Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Wolf Devil Woman

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1982 Taiwanese fantasy wuxia film Wolf Devil Woman, starring and directed by the amazing Pearl Chang! (originally published 4/5/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob
Lamb and since we're a little bit on the topic
of where Wolves of late, we are going to rerun
our episode from four five, twenty twenty four. This is
going to be Wolf Devil Woman from nineteen eighty two,
a Taiwanese fantasy film starring and directed by the amazing

(00:25):
Pearl Chang. Let's jump right in.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
today we are going to be talking about the nineteen
eighty two Taiwanese fantasy wusha film Wolf Devil Woman aka
Wolf and Queen aka Wolf and Ninja, which was distributed
by IFD, a company that apparently really enjoyed giving movies

(01:07):
an English title with the word ninja in them. Whether
or not the movie had anything to do with a
ninja usually I think it didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
A bit of just.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Slot ninja in there, So Wolf and Ninja, I guess
that'll kind of work. But I'm gonna call it Wolf
Devil Woman because I think that is it combines all
of the themes of the movie. You definitely have a woman,
she is kind of a wolf woman, and there are
major themes of devils, even though the wolf woman is
not really a devil.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
I agree, I think this is the title to go with.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
So Rob, I don't know if you have another contender
in mind here, but I would say of all the
films we have ever covered on Weird House, I think
Wolf Devil Woman is one of the most shrouded in mystery.
And by that I just mean that we were able
to turn up very little objective information in English about
the production history and the people who made this movie,

(01:59):
at least compared to most of the movies that we
watch on the show. But one thing that is for
certain is we know it is of course, you know,
movies are all the work of many people. There's never
just one creator. But this movie, I think is well
known as a product of a singular genius by the writer, director, producer,

(02:20):
and star Zang Ling, known in international releases as Pearl Chang.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, Pearl Chang is the moniker that I believe IFD
gave her just to like, you know, to spice it
up in the same way that suddenly it's a ninja movie.
Call her Pearl Chang. It's just marketing, so zang Ling
or Pearl Chang wrote and directed four movies around the
early eighties, and now I have only seen one of them.
I feel like I've got to see the other three

(02:49):
because she has such a weird, bizarre, pleasing and distinct style.
This is a movie that will devil woman. I mean specifically,
is a movie that has had a reputation for many
years as sort of one of as like a low
budget bad movie. People thought of it as bad, and

(03:11):
it was sort of circulated on low quality VHS tapes
and the kind of movie people would put on for
a laugh. And it certainly does have elements that are
very funny. But I also think this movie really does
have a genius and a style of its own that
should be appreciated. Like it's not just ironically good. This
is an exercise in imagination, and I really love it

(03:33):
for what it is. Oh yeah, it's originally entertaining. It
is intentionally comedic throughout. So it's not just a situation
of like, ah, look look what they attempted to do,
isn't it funny?

Speaker 4 (03:44):
Now?

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Like they're attempting and succeeding multiple times with comedy. We
have a great central performance by Pearl Chang, who is
at once funny, like broadly so, and yet never really
never in a way that feels mean. Also, she gets
she does get to be like the complete like stone

(04:06):
cold action woman who gets to kill multiple batties. She
gets to do that a lot, so she gets to
pull those levers as well. But it's just such a
captivating performance, like if nothing, you know, if nothing else
in the film caught your eye, like like she is
like the shining star at the center of it.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
So like by the end of the movie, the Wolf
Woman that the main character played by Pearl Chang is
she's hardcore like she is, she's a stone cold warrior
who is coming in to like be the coolest and
defeat the enemy. But early on in the film there's
all not just early on in fact, just different scenes

(04:47):
in the film. It's also like she gets to do
pratfalls and does like slapstick sort of self deprecating klutz humor.
There's a scene where she accidentally eats too much chicken
and gets drunk and then beats up a bunch of
people in a restaurant it's great.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, you know, it's based on you know, my observations
of the film and also going off some of the
extras that we were looking at from Justin to Klue
from over at Golden Ninja Video. You know, it's like,
you have, you have a filmmaker and performer here who
is who seems to be to varying degrees, like like
bucking the trends and the expectations of a female performer,

(05:27):
of a female role, of a female filmmaker in a
you know, mostly male dominated world. So it's it's really
it's really inspiring to watch.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
She really embraces the wolfinness of the wolf character. But
just in general, this movie is so it's not just
the main character. The movie is a wild beast howling
from the eighth dimension. It just has a lot going on,
and so much of it happens so fast and with
a little preparation for it. One thing that's been singled

(05:57):
out about the style of this movie is the fast
editing and the action scenes, but also just often quite
sudden and rapid plot developments. It's all really great stuff.
It's absolutely nuts and it's awesome. One I do want
to issue one word of warning if you're gonna go
watch this movie because there's a kind of unusual thing

(06:19):
in it. There were some rabbit hunting scenes that occur
on screen, and it is quite clear that they are unsimulated,
so large warning. If that's gonna bother you, you might
want to, I don't know, have the fast forward button
ready or just skip this one because there there is
unsimulated rabbit bow hunting on screen here.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah. Yeah, an unfortunate reality of some of these older pictures.
And sometimes it's something like this that you can tell
looking at it. Other times was often the case with
a lot of horsemanship on camera. There is some you know,
ultimately some animal cruelty going on there that may be
lost to the average view because we just don't necessarily

(07:01):
recognize what goes in to performing stunts with horses, right,
But anyway, not to forgive it. It's there and if
you want to avoid it by all means, avoid it now.
It's worth pointing out this is our third Taiwanese film.
I believe we previously discussed Thrilling Bloody Sword and Child
of Peach. Both of those are very weird movies. I

(07:22):
would say Thrilling Bloody Sword is more unrelenting psychedelic wusha
and Child of Peach is more intentionally goofy yeah, And
it's interesting in trying sort of place where Wolf Devil
Woman is between those two, because it's not nearly a
psychedelic is thrilling, bloody sword, but it has its moments,

(07:45):
And on the other hand, it does have plenty of
broad comedic moments as well, but certainly not to maybe
the fantastic extremes of Child of Peach.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
The commentary track on the release of this movie that
we watched the Golden Ninja release has some some sort
of general thoughts on it about differences you often see
between Taiwanese woosh of films and those produced in the
Hong Kong film industry, and some of the things that
this is by justin the clue of Golden Ninja video,

(08:15):
and he says several things are like, first of all,
Taiwanese movies of this sort tended to be lower budget,
they would be made faster and cheaper than Hong Kong films.
But also they tended to kind of make up for
that by being wackier and more imaginative and having more
unusual fantasy elements, often more gore. You definitely see that here.

