Fridae

If Asia had an Ed Wood, what would he look like? Look no further than veteran director Chu Yin ping, whose legendary status stems from a bizarre, yet fun movie he made almost 30 years ago, called Fantasy Mission Force. I mention this because like Ed Wood, Chu Yin ping had a creative imagination – as evidenced by his surreal mishmash of disparate genres in the same movie. Unlike Ed Wood, Chu Yin ping did know how to hold a camera, get funding, and write a decent script and still pull off “wildly imaginative” – as evidenced by the clip below:

Unfortunately, Chu Yin-ping did have a bit of a career slump since Fantasy Mission Force, making a series of Shaolin kungfu movies starring Ng Man-tat and a series of obese, bald little tykes. Decently-produced stuff, mind you, but nothing near the insane genius of his most famous work.

The Treasure Hunter is something of a homecoming for Chu, a return to the well of imagination he plumbed so well decades ago. How else can we look at a movie whose opening fight sequence is in a cowboy bar and grill, starring a Chinese Indiana Jones type (played by Jay Chou, with a whip)? How else can we look at a movie which veers from one different genre to another, one different set-piece to another?

The concept of the movie itself is sheer insanity (and I say this approvingly): Jay Chou stars as a reverse Indiana Jones, restoring looted artefacts from the desert from the likes of kungfu tomb raiders like the mummy man you see in the trailer and crafty tomb raiders like Eric Tsang and Chen Daoming, while a feral gang of desert warriors on horses wreck general havoc on anyone intruding the desert despite having their headquarters as a town where adventurers and tomb raiders frequent.

Like the very best of Chu’s films, The Treasure Hunter is best thought of as a series of set-pieces showcasing his eye for evoking films from varied genres, and the resulting spectacle of seeing all these come together in a strangely coherent but very surreal whole. As a result of Chu’s sense of pacing, the movie feels far shorter than it is – although this time round, the somewhat cursory script may make it feel far shorter than you want it to be.