Lung Wei Village (1978)

I invested a lot of effort into watching this film, spending about a week writing and fine-tuning an app that uses Chat GPT to translate the Chinese subtitles from the Taiwanese DVD to English. This is almost certainly more time than the film-makers spent working on the script.

Chat GPT does a pretty good job with the translation, but OCR errors rendered occasional parts nonsensical - though it wasn't always easy to tell the difference. Polly Shang-Kuan's character regularly speaks in cryptic poetry which the other characters tell her makes her sound like a crazy person, and the plotline takes some extremely sharp turns and weird diversions.

It is, all in all, rather a silly film but enlivened with some pretty good action scenes that showcase some imaginative choreography and even primitive special effects. It is still more kung fu than wuxia though, despite some high-jumping antics.

I don't know how Yueh Hua and Lo Lieh found themselves in Taiwan making this low-budget indie film, but I guess everyone needs a change of scenery once in a while.