(08:37):
In addition to what we already mentioned, there are some
unrealistic looking but quite interesting gore effects and just more
of a kind of wide ranging, fast moving, kind of
fast and loose feel to them.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah. I remember one thing that he mentioned in some
of the exers for Thrilling Bloody Sword is the y
It's kind of like the underdog status of Taiwanese cinema
of the time period, where Yeah, they really felt like
they had to do all these things. You know, Hong
Kong cinema had the advantage, but we Taiwanese cinema could
be even more daring, daring and stunts, daring and plot elements,

(09:13):
the magic, the wackiness, what have you.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
I do really love a lot of the stunts in
this movie, and it is stuff that you will have
you will have seen in other movies of this type,
like There Is the Woosha star often has a kind
of flying type ability or a weightlessness that they were
able to manifest so they can leap up thirty feet
in the air or sort of zoom across the zoom

(09:36):
across the room without their feet touching the floor. So
there's similar kinds of stunts to you would what you
would find in other movies of this type. But I
like the way they appear on screen here. Often, like
when the wolf Devil woman leaps up in the air,
like you know, up into the tree tops, it will
be filmed in a kind of slow motion that gives
her this this magical weight.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah. Absolutely. It has some of these these great Lusha
moments with the floating, the flying, the like strange physical
interactions occurring by two flying characters, nit air that sort
of thing. Yeah yeah, and then some just straight up
Mortal Kombat fatalities.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a lot of sorcery too. So,
like the bad guys in the movie have a habit
of walking up to people and just blasting these huge,
billowing gusts of fog out of their sleeves that somehow
like either burn people or freeze them.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
There's the Lady Demon Minion who covers people with spiders in.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Web yes, the Witch.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, so there's plenty of magic to go around. It's
what we're saying.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
Okay, should we do the elevator pitch.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Let's have it.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
A young woman is raised by wolves after her parents
are murdered by the minions of a sparkly devil. The
wolves happen to feed this young girl a plant root
that is a sort of one of a kind plant root,
a once in a thousand years root that gives her
amazing powers of heightless sleeping in martial arts. And then
when a pair of heroic adventurers meet the wolf woman,

(11:05):
they teach her to speak human language and live like
a human at least sort of, and they inadvertently open
her mind to a bloody path of revenge against the demon.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
All right, Joe, what's your what's your tagline for this one?

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Who are you gonna call white gensing? Okay, gen sing root?

Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, white gensing has a major role in this picture,
despite the fact that, as far as I can understand,
like white gensing is just a variety of gensyng that
you encounter and you can buy. So I don't know
if this was ultimately something where the actual term used
in the Mandarin it's referring to some sort of mythical substance,

(11:47):
because there are plenty of things like that, you know
that we've discussed in the Unstuffed A blow of your
mind before, you know, some sort of mythical substance that
grows on a sacred mountain and has to be harvested.
So maybe it was something like that somehow, you know,
linked to the source material, and it's just been replaced
in dubs and subtitles as White Genzen. Hmm.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, I didn't know what to make of that.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
All right. Normally we would try, we would hit you
with some trailer audio right now, but as far as
I know, there is not a theatrical trailer available for
this film, either for its original market or uh you know,
for international markets. So instead I thought we just might
have just a quick audio sample of some of the
audio nuttiness of this film, because there are multiple times

(12:33):
while I was watching it where I was just like, man,
even if you weren't watching this film, if you're just
listening to it, it's just absolutely bonkers.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
Maybe we can get some of the English dub of
the demon talking.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Oh, yes, yes he is. He is fabulous. All right,
let's have.

Speaker 4 (12:46):
It such a great here. It's becoming. Yeah, I understand
you came here to kill me, but it looks and
things and change.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
All right now, if you want to watch Wolf, Devil
Woman before we proceed, first of all, bear in mind,
it has all these different titles. If you're searching for it,
you might need a search for Wolf and Ninja. You'll
find Queen Wolf and Queen and so forth. You of course,
also you can always you know, get the original like

(13:28):
Mandarin title and you know, in the Mandarin characters and
throw that into search and you might be able to
find it as well.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
But I think we should make clear that if you're
like looking for versions of this on disc or on
the Internet and you can't find one where the picture
is good, yeah, that's just sort of what you're stuck
with apparently there as far as I'm aware, there is
really no good looking version of this movie out there.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, I mean, hopefully that'll change, because I believe that
changed with Thrilling Bloody Sword. We had the version that
came out, that Golden video put out, and if memory
serves correctly, some better source material for it, something that
could maybe be remastered, has surfaced and we can look
forward to another even more magical release of Thrilling Bloody Swords. So,

(14:15):
you know, as films like this become popular, you never
know what they're going to turn up. We have, we've
discussed cases of this before, such as Santo in the
Treasure of Dracula, where they thought that, you know, any
any color print of this movie was just lost, and
then they found it in a vault.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
I would really love to discover that in this case
because so yeah, we both watched it on the the
disc release by Golden Ninja Video, and that disc has
two different versions of the film, both of which have problems.
One is one in the original aspect ratio, which is
like a wide screen version of the movie that the

(14:52):
picture is really pretty poor, like the colors are kind
of messed up, and the it's not very sharp, and
it has hard baked in Greek subtitles, which I don't know,
maybe that's your thing, but I guess they kind of
pile up if you're also watching it with English subtitles
or whatever subtitles on top of that. But maybe that's

(15:12):
a good one to watch with a dub. Though in general,
I can recommend the English dub on this movie, which
is quite fun, yes, and.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
I think that's key. Like one of the things about
dubs is you want a dub that is at least
mostly accurate, and you want the dub to more or
less match the intended tone of the film, Like, if
it's a serious film or it has kind of a
serious tone, you don't want you don't want the dub
to be making fun of the picture. You don't want
the dub to be completely off kilter. And I feel

(15:44):
like the dub is wacky and fun in a way
that the movie is whacky and fun, and at least
to my ear, it never came off as disrespectful.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
But anyway, that is the wide screen version on the disc.
There was also a full screen version, where from what
I can tell, the picture is sharper, so it's a
little bit better looking, but it's badly cropped, so you're
missing a lot of the original film.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
That's the version I watched. I looked at the other one,
the wide screen, and I just felt like the picture
quality was overall two degraded for me to get into
it as much, so I decided to go with the
other though I will say it did probably make some
of the action sequences, especially those in the last quarter
of the picture, a little more confusing. For sure.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
I think those are somewhat confusing no matter what crop
you're looking at, that's the thing, right.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
So yeah, that Golden Ninja video release was titled Wolf
Devil Director the Films of Pearl Chang. It was a
two disc thing. It's currently out of print, but hey,
you can go to gold Ninja video dot Com. You
sign up for their newsletter, maybe hassle them a little bit.
Who knows, they might put it out again. I know
they've rereleased things in the past.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
I would get a copy if they put it out again.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
And by the way, we should say that that release
not only has Wolf Devil Woman that one is sort
of the main main event, but it also has some
of Zangling or Pearl Chang's other films in uh. I
think it. In fact, I wonder does it have all
three of the ones that she wrote and directed. I
believe it does have matching escort, and I think it

(17:21):
does have the one about the Flower.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
I think you're right. I don't have it's in the
other room, so I can't pick it up and look
at it right now. Okay, but it's definitely worth picking
up if you're interested in these films. Again, we rented
it from Video Drum here in Atlanta, as we often do,
so if you are local to Atlanta or visiting Atlanta
with your Blu Ray Player, you can go over to
video Drome and rent it for yourself and just a

(17:47):
quick shout out here. Video Drome, in cooperation with a
couple other parties, are trying to put together wings Fest,
a film festival devoted to the magical work of wings.
How we've talked about wings Houser on the show before
because he was the villain in Beast Master two. Well,
they're trying to they're trying to bring him in for

(18:09):
as a special guest for wings Fest. So if that,
if you're interested in that at all, if you're in
town or going to be in town for it, go
to video Drums Instagram account. They are video Drome underscore
at l and you can find out more. It's currently
in the kickstarter phase, so yeah, jump in and help
fund it if that interests you.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
All right, would you like to talk about the connections
in this movie?

Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, we're going to get into it as much as
we can. This one is definitely a film with the
least amount of information on the available databases, so we're
talking you know, the movie database IMDb, also the Hong
Kong Movie Database, which often provides additional insight into films
from Hong Kong. Taiwanese and mainland Chinese cinema. But in

(19:03):
this case really not so much. Like we said, this
is one of the more mysterious films that we've looked at.
But we're going to walk you through what we know.
So starting at the top, Yeah, it's Pearl Chang Ling
or Pearl Chang and so forth, the director, the writer,
the producer, the star. And also she did the theme

(19:23):
song vocals.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Oh okay, Yeah, she sang the theme song to some
other projects that she was involved in before she was
directing her own films as well.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, she I mean, she is just a tour de
force here. So she was born in nineteen fifty five.
According to the Hong Kong Movie Database, she was active
from seventy two through eighty three, acting in twenty four films,
writing for directing three. And I want to just add
an asterisk there because I know that there are some
films that it's thought that she did direct, but another

(19:55):
director that maybe just a pseudonym, is attributed. And again
we don't have lot of information to go on in
the databases here.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
From what I was reading and what was in the
documentary on the disc, it seems that it is acknowledged
that she directed four films, and one of them has
a director's credit that is a pseudonym for her.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Okay, Well, the three that are definitely her There's A
Romantic Night in eighty one, matching Escort in eighty two,
and Wolf Devil Woman in eighty two as well, So
this picture would seem to appear pretty late in her
film career, followed only by a trio of nineteen eighty
three films in which she acted the three famous constables,

(20:36):
General Invincible, which she also wrote, and is that the
one that she also may have.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Directed, possibly, I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
And then Fantasy Mission Force.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
She didn't direct that one. That is a movie that
she started in along with Jackie Chan.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
That's right, yes, now. IMDb also lists her as an
uncredited actor in nineteen ninety one's Thunder Ninja Kids The
Hunt for the Devil Boxer, but this is not reflected
on Hong Kong Movie Database, and I don't think it
was mentioned on the extras for the Gold Ninja release,
so I'm tempted to dismiss this one.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
Yeah, but once again, in the case of Wolf Devil Woman,
we know that she wrote it, produced it, directed it,
and starred in it in multiple roles.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yes, yeah, I believe she plays her own mother, as
we'll discuss.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Yeah, Rob, I don't know if you've got a chance
to watch it, but there is a short documentary I
think it's about ten minutes long on the Golden Ninja
release that focuses on the life and work of Zang
Ling or Pearl Chang, what we were able to know
about her.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
I did watch this.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
Oh, okay, quite good. So yeah, this is good. So
some of the things that they talk about in there
is that she starred in over twenty movies. According to
their research, she wrote and directed four feature films, not three.
That there really is. I think it's not just a
lack of available materials in English. This made it sound

(22:03):
more like that there really just is not a whole
lot that is publicly known about her.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, it sounds like she was She's thought to have
ultimately been kind of a private person anyway, And yeah,
that certainly factors into the lack of information here.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Once again, the name Pearl Chang is the name is
like her her work name that appeared on international releases
distributed by IFD. IFD once again, they like specialize in
releasing movies with the word ninja in the English title.
So yeah, there's a lot of mingo. Look them up.
Ninja Terminator, the Ninja Squad, Ninja Silent Assassin, Diamond, Ninja Force.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Not to be confused with Lady Terminator. But it's interesting
here that you would release it as Ninja Terminator. Just
go ahead and dip it into both buckets, you know.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Yeah, I wonder how much it has to do with
Ninja's or terminators. I don't think I've seen that one,
but yeah, anyway, So we learn in this documentary that
Pearl Chang was trained as as a singer, but also
in ballet, taekwondo, and in journalism. So she acted in

(23:08):
some films that seem now to be lost, but her
big break was around nineteen seventy four or seventy five,
when she starred in a TV show called The Protectors,
which was apparently hugely popular in Taiwan. So this was
a show about, you know, sort of fantasy hero as
martiall heroes, people doing martial arts and sword play. It

(23:32):
was kind of a swashbuckler, and Pearl Chang sang the theme
song to the show. She also played a wandering Swordswoman
who apparently became a breakout character, and then after being
in this show, she would appear in a movie where
the title translates to Armed Escort or China Armed Escort,

(23:54):
which was it seems an unofficial movie adaptation of this
TV show The Protector, which had been her big hit.
And then after this she would go on to write
and direct her own features, which are generally Wusha revenge stories.
One of them is called Miraculous Flower, released in nineteen
eighty one. I think basically all of these had multiple

(24:16):
different English titles, so there can be some confusion there,
but one is referred to in the documentary as Miraculous Flower.
This is sort of considered notable because a lot of
the films of this type produced around this time would
be shot mostly on indoor stage sets, but apparently Miraculous
Flower had a lot of outdoor filming locations and was

(24:38):
quite lovely looking.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, this extra included one clip from some sort of
a waterfall that looked a lot like the waterfall from
Child Peach. I'm not certain, but I mean, obviously there's
more than one waterfall in Taiwan, but at any rate,
very very interesting use of outdoor filming locations for sure,
as opposed to these indoor sets, which I don't know.

