They don’t make movies like this anymore.
Really, the 1976 War Godfalls into such obscurity that for the last 30 years, everyone thought that the film never existed. A couple of years ago, movie posters started circulating that there was such a movie about aliens invading Hong Kong, with the War God Guan Yu coming to the rescue. The movie was given many titles, including War God, Hong Kong Disaster and the most commonly known ”Guan Yu Battles the aliens”.
Not long after, a video on youtube showed still pics of the movie proving that War God did in fact exist on the big screen, it immediately attracted a cult following on the internet, with fans everywhere demanding to see the original version. But whether any copies were available was in doubt. It took one movie fanatic, director Edmond Pang Ho Cheung to find out. Flying straight to Taiwan, he was able to meet one of the investors of the movie and after some persistence and a treasure hunt inside the storage room, he was able to retrieve an original copy. But the copy was so badly damaged that after nearly one year of restoration, it seemed that it couldn’t be done and the film might never reappear on the big screen.
War God Guan Yu with his Blade War God Guan Yu with his Blade
However, recently with the sensational hit film The Lost Bladesman, which featured the same protagonist Guan Yu as the almighty bladesman and action fighter, a trailer length footage of the War God suddenly resurfaced on Youtube. This immediately attracted the attention of cult fans and director Edmond Pang himself. The movie blogosphere suddenly found that footages of the movie actually already existed on youtube but were given english titles, thus was long neglected by the Chinese movie community.
With the enduring hype, one of the owners of the long lost video has finally released the full version of the War God on youtube. This goes to show the power of the web 2.0 in unearthing a gem among the lost Chinese films of the last century.
Plot Summary
Mr. Zhao is a sculpture and for all his life, he has devoted himself to sculpting the perfect statue of Guan Yu, believing that one day, his persistence will transform the statue into an immortal being. His son however, is a brilliant scientist, and couldn’t accept his father’s superstitious behavior. The two apparently form a rift between each other as both were too stubborn to accept each other’s way of thinking.
One day, mysterious flying objects suddenly started to appear above Hong Kong, and before we know, aliens started wreaking havoc and destroying buildings, including the old HSBC Building and Hong Kong Legislative Council. It seems that the end of the world is near and Mr. Zhao, with one last effort, pleaded to his statue to come out and save the world…. which he did.
A sensational B-film
Mosquito head gets a bang on the headMosquito head gets a bang on the head
War God, is by any means, a hillarious and entertaining B-film. Despite it advertising itself as the first Sci-Fi disaster movie in Hong Kong, its fake looking replica models of Hong Kong and mosquito head aliens apparently causesmore laughter than awe. During the 70s, when Japanese Godzilla and superman style films were popular among the asian audience, it is no wonder that the filmmakers came up with their own Chinese version of a superhero, and it is only honorable the Taiwanese and Hong Kong producers came up with such a brilliant and bold idea, to have Guan Yu as the superhero to fend off the aliens.
Awkward camera shotsAwkward camera shots
The first 45 minutes of the movie was free of any action and was devoted to character development and suspense creation, but once the mosquito head aliens appear, the whole suspense factor seems to have fallen off the roof. While the aliens announce they came here to force humans to give up their nuclear weapons, once they start tearing apart buildings they act more like mad mosquito heads on laughing gas.
While Guan Yu, the supposedly superhero doesn’t appear until the last 20 minutes, his appearance is characterized by his opera style fighting, and a hillarious line from the aliens, ‘He’s a Chinese god, he must know Chinese kung fu!’ will surely enter the hall of fame for most anti-climax quote of all Chinese movies.
War God is also filled with awkward camera angles, probably limited by the vastness of the whole model which was created. Most of the time the fighting scenes will have half of Guan Yu cut out of the screen, which is very common among B-cult films. Suffice to say the disaster scenes were actually pretty entertaining, with enough damage and havoc combined with intermittment shots of people screaming and running around to create enough suspense. However, the audience might spot that The War God Guan Yu seemed to have wreaked more buildings and killed more people during his fight with the aliens……
No matter how we berate this film and we trash it, we all know that in the end we love this film. Who doesn’t love a cult film that is so bad it’s good? The War Gods is available online here.
UPDATE: Unfortunately the youtube video is not available anymore due to a copyright claim. Most likely we’ll need to wait for the ‘owners’ to release the film again
http://chinesemoviefan.com/cult/the-war-god-1976/
Anyone seen this before???
