The Thousand Faces of Dunjia (2017)

[Drunk Monk]

I could've sworn I saw this movie before but when I searched it out here and on KFM, I found no reviews by me. I think I thought this was a different film. Watching it, it seemed completely fresh but that has happened to me several times with movies I've seen already. Whatevs. I watched it again to see Miao Xie's role in it, which is minor. took me a while to recognize him and he does nothing of note.

This is deep in the yaoguai genre with lots of flying about, taoist magic and dated CGI effects. It's Yuen Woo-Ping revisiting his 1982 rant-aisa The Miracle Fighters, which I must seek out and watch because I don't know if I've seen that either. I liked it, but it's so overblown with magical stuff, like a superhero movie. It kinda gets lost in itself, overdone, but I enjoyed it for what it was. The story was amusing with a love quadrangle, and the yaoguai genre is one of my favs. Tsui Hark also had a hand in this, so it's deep in the Fant-Asia zone. 

The film was highly regarded at the time, mostly for its costumes, sets, effects and its overall design style. Those don't hold up, at least the effect don't. CGI has gotten scary good. This was back when it still looked like CGI. The fights were a lot of flying about and tossing various missile weapons. I did like all the demon unmasking. It had it's moments and there was a sequel, which I'll probably check out someday.

Not overly D00M recommended. 

Seen on YouTube here:

[Drunk Monk]

The Thousand Faces of Dunjia 2 (2023)

This is one of those Chinese sequels that has little to do with the original - new cast, new director, all new. The only thing that makes it a sequel is that it's the continuing adventures of the Mist clan, a secret Daoist org of warriors saving the world from demons. It is far inferior to the original.

Nevertheless, it has some interesting yaoguai stuff. It's one of those 'everyone's after an ultimate power source' plots, but this time it's the Tai Sui, a Feng Shui thing that I know from translating Chinese horoscopes for a quarter century plus. Tai Sui is a god tied to Jupiter, but in the year of your zodiac, he brings you bad luck just to be annoying. The uninitiated often think that their year is lucky, meaning if you're born in the year of the horse, then the year of the horse will bring you luck - it's the complete opposite thanks to Tai Sui and a tell to see if your Chinese astrologer is full of crap. A lot of western Chinese astrologers make this mistake. Anyway, here the Tai Sui is a glob of meat off the face of a dead grandfather that is dug up by his son to heal his grandson's birth defect of blindness. It works - the kid can see after the family has dinner with the corpse to extract the Tai Sui meat glob. But it attracts the attention of the 'stinky insect demon' who kills the parents and reanimates them and the granddad to chase after the kid. It's kinda dark. 

The kid is saved by the Mist clan, and they wipe his memory with a magic goldfish and then go to after the stinky insect demon. A fake fortune teller gets possessed by the Tai Sui, who talks to him in his head like a schizophrenic voice and empowers him with magic. The hawty from the Mist clan (who fights with a magic parasol) seals the Tai Sui and the fake says he'll join the Mist clan if they unseal him (a ploy by the Tai Sui that everyone see through). The Mist clan has two hawties, a bald elder that wields a magic bell, a coolie with a pig-like snout, and a puppeteer who uses a yard high puppet of Zhong Kui, the demon queller (played by a kid or a dwarf in a creepy mask). 

There's a lot of artsiness that I liked in this. The demons were gross and creepy, including one six-legged winged stinky insect demon with a pale woman's head, and the Tai Sui is always sending out artery-like tentacles to encase victims. Plus there's swarms of bugs like in The Mummy. So many bugs. The use of magic was cool too like the way the bell captures demons and the parasol which can help that hawty fly like Mary Poppins and crawls about like a spider. The story has two really good twists that are heart-wrenchingly romantic unrequited love arcs, something Chinese movies can be really good at. 

But overall, the film misses. I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps my expectations were too high from the original. Perhaps it's a timing thing. I really need to revisit the original Miracle Fighters but I can't find it online yet.

Not D00M recommended unless you really got a hankering for some yaoguai. That's probably only me that craves it. 

Seen here: 

[King Bob]

I enjoy the bits of yaoguai that turn up in my Instagram feed.