(25:00):
I love a great over the top Taiwanese Wu Shaw set,
and we can get those in this picture.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yeah, we get a great temple set for a They
kick off the movie with a rollicking crucifixion at an
indoor temple set, let's see. According to this documentary, this
seems less well founded but just sort of general rumors
about Zengling's reputation. She was considered something of a loaner

(25:30):
and was characterized by some as maybe difficult to work with,
or as a perfectionist and difficult to work with. But
dclu argues in this documentary that it's quite possible that
having a reputation for being difficult to work with was
just like men in a male dominated industry reacting with
alarm to a woman who is insisting on doing things

(25:53):
her way.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah. We've touched on the whole difficult to work with
a label before on the show, which can mean a
lot of things. You can see it applied to people
like say klaus Kinski, who I think was legitimately difficult,
if not impossible, to work with.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
That was a hymn thing, not an other people thing.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, but other times who can say, you know, it
could be just the slightest thing possible that just goes
to the echo chamber and then it becomes difficult to
work with, you know.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, I can certainly imagine in any national context, really
that a woman making films might well just like have
a creative vision of her own and she's like, this
is the way we need to do it, and maybe
some guys around her are just freaked out by that.
But anyway, in nineteen eighty three, I think this is
one of her final credits, she acted alongside Jackie Chan

(26:42):
but also Jimmy Wang Yu and Brigent Lynn in Fantasy
Mission Force, which was a Hong Kong a sort of
martial arts fantasy horror movie. And then she also released
her final film, General Invincible in nineteen eighty three, after
which she apparently just disappeared from public view. So there
is not really, as far as I could tell, anything

(27:04):
known about what she did after that.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, I mean, there's been no death date for her,
so one presumes that she's still alive, but doesn't seem
to have been a public persona in any way after
this last film, which is fine. We've talked about this before,
like Warhawk Tanzania made basically just a very small handful
of pictures and then disappeared, presumably still alive, but maybe

(27:30):
just didn't want to be part of the limelight after that.
And if so, more power to him and more power
to Proachang. If that is the case.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Here, Yes, retiring from a public facing profession and just
living your life. I give that my full blessing. It's
a choice I support.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Now. I don't know about you, Joe, but you know
it's you can't help but compare a performer, especially you know,
a real larger than a live performer, to try and
find some comparison to them, either like in current or
recent or like a different nationality of cinema. And the
main person that I kept thinking of watching Pearl Chang

(28:06):
on screen is Amy Sedaris. I'm a big Amy Sidaris fan,
and there's just something, especially in the comedic scenes, the
way Amy Sedaris really commits to these you know, weird
and wacky moments. I felt like she had a similar
energy here Pearl Chang did.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Okay, yeah, maybe like hopping around and falling on your
face with the rabbit blood all over your chin and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
There are multiple parts in the film where I was
like this, Amy Sidaris would have totally done this.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Yeah, okay, the restaurant chicken disaster scene.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, exactly, So stuff like that, And I don't know,
Also maybe i'm you know, I can't help but compare,
and you know, think about Amy Sidaris as someone who
also has like a very seems to have a very
singular vision and you know, a big personality. But also
is you know, I don't think Amy Sides is a
loner by any means, but she also I've seen things
where she talks about, like, you know, enjoying crafting by
herself and her apartment and that sort of thing. So

(29:00):
you know, I can kind of line them up in
my own imagination on that level as well.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Yeah, I no offense to Amy Sedaris at all. I
can see her less in some of the other aspects
of this role that Pearl Chang does so wonderfully, like
the when she actually becomes the like the cold cold
steel warrior at the end.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Yes, I agree, when she gets into the like the
stone cold killer mode, it's a different act altogether, all right. Now.
One of the challenges that and a challenge we're not
really going to be able to overcome here is that
on all of the databases we had access to, none
of the actors are matched up with a character name.
And on top of that, the character name's very depending

(29:44):
if you're doing the dub or you're doing the subtitles,
So it gets very confusing and difficult to chart exactly
who everyone is supposed to be. Luckily, Pearl Chang's character
in this Snowflower or wolf woman or wolf and queen,
the various monikers that are attributed to her, she's the

(30:04):
main character. She's see really the only one you have
to be super invested in and know what her name is. Yeah,
But as far as we can tell, I believe Schifing
is the actor who plays master Lee. Master Lee being
the sort of he's sort of in the mold of
the traditional male hero.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah. In the picture, he's the wandering prince with the
powerful sword arm. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
So not a lot about this particular actor either. He
was born in nineteen forty two. This may be his
most well known film internationally, but he was also in
nineteen seventy six's Adventure of Shaolin, seventy eight's The Zodiac
Fighters in nineteen eighty two's The Hell and just basically
a character. I don't know who played these characters, but

(30:51):
he has a sidekick named Wong, but also possibly Rudy
I think, but will probably refer to him as Wong.
And then he he has a master, like a shooland
master that he studied under, by the name of Master Chew.

Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah, that's right, all right.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
And then Master Lee's father, I'm not sure if we
know his name, but he has a father that he
meets with and is sent on missions by. This character
is played by c Wang, who lived nineteen thirty through
twenty sixteen, an actor who appeared in two films that

(31:28):
we've talked about on the show before. Nineteen seventy five
is The Super Inframan, in which he plays a professor
at one point, and also nineteen seventy six is The
Oily Maniac. This was a Shaw Brothers melt monster movie.
He has I think it's a small part, but he
plays a lawyer in that man.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Those are like the two ends of the spectrum, like
the like with Inframan, you've got the most beautiful, holy,
pure imagination ever, and then with The Oily Maniac, just
the sedious thing we've ever watched.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, yeah, And to be clear, we do avoid most
CD films, but this one has some CD elements that
kind of like slipped in early on in weird house
cinema that we have we generally avoid later on. But
still very cool monster and I'm guessing a great performance
by weighing here as a lawyer. His other film credits

(32:22):
include nineteen eighty six Is a Better Tomorrow, directed by
John Wu and starring Chao Yon Fat and Leslie Chung.
He has one hundred and ninety credits on Hong Kong
Movie Database, so it seems like he was kind of
like a workhorse performer that they brought in for this one.
That's my interpretation anyway. And then as far as the
music goes, the credited composer is Huang Mao Sean born

(32:44):
nineteen forty, Taiwanese film composer whose credits include eighty two's
The Green Green Grass of Home and also nineteen eighty
one's The Devil. I will say the music and overall
soundscape in this movie tends to to rapidly move in
and out of just electric tronic madness with demon growls,
demon laughter and howling wolves to like sort of traditional

(33:06):
East Asian themes.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
There was one review I read where I couldn't confirm
whether this was true or not, but it alleged that
this movie also used some music from Dawn of the Dead.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
That would be believable. Yeah, there are a lot of
these pictures that seem to play a little fast and
loose with their soundtrack. I mean you find that in
others as well. I was watching Ramsey Brothers Indian horror
movie just like last week, and there's one point where
they just go straight into Friday the Thirteenth music purchased,

(33:38):
even with the sound effect, all of it just blatantgend
ground here. Yeah, just blatantly ripped from Friday the thirteenth.
So you know that sort of thing occurs.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Okay, that's good, But I'd be really impressed if it
just started featuring the Darkest Side of Night from Jason
Takes Manhattan.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, that was the rock number.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, Fallen Angels into the Street.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, nothing as obvious as all that here though.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
All right, you ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Oh yeah, let's talk about this plot.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
Okay, Rob, I've pulled in some screenshots from the first
couple of minutes of the movie that you can peruse
while I'm trying to describe what happens here, because it's
a lot to take in really fast.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, the first three minutes of this movie are incredibly
weird and captivating. So if you're just on the fence,
go check out the first three minutes on tuby or
wherever you find a rip of it. I think you'll
be convinced.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Yeah. So the film begins with lightning ripping across the
sky that is covered in smoke. We see a dead
tree with barren limbs burning in the night. Then we
see a golden idol in the crude shape of a
man graft in a room with violet walls. Then some
kind of throne room or temple with like an elevated

