I probably should feel somewhat remiss that before I watched
this movie (and subsequently perused a Wikipedia entry) my only knowledge of
the eight Taoist immortals came from Jackie Chan’s
Drunken Master, where he
plays a young Wong Fei-Hung who learns “eight immortals drunken boxing” from
Beggar So.
The Eight Immortals is an anthology film, telling
traditional tales of the immortals before bringing them together for an
action-packed finale. The film uses a framing device to tie them together – a
pair of itinerant story tellers in contemporary (for 1971) Taiwan
entertaining their listeners with music and banter. They begin with the tale of
Lu Tung-Pin, who helps a woman to reunite with the man she loves. Then there is
the tale of Iron-Crutch Li, whose crutch turns into a peach tree, which bears
fruit with curative properties. And it goes on from there.
The film’s
raison d’être begins about half-way through,
after introducing the eight immortals and the incidental characters who will be
reunited for the finale – an assault on the manor of the evil “red demon from
the Chinese mainland.” The red demon kidnaps women, extorts enormous amounts of
capital from the peasantry, and is actually a pig-demon in disguise, whose
queen is a rat-demon. It is not difficult to guess that this is intended as a
thinly disguised dig at the PRC.
This portion of the movie is also relentlessly grim, and
contrasts starkly with the introductory scenes in which the immortals sing and
crack jokes while helping ordinary people with their ordinary problems. The
first part of the film resembles the sort of whimsical fairy-tale films of
Alexander Ptushko, while the second part is like a Harryhausen effects
show-case by way of Chang Cheh. The Red Demon not only rapes the kidnapped
servant girls, he eats them, and the film graphically shows the latter. One
servant girl – the now married young woman helped by Lu Tung-Pin in the film’s
first segment – is tortured and branded on camera. When the eight immortals
succeed in killing the red demon’s queen, her true form is revealed with a
cross-fade from the actress to a dead rat. A real dead rat – with its head
crushed in a pool of blood.
The cognitive dissonance caused by the whiplash between the lackadaisically paced introductions of the immortals and the brutal
finale is the result of the film’s production origins and era. 1971 was the
year of Chang Cheh’s
The New One-Armed Swordsman, easily the most violent and
bloody Chinese language film of its time, and a considerable financial success.
Hong Kong and Taiwanese genre films had grown
increasingly violent since the beginning of Shaw Brothers’ “New Wuxia Century,” which
brought the sensibilities of Chang Cheh to the forefront of a genre normally
reserved for child-stars and cute teenage starlets like Fung Bo-Bo and Connie
Chan, respectively. The violence and sadism in
The Eight Immortals is clearly
intended to keep the movie relevant, as far as violence and sadism can be
characterized as such.
While the general zeitgeist of early seventies genre film
explains the finale, it is the involvement of Taiwan’s CMPC production company
that explains the earlier sequences of the immortals and their interactions
with the mortal townsfolk. The Central Motion Picture Corporation was the
Kuomintang’s subsidized film unit which introduced ideologically tinged films
and film movements, such as the wave of “healthy realism” melodramas from the
1960’s. The introductory sequences usually serve the purpose of “promoting
morals,” like respect for elders, rendering fair service, reciprocity, etc. Even
the story-teller framing device can be read as the promotion of humble means of
entertainment during a time of modernization.
But it’s fairly obvious that the major selling point of The
Eight Immortals was not the inculcation of national values, but a wacky,
violent, special-effects driven fantasy. And the effects can get very, very
weird. Miss Ho, the lone female immortal, at one point attacks the red demon
with a giant peach, which opens up to reveal a huge pig’s head, which spits a
dart out of its mouth. Iron-Crutch Li uses his crutch as a flamethrower. The
demon-queen, fearing an immanent loss to the immortals and their army of angry
peasants, lifts up her shirt and shoots poison gas from her belly-button.
The long and violent action sequence will probably be of
most interest to the audience to whom Fusian tried to sell The Eight Immortals,
and that audience will probably yawn for the first half of the movie, if not
balk at all of the singing (and there is a lot of singing). But I actually
quite liked the first half for all of its quaint whimsy and old-fashioned
moralizing. The barely concealed political posturing is funny too, and if the
action is sparse for the first half, the assault on the Demon King’s manor is a
masterpiece of absurdity. The Eight Immortals is a fun movie in the same vein
as the stupendously silly Monkey Goes West series from Shaw Brothers director
Ho Meng-Hua.
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