Watches
February 16, 2022
Watching this, I felt pretty bad for Cheh Chang. After making so many films, many of them pretty good, it's almost unimaginable that he had to close his career (it's his second to last film, but still) with a paltry production like this. This looked more like a film you'd expect to see at the start of someone's career.
No matter how many Journey to the West adaptations I see, the plots always seem to be different, the only constant being the main characters. This film is no exception. The Monkey King is there, other than that the plot didn't feel familiar at all. Maybe Chang picked some less popular side stories though.
The costumes are cheap, the cinematography is amateurish, even the fights don't translate all that well. And that's from a man who made more than 50 martial arts flicks in the preceding three decades. Comparing this to other high quality martial arts productions of the early 90s makes it even worse. For true completionists only.