‘Buddha’s Palm’ or — Reaching a State of Idiotic Nirvana?
Despite the superhuman abilities of their heroes the Wuxia films of the 1970’s still tended to be relatively grounded and realistic affairs with all that leaping, flying and somersaulting about typically the product of dedicated training or spiritual devotion as opposed to any magical or supernatural powers. That somewhat changed in the early 1980’s when the popularity of American special effects driven movies pushed the genre into the realm of the explicitly fantastical and the results were some of the most ridiculously entertaining and visually deranged action flicks ever made. Taylor Wong’s ‘Buddha’s Palm’ (1982) is one of those movies.
I won’t bother to outline the plot because the experience of watching ‘Buddha’s Palm’ is so overwhelming it’s like being violently attacked by a bear and then being asked if you can remember what colour its eyes were afterwards. I think it had something to do with a blind kung-fu master and his flying dragon-dog teaching the Buddha’s palm technique to a young disciple so he can defeat a villain whose devastating move is his ability to turn his boot into the giant foot from Monty Python’s Flying Circus but, outside of that, it’s a blur.
Fortunately the plot doesn’t matter. What does matter is your capacity to grip onto your chair and retain your sanity for the next 90 minutes because once ‘Buddha’s Palm’ kicks off it doesn’t let up for a nano-second. In that respect it very much feels like a precursor to Tsui Hark’s ‘Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain’ (1983), a film which might hold the distinction of being the most breathlessly demented movie ever made. So yeah, we’re talking THAT level of lunacy here.
It’s also very much the type of fantasy style Wuxia that inspired John Carpenter’s excellent ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ (1986) so if the thought of elderly Chinese hermits shooting lasers out of their fists appeals to you in any way whatsoever then this is the film for you.
‘Buddha’s Palm’ also does something I absolutely love, and wish
more films would do more often, and that’s having their characters die by exploding into bits. In fact, it doesn’t really seem to matter how they’re killed (stabbed, falling off cliffs, attacked by flying, glowing swastikas) the result is inevitably the same — they explode. It’s utterly fantastic and only confirms my belief that if ‘On Golden Pond’ (1981) had done the same thing to Henry Fonda it would’ve improved that movie immensely.
There’s also a lightsabre, a boat-load of gloriously dodgy optical effects and a lethal metallic flying object that wouldn’t look out of place in Don Coscarelli’s ‘Phantasm’ (1979). I’m tempted to say the film’s most WFT moment is the nasty little kid with the goiter sized spot on his neck which, whenever he squeezes it, shoots out a jet of green acidic puss that dissolves people’s faces but that’s only inaccurate because the entire film itself is one big WFT moment to the extent it can’t really be broken down or disassembled into its constituent nutzoid parts.
Sticklers for the more trivial aspects of filmmaking such as a coherent plot and character development, or those who prefer their cinema to be slightly less berserk than a kaleidoscope in an insane asylum, might want to give this one a miss. Anyone else will find themselves transfigured and lifted-up into a state of ecstatic bliss.
