particular excellence… in context of the OUATIC sequels going slowly downhill, this feels like the best movie ever made.

Like father like son:

Not good in almost any sense but absolutely a must-see for the bonkers imagination factor. Full of hilariously suggestive images, making a mockery of sex and religion. Tsui Hark cowrote/produced this anime remake, though it feels less written and more like it’s making up its rules as it goes along, with world-building ambition way beyond the league of the physical effects and baby computer graphics teams (there’s a cellophane blob and some mighty morphing). It’s impossible to dislike, or to imagine that we could do any better today.

The aliens invading Hong Kong in human disguises mostly take the form of hot chicks, and mostly they murder hot chicks… the movie is overall a big fan of hot chicks (this is apparently accurate to the original version).

Windy and Daishu:

Human cop Leon Lai likes lightsaber alien Windy (they play the killer and his agent in Fallen Angels) after they save each other’s lives. Half-alien cop Jacky Cheung (lately Bucktooth So in OUATIC 1) likes human traitor cop Orchid (Carman Lee Yeuk-Tung of Burning Paradise and Detective vs. Sleuths), but Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping keeps them apart. Alien boss Daishu is captured by the cops and kept magnetically captive (this is movie royalty Tatsuya Nakadai, star of Harakiri, apparently game for anything) while his evil son Roy Cheung (one of The Mission boys, also City on Fire) runs rampant in the city, plotting to hook the whole city on a drug that will simply kill them in a couple days. As the movie’s nonsense intensifies, the son ends up juiced to death by a jet engine, and the aliens’ vacuum powers reverse the flow of time and a psychokinetic police force lands a plane atop a skyscraper.

Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping orders all men in this movie to wear glasses:

and sometimes glasses get dirty:

Time for another Sammo Hung movie. This time he’s a butcher, introduced slipping on a banana peel, but the butcher job barely matters – mainly he’s a disciple of Wong Fei-Hung (Kwan Tak-Hing, who’d been playing Wong since the 1940s), innocently helping start a war with another school run by Lee Hoi-Sang (a fighter in Game of Death II). One of the rival school’s guys is evil Ko (Fung Hak-On of Police Story) who has kidnapped Sammo’s little brother’s wife. Meanwhile, a weird beggar gets some chickens drunk, turns out to be drunken master Fan Mei-Sheng (of The One-Armed Swordsman) with an interest in solving the kidnapping. Allies and rivalries get all mixed up, and there’s more crazy plot stuff and some brutal deaths, but we have come to watch great fighting performed with unusual weapons (I just saw the Ko fan fighter as the master in Encounters of the Spooky Kind II) against ludicrous villains (Mad Dog from Yes, Madam! appears here without the mustache as “Weird Cat”).

The brother and the drunken master:

Guess who: