Sai yau gei: Dai yat baak ling yat wui ji - Yut gwong bou haap (1994)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Jeffrey Lau

Writers:

Jeffrey Lau (writer)
Ch'eng-En Wu (novel)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Comedy | Fantasy | Romance

Plot:

Fantasy adventure about the arrival of Buddhism in China. When the Goddess of Happiness tosses the Longevity...

Plot Keywords:

Giant Spider | Swordswoman | Reincarnation | Magic Box | Based On Folk Tale

Awards:

3 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Stephen Chow	...	Joker / Monkey King
Kit Ying Lam	...	Spider Woman
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Athena Chu	...	Lin Zixia
Jeffrey Lau	...	The Grapes
Kar-Ying Law	...	Longevity Monk
Kin-Yan Lee
Karen Mok	...	Pak Jing-Jing
Man Tat Ng	...	Assistant Master

Also Known As:

A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora's Box (Hong Kong: English title) (International: English title)
A Chinese Odyssey
Daiwah saiyau
Xi you ji di yi bai ling yi hui zhi yue guang bao he (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)

Runtime:

87 min | Germany:115 min

Country:

Hong Kong | China

Language:

Cantonese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Singapore:NC-16 (re-rating) | Singapore:PG (cut) | South Korea:12

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Ping Shao Han: Ascension (2004) (V)

Great imagination ... on the journey to nowhere

This is a nice movie, including the second part.You can really appreciate the imagination and some twisted sense of humor. Decent fighting scenes, pretty woman and impressive art design. The story is, well, kind of freaky, so all this together make this film very surreal, but entertaining enough. Stephan Chow, genius as usual, is very helpful.

You can see that Jeffrey Lau got a lot on his mind. In this movie he presents identities in crisis, internal struggles, personal development and learning, some religious, cultural and social issues, including sexual problems. All this presented to the viewers through fantastic story, while completely ignoring the laws of Fisics.

But the way he chooses to make his statements or opinions looks strange, simplistic and not complete, at least to Western culture cynic like me. There a lot of movies dealing with the same stuff in another way, more realistic and, that's why, more powerful.

So, it's great Mr Lau are talking and presenting this sort of themes in his personal and interesting own way, but the movie is not for everyone. His extreme fantasy takes the viewers far away from reality, it's all very distant, like some alien world. The plot and the characters are very confusing sometimes, this unbelievable environment seems artificial and doubtful, so the movie has no real impact, no meaningful influence, it's like grabbing water with hand. You know you felt something, but there is nothing left.