(35:07):
area above, you know, in the center of the room,
big old platform in the center. Hooded figures in black
and white carry candles across the floor and gather in
advance of an ominous ceremony. Then we get our tidal screen.
In this version, it says wolf and Ninja. So the
hooded figures begin to approach the altar at the head

(35:28):
of the temple and they are carrying with them a man.
The man is prone and tied to a beam. But wait,
it's not just a beam, it is a cross. It
is a man tied to a blocky red crucifix, and
the man on the cross is hoisted up above the
gathered congregation of evil. He's tied to the cross, and

(35:52):
then a horrible figure takes center stage. It is someone
in dark clothing wearing a red and gold cape and
a glittering silver conical hat with a veil that falls
over the face and hangs down in front and back,
and on the front of the conical part of the
hat there is a hot pink skull and crossbones. So

(36:14):
it is essentially a pirate glam rock capi rote or
like a penitent's hood.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, this is the Red Devil, which we'll find out later.
And he's just fabulous, just just dressed to the nines
here and seem conceived in a way to where it
does seem like multiple influences are coming together. Like this
is not sort of your stereotypical like Hong Kong action
picture Wushaw villain. Like there are elements like you said

(36:42):
of like you know, Spanish, Spanish inquisition perhaps and penitents
and also I guess pirates and also like disco warriors.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yeah, the pink skull and crossbones. Yeah, but the sparkles,
it's like glittering.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah. So already, just like three minutes into the picture,
we have this character. We have a black magic crucifixion.
There's a lot going on.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
So we got several observers looking on in fear, others
looking on with excitement. Some of the people in the
room here are like vampires and orcs. There's one guy
that's just I don't know is the like is the
green orc mask supposed to be a vampire. I don't
know exactly what this guy's deal is.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah, there are two kind of spirit Halloween mask masks
going on that are not convincing as actual fleshy faces.
They look like Halloween masks, but I wouldn't change them
for anything. No, No, they they ultimately work within the
context of this film, but they are I guess, if
you want to get critical, some of the weakest choices

(37:49):
in the picture.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah. So the glam rock demon priest who he also
has I didn't even get to this part yet. He's
got knives for fingers, but they're not like Freddy kruegers,
which are oriented what you might say, perpendicular to like
the knuckles on the on the fingers. These are like
sort of knife shovels that extend about a foot out

(38:13):
from the tips of the fingers, like fingernails, essentially along
the contours of what a fingernail would be, but more
curved inward and sharper.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yes, And the dub for this character's voice is terrific.
It's just just the right level of cheesy over the
top villain that works perfectly with such a cheesy over
the top villain. So again that the dub matches the
context of the picture perfectly.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
Here, Yes, so the demon priest picks up a doll
or an idol and then pierces its heart with a stick.
And then this, by the principle commonly associated in movies
with a voodoo doll, causes an equivalent wound to explode
on the chest of the man tied to the cross.
So the wound is the wound here is actually with

(39:00):
cell animation, which I love. And so like a hole
that looks almost like a gap blasted in rock with
cracks all around, it opens up over the man's heart
and red blood pours out and again this is on
a on a film, uh like film like still film
of the guy, and it's animated on top of that.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, it's it's it. I love it. It's just it's
like they could have done more of just like a
traditional you know, blood effect, and that would have been
that would have been great years later, this would have
probably been c G I blood. But instead we have this.
Uh we're between those two and uh and it ultimately
looks really cool.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
Yeah, there's some really great cell animation that comes in
later too, Like in the very last scene there's some
cell animated fire that is beautiful. Also, I should say
throughout the scene that the demon or the demon priest,
he keeps making a grunting sound which then echoes back
a lot. So imagine it's this voice. It goes like yow,

(40:01):
but then it echoes thirty times.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Yes, there is a lot of that. Like I said,
the soundscape for this picture is pretty bonkers just on
its own.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Then the demon Priest takes the doll and turns it
upside down and dunks it headfirst into this big old
vat of frothy red goo. And this causes some kind
of pain and suffering for the man on the cross,
and then in the background of the room there is
a couple holding a baby wrapped in yellow swaddling, and

(40:29):
I'm just like, this is not the kind of event
you bring a baby.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
To, and I think they're having the same realization. They're like, honey,
I think it's time we fled the cult. I think
the devil Colt has gotten a little too heavy for us,
and we need to think about raising this child somewhere else.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
Exactly. They're observing this ritual torture in horror, and yeah,
I'm not sure what they're doing here, but they obviously
don't like it. And then we see the man on
the cross. He spits blood and dies. The doll falls
to the floor and show and then suddenly we just
smash cut to the mother and the father we saw

(41:05):
in the room. They're now outside on a snow covered
mountain side, surrounded by evergreen trees, fleeing for their lives
with their baby in their arms. The man and the
woman are frightened and exhausted, and we see them both
carrying swords, so I guess this is like a married
pair of warriors. And while running through the snow, the

(41:25):
man and woman are attacked by fighters dressed in red,
wielding swords and pole arms. And then the leader of
the demon fighters appears and he is one of the
guys we saw at the ceremony, the guy in the
goofiest of all the masks. It's like the vampire orc mask.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, the other masks looked coolers, So I do wonder
why they picked this one to do these things with.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
It's good, so he said. The demon leader he you know,
goes to the he's talking to the parents and he says, traitor,
you will be punished for your treachery. And the mother
says to him, We'd rather die then go back to
your hell and serve under you. So did they come
from Hell? Possibly?

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Well, maybe all.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
And then the parents they the parents are brave fighters,
so they fend off the demon hinchmen. Initially they sort
of duel with them while they try to escape up
the mountain. I think we do learn that the mother's
name is Jade. And then when the parents are eventually
cornered by the fighters from Hell, they decide to things.

(42:28):
I was about to say things start getting weird, but
they've been weird. Here's another weird thing. They decide to
sacrifice themselves to protect their baby. And the way they
decide to do this is they stab each other with
swords and then rapidly slam their heads into the ground
until the headbutting of the mountain causes an avalanche, and

(42:50):
the avalanche comes down and covers everything with snow. And
then they bleed on their child and they say the
blood will keep the baby warm and protect her from
the snow.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Oh so many, so many issues with this plan. And
I have to say too, in that crazy moment when
this first happens, it's not entirely clear that they are
stabbing themselves. It looked I thought they were stabbing the
baby and running the Yeah, Like I was like, oh
my god, this movie got so strange and weird and
dark all of a sudden I had it wasn't until

(43:20):
the second time I was going through it with the
dub and the subtitle of the like, Okay, they're clearly
stabbing themselves, And then I understood this ridiculous plot of
theirs to bleed all over their baby so that their
warm blood will keep the baby warm, as if blood
has self sustaining warmth or something. But you know, within

(43:41):
a mythic context, fine.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
I criticized this plan as not realistic.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
I probably supposed to be more symbolic than realistic. I recognize.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, so the avalanche comes down and buries them, but
the devil warriors are not satisfied. They go digging in
the snow to find the three of them, and they
eventually do find the two parents, but before they can
collect the child from underneath the avalanche, they are driven
away by wolves. Wolves come out howling and chase away
the demon fighters. But actually are these wolves?

