Fridae

These days, Wong Jing has made a name for himself as a director with strong technical skills for hire in mainland China. There was a time in the 80s though when his name was synonymous with a very lucrative brand of lame and crass comedy that would make the Wayans Brothers look like the Marx Brothers.

Fast forward to today: period comedy Petaling Street Warriors plays like a heartfelt tribute to the Wong Jing of the 80s. There's a semblance of a story in there but that's not the point of the film. But if you want to know, Mark Lee's character is a descendent of an exiled Ming emperor. The imperial seed has fallen to very humble grounds in indolent tropical Nanyang – namely Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur, Malaya. Yet somehow this noodle hawker has secret bodyguards looking after his back, possesses an heirloom even he isn't aware of, and of course becomes the centre of much intrigue by foreign powers. All this, by the way, is literally spelt out for you in the first minute in the introductory wall of text that makes watching this film for its fine craft of storytelling a wasted endeavour.

What we really are here to see is a film that because you know what's going to happen even before it begins, you can watch for its rambling Wong-Jing style comedy. By that, I mean it's so uniformly and relentlessly politically incorrect and rather crass, it becomes effectively and uproariously funny over the long run. The film is populated by silly jokes revolving around male chastity belts, erections, outsized boobs, characters with speech impediments and others in drag, and a host of visual pastiches to 80s fantasy wuxia fight scenes (imagine actors throwing bales of cloth at each other in a cottage factory) that would make Tsui Hark blush. Just to stay on the classy side of things though, there's a non sequitur of a cameo involving the good Dr Sun Yat-Sen!

Like most of Wong Jing's good "bad films" of the 80s, Petaling Street Warriors is something that is best watched as a New Year movie. And since Wong Jing no longer makes such films these days, I daresay the team of Samson Yuen and James Lee have the market for crass and silly New Year movies and easily amused festive audiences finally cornered.