Sunday, June 3, 2007

wandering aimlessly in translation

Recently arrived in the mail: two Shaw Bros dvds. Dragon Gate Inn (the King Hu original) and Battle Wizard. This is the back-of-box blurb for Battle Wizard:

"Tuan Yu is a wealthy young scholar with no interest in martial arts, who sets out into the boxer world to discover if he can survive on his own. He encounters Zhong Ling-erh, a beautiful woman in command of deadly snakes capable of burrowing through a victim's body. She ends up trapped by members of the Poisonous Moths Clan, but not before allowing Yu to escape and seek aid from the notorious female warrior Xiang Yaocha, wielder of the deadly Bone-cutting Sword. Yu doesn't know it yet, but the woman is actually Mu Wanqing, his elder sister, born of his father and the scorned wife of the Yellow Robe Man. When this affair was previously uncovered, the two men fought and Yu's father blasted the Yellow Robe Man's legs off with his Yi Yang Finger technique. Now the Yellow Robe Man plots to take his revenge by abducting Yu and his sister with the help of a vicious man-beast with a metallic skull and claw hand. Their only hope resides with Yu, who has absorbed incredible internal power by sucking the blood of the giant Red Python. Combined with another power source, he will have to confront a nasty gorilla while locked in a prison lair and escape to face the Yellow Robe Man's fire breath and extending mechanical bird's feet."

I was coping pretty well until I reached the nasty gorilla. Maybe I should watch this with the subtitles off, for better comprehension? Nope, it's English-dubbed only. Darn.

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