Speaker 4 (44:13):
Know?

Speaker 3 (44:13):
They're they're sweet doggies. Yeah, they look like good boys.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
They're just straight up German shepherds without anything ad Like
they're not wearing anything weird, like they didn't put extra
for or anything.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Yeah, but so I love these dogs. The dogs run
up and they start eating the parents' bodies.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Oh yeah, they express the bodies to pieces and big
bloody splashes in the white snow.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
So yeah, they're like ripping arms off and stuff. But
then when a quote wolf finds the baby, the wolf
does not harm the baby and instead brings her back
to the wolf den, which is like a cave of ice,
a frosty cave where the wolves make their home. And
we see the wolf carrying the baby along the way,
which is, by the way clearly just like a weightless
yellow bundle of cloth. But then back at the cave,

(44:58):
the wolf mother takes care of the baby and crouches
over her to protect her, and then we see time
is passing.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
This includes multiple shots though of the baby crying quite
audibly while the wolf like growls at the baby, and
the baby's covered with blood. And this feels like it
goes on for about five minutes.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
Yes, but the wolf is it is weird, but the
wolf is protecting the baby.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
So years into the future we see that the child
is growing up now that I don't know how old
she's supposed to be in the scene, but she's older now.
She can like walk around and stuff. She's living with
the wolves, and she is dressed in furs and pelts
and just like tearing into a big old, bloody hunk
of raw meat, just like eating the raw meat, getting
blood everywhere, and we see her practicing hunting. She tries

(45:49):
to hunt a rabbit like her like her wolf family
here does, but she fails and she ends up tumbling
down a hill and getting injured and then lying back
the cave covered in blood from her injuries while trying
to hunt. The wolf girl is nursed back to health
by her wolf mother, and in fact, the wolf mother

(46:09):
brings her some kind of medicine. The wolf I guess
has medical knowledge and brings her strange plant matter found
from outside. What could this be? I believe this is
going to be the special ginseng root that we learn
about later.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah. Yeah, they're all a part of the Wolf Devil
Woman diet. Some of you may the adherence to the
Wolf Devil Woman diet. It's just raw meat and white
gen sing. But you can eat as much white gen
sing as you want.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
Oh, but when you follow the Wolf Devil Woman diet,
your your hair turns white and then turns black again.
But then at intermittent periods for the rest of your life,
we'll just turn white at certain times.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
There are side effects.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
Yeah. Time okay, So time passes once again, and when
we once again meet the Wolf Girl, she has become
the Wolf Devil Woman. So now we see Pearl Chang
Zengling is out hunting. She's like better at hunting now,
except so we see her hunting rabbits and she's she's
dressed in the garb of the wilderness, so it's all furs,

(47:12):
but also a wolf's head cap. And I was just thinking,
so is this It looks it's almost like it's supposed
to be a camouflage for her hunting rabbits, so she's
like camouflaged as the rabbit's natural predator.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
This is the reveal of this costume and of the
adult wolf devil woman is just this is one of
those moments where you watch in the film and it's
like you feel like you're going crazy for a moment
because it's like a snowbank and then here is this
what looks like a like a stuffed wolf or a
stuffed fox or a stuffed German shepherd head peeking over

(47:47):
like muppeting up at you, and you're thinking, like what
is this? Is this a puppet effect? And then you're like, no,
this head is on top of Pearl Chang's head. This
is a hat or a costume. She is wearing some
sort of head dress, and then she commences to hunt rabbits.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, it's it's a lot. And so now grown up
and having learned the ways of the wolves and also
benefited from the potency of the White Gensen route, we
see that the wolf woman has extraordinary powers, so she
can make herself weightless in classic wusha wirework style, so
she dump jumps dozens of feet into the air glides

(48:26):
like a spirit on the wind. But I think it's
funny that it's cool that while she is shown to
have this power, she is also shown to be clumsy
in a sense, like failing to capture rabbits and reacting
with anger and frustration. So she'll like leap up thirty
feet in the air and try to like come down
and catch a rabbit and miss. But eventually she succeeds

(48:48):
in catching a rabbit, not with her mighty leaps, but
instead by using another strange power, digging tunnels under the snow,
So she like digs down and then comes up and
snatches the rabbit from below.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Yeah, like a wolf? Is that? Maybe wolves hunt and
then the wild they dig under and they come up
like a sandwhorm gopher powers. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Oh, somewhere around here we get an interlude on the demon,
which is what people are yelling, so we're cutting back
to some other actions somewhere else where. The editing is
so rapid it's really hard to tell what you're looking at.
But we get like rapid shots of things happening and
then people yelling the demon. So there's like something on

(49:31):
fire and somebody yells the demon. One we see one
of the vampire orcs beating somebody up. We see the
guy in the conical hat and the silver glam veil
blasting a guy with white smoke out of his hands,
saying you have betrayed me, and the guy is blasted
and shown frozen against the bark of a tree.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Yeah. I think that the only thing we're just supposed
to take from the scene, I assume, is just that
the demon and his forces are still out in the
world doing harm and perhaps and perhaps they're looking for something.
That's all we know.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
Yeah, they're causing problems. Yeah, but okay, we're about to
meet a couple of other major characters, master Lee and Wong,
And this is a kind of duo you might have
seen in adventure films before. Master Lee is a very
typical martial hero. He's a dashing and honorable, wandering swordsman,
you know, he's this kind of character is usually a

(50:27):
prince or some other kind of high born and then
he's got his comedy sidekick, often a cowardly comedy sidekick.
Though with Wong, I don't know if you've got a
similar kind of thing, Rob. When we first meet Wong,
I interpreted him as being sort of hapless and cowardly
and not very able to take care of himself. But

(50:49):
then by the end of the movie, he's like he's
kicking butt.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah. I feel like we've seen this before in Taiwanese
action films. I think there was a character in Child
of Peach like this who was very much there comedic
effect but also really good did get to tear it
up in some of the action scenes.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
I guess it's just that you don't get a sense
early on that this character will would be like that.
But anyway, when we first meet them, they've been traveling
for days on an important mission, and Wong is tired
and is complaining. He has started complaining by this point,
but I don't know how early he started, so he
may have been complaining for a long time. He keeps

