‘Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain’ or — An Exercise in Over Stimulation?

Gaah! ‘Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain’ (1983) might be the most infuriating movie ever made as it is both a work of unhinged genius and an exhausting pain in the fucking ass! Christ, I need a lie down.

‘Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain’ is berserk, insane, relentless, delirious and utterly incomprehensible. Seriously, don’t even attempt to cling onto the narrative here because the violent whiplash of doing will be fatal. Needless to say I’m not even going to start explaining the story; I think I gave up trying to understand what was going on when the wizard was keeping a demon trapped in rock using only the power of his eyebrows. And if you think that’s silly, and it is, then you don’t know the half of it.

That’s the delight of ‘Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain’ — it’s excessive overstimulation. It’s like being tickled beyond the point of tolerance but that’s also the drawback as, after 90 minutes or so of this, I found myself begging for it to stop and for something, anything, to make sense even for a second and for me to catch my breath.

So what we’re dealing with here is an exercise in unbridled incoherence with the concomitant pros and cons inherent in such an endeavour. You will not be able to identify with any of these characters, possibly because you’ll have trouble actually being able to identify any of the characters as demons, ghosts, warriors and warlords of all descriptions burst onto the screen with the randomness of subatomic particles. Fortunately this means the film can get any with ANY CRAZY SHIT it can think of and when I say crazy shit I mean crazy shit. As one of the characters says to another early on — just sit back and enjoy the show and that’s the best advice, possibly because there is no other option.

What’s also interesting about ‘Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain’ is that, despite appearances, this isn’t a martial art or kung fu movie. No, this is very much a special effects movie which are constant and relentless and fire themselves into your eyes with the intensity of an exploding monk detonating from the inside.

I’m still not too sure what I think of ‘Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain’; I did have a blast though was left struggling to think how to describe my feelings towards it when I realised that this is what it must be like to be a parent. I don’t have children of my own so find it easy to see little kids as super cute and nothing other than delightful bundles of joy who could never be annoying or grating or a pain in the ass to their parents. Watching ‘Zu Warriors’ I now completely understand how you can love something passionately but also want to pick it up sometimes and throw it out the window… and I live on the third floor.