THRILLING BLOODY SWORD (1982)
Directed By: Chang Shing-I
Starring: Talking Chicken, Flesh-Egg Princess, 7 Dwarfs

Once Upon a Time...

…there was a Taiwanese film called Thrilling Bloody Sword about a princess who laid a disgusting egg made of skin. King Gau thought the egg looked very dirty and so he threw it into a river. The gross egg floated downstream until it was rescued by seven dwarves who marveled as the egg hatched and out stepped the beautiful Princess Yaur-gi. She was the most beautiful princess in the land and this caused the evil Witch to send many monsters after Yaur-gi: a nine-headed hydra, a one-eyed insect monster, evil spells that turned the nice Prince Yuh into a talking bear. The Princess released a genie who gave the Prince magic armor and together they destroy the wicked witch and her henchmen and lived happily ever after.

The End

This hallucinogenic Chinese fairy tale is an epic crafted out of sets that look like something off a children’s TV show, double exposure, and paper mache'. From the ManBat Frogs to the talking chickens, Director Chang Shing-i weaves his frantic phantasmagoria out of things he got at the dollar store and keeps them unreeling at double time, their sheer motion preventing them from falling apart. Nothing is onscreen long enough for audiences to notice the zippers and strings before the narrative leaps nimbly to the next filmic phantasm. The result is an utterly cheap, utterly charming otherworld full of monsters and magic whose lack of realism is entirely in keeping with its handcrafted vibe.

Effect after effect, monster after monster, come rushing off the screen in Thrilling Bloody Sword, the kind of old-fashioned Saturday afternoon matinee that puts realism to the knife in favor of entertainment. A haphazard retelling of the Snow White story oozing technicolored invention, Thrilling Bloody Sword is the movie that warped children all over the world when it first came out, and has since remained totally unseen. Previously existing only as a perplexing childhood memory, this screening marks the first time in over 15 years that it is being shown in North America. Unavailable on video, Thrilling Bloody Sword is a celluloid dream, a phantom empire of the senses that flickers, briefly, on a movie screen, and then goes back into darkness leaving dazed retinas in its wake.

NOTE: Not only was TBS previously unseen, we hadn’t seen it. The movie sounded like fun so we booked a print. Then one of our members dug up a VHS tape, we watched it, and instantly regretted our decision. Today the movie would play fine, but in 2000 it we felt like it was a bridge too far for audiences and they would murder us for this weirdness. Should we have trusted them more? Probably. But we didn’t. Instead we canceled the screening.