(51:25):
falling into holes in the ground and has to be
rescued over and over. Yeah, Wong and Master Lee catch
a rabbit for dinner, and warning, this is one scene
where you can quite clearly see what looks like an
unsimulated killing of a rabbit with an arrow. There are
other scenes with rabbits where something might be going on,
but it's harder to tell.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Yeah, like sometimes a wolf woman may tear a rabbit's
body in half or and then eat it's bloody pieces.
I'm assuming she's not eating actual raw rabbit. But then
they're also scenes where she tears humans in half, and
I'm one hundred percent positive those are not real humans
being torn in half by wolf women.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
But if you're if you're looking for the place where
you would really want to fast forward, it's going to
be right around in here. When when Wong starts trying
to get after a rabbit.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Right even though there's there's a fun gag there where
he's trying to throw a knife at the rabbit, and
then he gets over to the rabbit, he's like, there's
an arrow in this rabbit. I thought, I hit the
rabbit with my knife, And yeah, I don't know. It's
not worth watching the animal cruelty if you don't see it.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
But so anyway, they cook it up for dinner and
then Master Lee plays his flute, and unfortunately here they
have an ill fated encounter with the wolf woman. She
sneaks up on them in their camp and attacks Wong,
and in reaction, oh no, they shoot her with an arrow.
That's not what we wanted. But once they realize she

(52:52):
is a human woman and not a wolf, they tried
to treat her with medicine, but then the rest of
the wolves attack their camp. They jump over the fire repeatedly.
There is whiplash editing, until finally Master Lee manages to
kill one of the wolves in the fighting, and oh no,
it seems that the wolf he killed may have been

(53:13):
the woman's wolf mother, but the wolf woman is unconscious
with her wound. She doesn't know that this happens initially,
so they track the They fall unconscious also for a bit,
I think, and I forget exactly the sequence here, but
they eventually track the wolf and the wolf woman back
to their cave. The woman attacks them again, at first,

(53:36):
revealing that she has great powers, like she's flying around
on wires and stuff, and Wong wants to fight back
with lethal force, but Master Lee restrains him. Clearly, Master
Lee takes pity on the wolf woman, and when she
passes out from her injuries, they treat her with medicine
that they have among their supplies, and Master Lee is like,
I know what's going on here. She is a creature

(53:59):
of the wilderness. He is a human raised by wolves,
and thus she does not know any human language and
does not understand what death is. So she goes on
trying to feed to the mother wolf even though it
has died. And then there is some time that passes,
so we see wolf Lady Lee and Wong hanging out
in the cave. There's some scene I don't remember how

(54:21):
this starts, but where the wolf Lady is biting him.
He is biding Lee on the hand, and we see
Wong lying to her and telling her that the wolf
wolf mother is still alive somewhere, like he sort of
has to act this out in charades, but says she's
off getting food somewhere. And then meanwhile we get another
cut back to civilization. We see in a palace somewhere

(54:43):
there is a king being attended by servants and subjects.
This king is named Master You, and they say, Master
the Blue Devil commanded us to give him the amulet
or he'll kill us all. We have to hurry up
and find a way to stop him. Another says, ma,
terrror is everywhere. Too many people have died already already.

(55:03):
And then the subjects all say in unison, Master you,
we implore you to help us in this time of
horror and death. And Master you is he's an older
man with a stern face, angry eyebrows, and very solid beard.
And he says that he understands the devil must be stopped,
but he cannot do it without the aid of terrible magic.

(55:24):
And there is only one thing on earth that possesses
enough power to defeat this plague of demons, and that
is the White Gensing Root. Then like smash cut before
he even finishes saying the last word of his speech
back to the cave.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
Now, is master you Lee's dad?

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Yes, okay, Yes, he has sent Lee on a journey
to retrieve the great White Gensen Route because it is
the only thing that can that they think can stop
the demon from attacking them. Now here's something I wasn't
sure about, is like witch devil is the blue devil?

(56:02):
Because there's another devil they call the red devil. I
think the one in the conical hat is the red devil.
So is the blue devil a different one? I don't
quite know.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
I was wondering if they it was just a mistake
that like Blue Devil and Red Devil are the same devil,
because otherwise, who would Blue Devil be one of the
spirit Halloween guys?

Speaker 3 (56:22):
Possibly the Witch, but they're saying he, so I think
not her, So it could be one of the two
Orc guys. I don't know either way.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Team Devil team Demon is what they're up against, and
the only way to do it. The only way to
defeat them is White Gen sing route not Red Gen
saying it's got to be White Jen sing. Right.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
So back at the Cave of Wolves, how long have
Lee and Wong been here now unclear, but they're kind
of settled in and Lee wakes Wong up, telling him
it's time to move on. So, you know, we learned
that Lee's father sent them on the quest for the
great the Ginsen Root. They've been looking for it, they
can't find it. We find out it's also a thousand

(57:11):
year gensing root. Maybe it only appears once every thousand years,
and they've been digging holes for it everywhere. So I
think these are the holes that Wong was falling into earlier.
With the holes they were digging looking for the root.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
That makes more sense than I had thought. Originally he
was falling into a wolf woman holes that she was
digging out to catch rabbits.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
That could be the case also, Actually I don't know
for sure. But so they go out digging again. They
get attacked by wolves again, but they are just cute
little doggies, like sniffing around at their feet, and they
are saved by the wolf woman, who calls off the pack,
so the wolves obey her. And around here it starts

(57:52):
to be quite obvious that Master Lee and the wolf
lady are interested in each other. They stare at each other,
they got like laser beams of love coming out of
their eyes.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Yeah, I mean, how could they not fall in love?

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Yeah? And then there's this weird scene where I don't
know what's going on here. It's Master Lee starts adjusting
the wolf Woman's bones, like he sees that she's walking
around with a hunched posture and a strange gait, like
like there's something wrong with her spine. So he grabs

(58:25):
her suddenly, and we see an animation of her bones,
like her vertebrae realigning, and then she starts biting him
and Wong says, oh, no, she's biting him again. But
after her bones are fixed and she seems grateful. She's
kind of sheepish about the biting, like her mouth is
covered in blood, but she I think, realizes that her

(58:47):
bones have been fixed.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
I don't know, Yeah, I mean, I just took the
bi the bye. It's like I thought of my cat
a lot. It's like, oh, she's biting me again, Like
it's like my relationship with the cat, a wild animal
that lives in my house.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
But they, yeah, they mend, they mend this, like she
the wolf woman puts moss on Lee's hand and wraps
it in a leather strap, and it's just clearly true
love Lee. Lee and Wong start trying to teach her
how to talk and how to have manners. So they say,
you have a heart of gold, a spirit like spring mist,

(59:22):
a face like a flower. Snowflower. Yes, Snowflower will be
your name. And this name only half sticks for the
rest of the movie.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Yeah yeah, but it is used again, I think I
can't remember, as the dub or subtitles also call her
winter High Discus or snow High Discus or something. But
Snowflower is what sticks.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Right after they call her Snowflower. They're trying to teach her.
They're trying to teach her grammar basically, and so she
learns to say her own name and everybody else's. And
there's this scene where she's arguing with Wong where she's
like talking to Wong, saying you're wolf Woman, and he's saying, no,
you're wolf Woman.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
I have forgotten any elemental Mandarin that I attempted to learn,
but I have a feeling there might be a little
bit more to this exchange in the original language, you know,
like maybe it's a little more clever. And I mean
it's still hokey, it's still played for laughs, but it
might be it might play out a little bit differently
in the native language.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
That seems quite likely. Yeah, we also get an education
montage here, so you know, wolf Woman is learning how
to be a human. And one day Wolf Woman in
master League get to talking. She asks him if he's sad,
and he says yeah. In the place he comes from,
things are very dire. There is a wicked devil who
rules over everything with extraordinary magic, killing many people, terrifying others,

