Tian luo da po wu hang zhen

This strange '70s kung fu fantasy confused the heck out of me, so I read a few reviews in the hope of understanding the film a little better. No dice. It's so bizarre that no-one seems to be able to give a comprehensible summary. IMDb can't. Even my usually trusty copy of The Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Movies of the 1970s failed to make matters any clearer (their description is so confusing, it might have well been written in Chinese).

The film opens with a man rescuing a sea snail from a snake. That much I understood. It's everything that follows that had me bewildered, some nonsense about a snail fairy helping hapless hero Cheng Fu (Yuan-Shen Huang) battle wicked relatives who are being aided by an evil demon. For most of the time, who is who and why they're doing what they are doing is completely unfathomable. Atrocious dubbing certainly didn't help, but I seriously doubt that the film would have made much more sense had there had been perfectly translated subtitles. It's that bad!

Often, I'm still able to have a good time with weird Asian movies even when I don't understand what is going on, but this one annoyed the hell out of me, its sheer shoddiness proving irritating rather than funny, its collection of shonky demons looking as though they've come straight from a pride parade—these include a snake demon with a badly painted face (I've seen better face-painting at my local school fete), a gold demon wearing a phallic hat and a shredded bin liner, a fire demon who looks like a bad disco dancer, and a creaky wood demon, all of whom perform some pretty lousy martial arts.