Thrilling Bloody Sword Is Utterly Ridiculous. That’s What Makes It So Great.
Evil wizards! Magical swords! Paper-mâché monsters! Dwarves trained in martial arts! This gonzo Taiwanese fantasy film has it all.
Are you suffering from Masters of the Universe withdrawal? Do you find that the cheaply animated fairy-tale ripoffs of today lack a certain handmade quality? Then Thrilling Bloody Sword might be for you. Made in 1981 in Taiwan, this sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic was nearly impossible to see for nearly 40 years, its rarity only fueling its legend. Then, in the early 2020s, rips from the only surviving 35mm print began to circulate online, aided by a (now-out-of-print) Blu-ray from Gold Ninja Video. The images were faded, and the subtitles were fragmented, but one thing was clear: This movie was absolutely bonkers.
Now, a new 4K restoration of Thrilling Bloody Sword has swooped down from a magic mountaintop to throw some smoke bombs and lure in viewers with its exuberant colors and zany plot. After seeing the world premiere of the new restoration — which was sourced from the film’s negative and world premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival — I can confidently say that this feels like a whole new movie, and it’s a revelation for fans of fantasy films from Asia and beyond.
Error 4444, which co-produced the restoration, calls Thrilling Bloody Sword “a grindhouse xianxia film,” which — to greatly simplify it — means basically that it’s a Chinese fantasy movie about immortals, demons, gods, and wizards made on a budget of $6 and a bucket full of paper-mâché glue. As specific as it sounds, dozens of these movies exist; even among bargain-basement Asian fantasy, however, Thrilling Bloody Sword stands out for combining European fairy tales with Chinese mythology. The result is a wacky cross-cultural hybrid that was made to appeal to children, but has much to offer adults who appreciate its unbridled creativity and homespun charm.
The story begins on an appropriately peculiar note, as the queen of a fantasy kingdom dies while giving birth to a flesh sac that resembles a decorative gourd made of placenta. Disgusted, the king sends the freakish thing away, floating it down a river Moses-style. The basket is then discovered by a group of seven dwarves (all average-height actors who walk on their knees and use camera angles to appear shorter than they are), who, after debating whether they should boil it or turn it into sashimi, cut open the sac to reveal a perfect, tiny human baby inside.
From there, we fast-forward 17 years to discover that that perfect baby has grown up into a graceful young woman under the care of her seven diminutive dads. That’s where the Snow White parallels end, as the story shifts into a Cinderella-esque storyline where first a heroic prince, then her own father, recognize our heroine as the kingdom’s long-lost princess after she sneaks into a royal banquet disguised as a servant girl. However, the two evil wizards — one male, and one female —who are scheming for control over her father’s kingdom have plans for the princess as well.
Of course the demon puppet can talk!
That’s just the setup, and soon the prince sets out on a journey to win a magical sword and use it to free an all-powerful Sorcerer King from captivity and defeat these demonic sorcerers once and for all. This is where Thrilling Bloody Sword becomes a real treat for He-Man fans: Although the titular sword is obviously plastic when you see it in 4K clarity, the prince’s stance every time he harnesses its power has such “let’s play pretend” commitment to it that the cheapness of the prop is endearing, rather than embarrassing.
And the monsters? Oh boy, the monsters. Our heroic prince fights a series of foes that must be seen to be believed, including a pitiful-looking bear, an invincible warrior whose secret weak spot is (how to put this delicately?) in his backside, and a cave-dwelling creature who can disassemble himself like a LEGO figure and throw his own limbs at his enemies. Combined with the hand-painted backdrops and crazy costumes — I was particularly charmed by the Sorcerer King’s nose ring, orange muumuu, and glowing skull staff — the passion that the artisans behind Thrilling Bloody Sword brought to this utterly ludicrous movie is touching, not to mention infectious.
The film’s old-fashioned camera wizardry is also incredibly appealing: I’ve always had a soft spot for what I call “wizard battle” movies, fantasy films that climax with sorcerers battling each other with their mind powers and throwing lightning bolts with their hands. Before the invention of digital compositing, these magical scenes were accomplished through a technique called optical printing, in which effects are hand-drawn onto strips of celluloid, then layered on top of existing footage and re-photographed to create a third strip of film with both live-action and animated elements.
A great example of optical printing.
Thrilling Bloody Sword is packed with optical printing, some of it quite cheap. (While the new 4K restoration does fix many of the film’s clarity issues, it can’t do much about the blurry frames created by a shoddy optical printer.) It also utilizes a number of in-camera techniques — characters disappearing and reappearing out of thin air, for example — that date back to the silent era. Typical of this era in Taiwanese filmmaking, many of the music cues are, let’s say, borrowed from other sources — Battlestar Galactica fans should pay special attention, as the movie recycles the theme song from the 1978 show.
Sure, it’s all pretty cheap-looking. And yeah, you can see the wires even more clearly in 4K. But a movie like Thrilling Bloody Sword isn’t about realism, or being dazzled by the latest in effects technology. It’s about the magic that happens when a group of people get together to create a world with few resources and unlimited imagination — even when that world is completely ridiculous.
