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Ku (Shih Jun) is just a simple portrait painter, but when he rather by
accident saves the life of general Shih (Pai Ying), who is disguised as
a blind fortuneteller, he getsw dragged into a fight between the Eastern
Group & a handful of renegade officials who happen to have offended
eunuch Wei. Ku soon decides to side with the renegades since he has
fallen in love with Miss Yang (Hsu Feng) & had sex with her before
she tells him about how her father offended the eunuch & was
tortuered to death for it, & how she could only flee with the help
of general Shih & general Lu (Hsueh Han), who now poses as the
town's doctor, as well as some Shaolin monks who taught her martial
arts. Impressed by her story, Ku soon devices a way of how to defend
themselves against about 200 soldiers of the Easten group. He has the
soldiers head for the fort where he actually lives but has the rumour
spread that the place is haunted (which proves to be easy since
everybody more or less believes that anyways), & has some of their
guerilla attacks look like they have been done by ghosts. At the final
confrontation he stages a horrorshow as to frighten the soldiers, break
their morale & make them easy prey for his associates, whose array
of weapons does include, besides swords & bow & arrow, also
catapults & arrow-shooting devices. Victory is finally theirs, but
at what cost - general Lu had to give his life, the whole place is
covered by corpses, both general Shih & Miss Yang enter the
monastery & Ku, troubled by the amount of death he has caused, is
left behind. When he finally tries to catch up with his love, he does
not find her but the son they procreated ... But the danger of the
eunuch is all but over, since he has already sent new troops to kill
Miss Yang & general Shih in a bamboo-forest ... & this time,
their leader proves so strong that even the head abbot (Roy Chiao Hung)
of the monastery has difficulties defeating him & is almost killed
himself by his opponent's trickery. In the end though, that man kills
both his surviving soldiers in a frenzy & finally himself. The
abbot, Miss Yang & general Shih survive, if only just.
On a visual & directorial level, this movie is a masterpiece,
keeping a fine balance, between atmospheric, creepy, even poetic shots
& well choreographed, highly inventive martial arts, much of it
unparalleled to this day, as well as immensely often cited (e.g. the
fight in the bamboo-forest is by now a mainstay of martial arts movies).
Unfortunately, on a story level, A Touch of Zen does not quite
live up to the expectations - simply put, it just has too much story
& is (not only therefore) too long: The set-up at the beginning is
just dragged out a little too long without actually saying all that
much, & everything that follows the fight at the haunted castle does
not live up to that fight in pure excitement & inventiveness, &
is furthermore only loosely connected to the story that led to that
fight.
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