ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Hong Kong, 1983)
Directed by: Tsui Hark
Starring: Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung, Adam Cheng, Brigitte Lin, Damian Lau, Meng Hoi

“In this film, Tsui deals with concepts even Chinese can’t understand, much less Westerners.” - Keeto Lam, screenwriter

A mad whirl of glorious chaos, savage speed and eye-bursting fantasy like nothing you’ve ever seen before, the impact of ZU is hard to over-estimate. Imagine if lightning suddenly struck Hollywood and overnight and teleported it 20 years into the future. That’s what it did to the Hong Kong film industry. Determined to give martial arts movies Hollywood-calibre special effects and production values, young director Tsui Hark rounded up a massive budget, built huge sets and shanghaied Hollywood effects technicians from just-completed Star Trek: the Motion Picture and Star Wars and made a movie that dragged stuffy kung fu cinema kicking and screaming into the future with this frenetic whirlwind of special effects and screaming martial arts madness.

Moving faster than the eye can follow, ZU is the silk to The Blade’s steel. It gracefully crams in 60 volumes of Lee Sau-man’s 1920’s martial arts novels about the Zu Mountains (“First to revolt, last to surrender.”) where it’s eternally night and the forces of good and evil clash in its abandoned temples and forgotten mountains. Starting with a blast of Saturday matinee music, armies clash pointlessly on dusty plains. Desperate to make it home alive, a hapless scout (Yuen Biao, Jackie Chan’s “younger brother”) seeks refuge in a ruined shrine where he’s attacked by flying zombies. Saved by a powerful swordsman (wu xia stalwart, Adam Cheng) the two of them wind up locked in an eternal battle in which the forces of evil are organized and efficient and the noble martial schools that oppose them are hobbled by moribund rules and dusty regulations.

With its delirious cutting, funky optical effects and breathless action, no wu xia is more surreal, more baroque or more totally bonkers than this one. The first movie to feature true flying swordsmen, it’s packed with cadres of heavily armed handmaidens, killer eyebrows, Blood Devils, Ten-Day Heart Venom, arcane Sky Mirrors, trippy celestial forts and characters who have no use for the laws of gravity. But it’s all used to tell the story of the kids who have to step up and save the world when all their old heroes have given in to despair. A call to revolution, a psychedelic fantasy film, an adrenaline-pumping wu xia movie…ZU: there’s nothing else quite like it.