170: A Touch of Zen (Xia Nu)

This poster is honestly the best thing about this film

More than eighty percent of my way through the list I can honestly say that few films have been as much of a waste of my time as King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (a.k.a. Xia Nu; 1971).  The selection committee for the 1001 list should seriously consider removing this film from the tome.  It’s simply awful.  Like Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966; # 188) it embodies everything wrong with melodrama and plays almost like pathetic self-parody.  The makers of the spoof Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002), an incredibly stupid movie in its own right, must have had films like this in mind when they were looking for something ripe for lampooning. 

Zen attempts to be stoic and slap-sticky simultaneously, never quite finding any sort of discernable tone.  This mirrors its lack of pace and any real coherent plot.  There is something about embezzlement and ghosts, but it is hard to remember when nearly every scene is fragmented.  Fights erupt out of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of conversations, which continue after they’ve commenced.  So dull and poorly choreographed are these lengthy altercations that I often found that I’d forgotten who was actually fighting, let alone why.  Perhaps I would have been able to tell had the DVD transfer not been almost too dark to see during many of these scuffles.  This poor quality is only surpassed by that of the dismal sound transfer.

In the entirety of “Part One” of the film, I caught only a single creative edit.  As if this lack of artistic creativity weren’t enough to bore any audience to tears, “Part Two” of the film opens by repeating, yes shot-for-shot repeating, a scene from Part One.  This is no summation of the first act’s characters and action, but just a single scene played over again, in which indistinguishable bad guy minions inexplicably cut down bamboo trees while trying to fight a group of the extremely flat protagonists.     

This re-scene precedes another in which 6-way split screen displays myriad conversations, none of which are subtitled, all off which apparently advanced the non-plot into yet another uninspiring confrontation.  There is but one shot in the film which I deemed to be cool, but if you’ve seen anything by post-Jackie Brown (1997) Tarantino it won’t exactly blow your mind.  By far the low point comes after a battle involving the aforementioned “ghosts,” as a character walks through the aftermath laughing manically for almost five uninterrupted minutes.  I say “almost” because the continuity errors contained therein did provide some distraction. 

            The movie ends mysteriously in some sort of bad acid trip meets mountain top showdown configuration which somehow involves both a group of monks and a baby that appears from nowhere.  It’s movies like this that make people not want to watch foreign films, but in truth I can’t see how any group of people, regardless of race, religion, culture, or native language could have ever thought A Touch of Zen was a good movie.  At 3+ hours, this was one of the worst movie afternoons of my viewing life.

Grade: 0 Hats Off