(01:00:43):
and Lee explains that he came to the Mountain because
he needs to find the great White Gens en route,
the only thing in the world powerful enough to defeat
the demon. But of course the gensing is too strong
for a mortal human to consume. It would just wreck them.
And then the wolf lady gets curious. She's like, what
is this white gen sing like? And he describes it
and she's like, oh, yeah, I ate that years ago

(01:01:08):
and there won't be another for a thousand years. Whoops. Yeah,
So Wong is mad, but Lee says, perhaps it's for
the best, and so he's got to go home and
tell his father that the root will not be found,
and they sort of they convince wolf women to come
with them, but first they have to admit to her
that her wolf mother is dead. I think they've been

(01:01:30):
lying to her about this the whole time so far,
which is weird, messed up. And then the wolf woman
is greatly saddened by this, and the grief over her
dead wolf mother causes her to turn blonde suddenly, and
like I think, hair grows down over the front of
her face and this is not the last time she

(01:01:50):
will like activate her gensing powers through profound emotion and
turn blonde.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
Yes, yeah, it will happen again, and it's not permanent.
When it happens here, I thought, maybe she's just gonna
look like this the rest of the picture, but she
does not.

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
So Master Lee and Wong go down the mountain and
arrive at the home of Lee's master, his own teacher,
and this is Master Chew. Master Cheu is your classic sage.
He's dressed in all white, with long white hair, gigantic
eyebrows like a mintat, long flowing mustache, and facial hair.
And they meet him and he's he's like, I know

(01:02:27):
everything that happened. Don't tell your father about the wolf lady,
because he will just accuse you of wasting your time
chasing women instead of accomplishing your quest. And then he
also gives him a gift. He gives him a little
box and he says, the thing in this box, it
will protect you as soon as you open it, and
then Master Chou flies away.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
The other thing I like about Master Chew is that
he like you encounter this sort of performance and characterization
a lot in like Hong Kong action films, Lushot films,
and so forth, where it's clearly a much younger actor
who's been dressed up to look like an old, sagely individual.
So on one level, like it's obvious, but on the
other level it kind of works because it's like this

(01:03:07):
concept of like a Taoist immortal, Like yeah, it's like
an old young and or young oldie, whichever way you
want to look at it, Like, yeah, he's an old man,
but he also there's something unnaturally young about him too,
And I don't know how much of that was ultimately
like accident of filmmaking, because you need this older individual
to also do death defying stunts. However it comes together,

(01:03:30):
it's kind of a staple of the genre that I like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Would you agree that there's almost something kind of impish
or mischievous about Master Chew in the way that he
just pops up to with ease deliver information that other
people had been struggling to learn or whatever. He just
pops up and is like, hey, I know everything, or
he just wanders into a scene and says, here's the

(01:03:54):
real truth, here's who the devil is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Yeah, yeah he is. There is an infish quality to it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
Well, see inside the gift the box that Lee is given,
there is some kind of highly reflective mirror in there
is it kind of an amulet?

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
Yeah, yeah, some sort of an amulet in there, So
we're like, okay, magiciehim for later.

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
Okay, So next we get a homecoming. Lee and Wong
returned to Lee's father and they admit that they were
unable to find the gin sing, so there's got to
be another way to stop the demon. Next thing is
they commence a mission. There's like they're going to go
raid the demon hideout. I guess so, like Lee, his
father and a group of warriors, all dressed in different colors,

(01:04:35):
trek into this lush green forest, which I get. Did
you understand this to be the Demon's camp?

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
I guess so. Yeah, going into demon country.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
This was a very cool looking and dangerous feeling. Seen.
We hear strange bird calls echoing through the trees, and
at the camp there are the bodies of warriors hanging
from the trees. But then it's a fake out because
they think these are the Demon's victims, but actually the
bodies hanging there are the devils pretending to be corpses,
and they attack and.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
From this week get into the first of many action
sequences here, where one of the core objectives is to
nail demons to trees with arrows and or swords. This
happens a lot and it never gets old.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
Yeah, it's good stuff. And the frenzied editing the demons
appear and disappear. They use trickery and magic. We see
the witch from the opening scene using this. She's wearing
like a jeweled veil and she uses magic to knock
Lee unconscious. And then later Lee awakes in the temple
slash throne room from the beginning of the movie, and

(01:05:40):
he now is the one affixed to the red cross.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Oh, this doesn't look good for him.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
They mock him, and the gist is basically, you're a
student of Master Chew, so you think you're really hot,
but are you strong enough to defeat my fingernails? And
the demon priest really likes laughing at nothing and then
spraying people with dust from his sleeves. He's constantly Yeah.
So the demon priest also wants to know what happened

(01:06:07):
to the White Gensen route, and after torture, Lee tells
him it was eaten by the wolf woman and the
demon is mad about this. He does not like this information.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
This exchange is great because he's like somebody ate it,
and he's like, somebody ate it?

Speaker 4 (01:06:21):
Who ate it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
Okay, Well, anyway, we got to get back to the
Wolf Woman. What's she been up to? I missed the
Wolf Woman. She finally comes down out of the mountain
and she is now using a fraying knotted rope like
Indiana Jones uses a whip. Rob did you think that
maybe this rope slash whip was made out of rabbit pelts?

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
That was the sense I got that this is like
some sort of a super elaborate ninja whip weapon made
out of rabbit pelts stitched together, but then with some
sort of a four pronged animal claw situation going on
at either end of said weapon.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Oh yeah, she also has like bird claw feet bird
feet claws that she uses as weapons. Yes, but she's
using this whip to swing around through tree branches and
fly through the forest. And then the Wolf Woman she
walks into the Kingdom of the Demon. Now, first she
goes into a barn, finds a chicken, rips its head

(01:07:24):
off and starts eating it raw. And the farmers catch
her stealing the chicken and they attack her with weapons
and she violently defends herself. So there's another action scene.
We get a brainwashing scene with Master Lee. So the
Demon Priest uses the Golden Needle to essentially brainwash Lee

(01:07:45):
into making him one of them, to making him loyal
to the demon. And now Lee goes around doing he's
an enforcer for the Demon Priest. Basically, he's like going
up to people's houses telling them to surrender to the
devil power.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
Yeah, he's decked out in red now cut like a
red veil covering half his face.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
So, oh no, Lee has become a bad guy. We
even see him like he goes to people's houses and
like beats them up. Yeah, there's one house he goes
to and the Demon Priest shows up there when the
guy won't submit and he's like, you worm, you have
the guts to stand up to me. And we get
a sleeve blast of course, you know, he loves to
shoot the smoke out of his sleeve. Elsewhere, we get

(01:08:26):
a scene of the Wolf Woman going to a restaurant.
This is one we've alluded to, I think a couple
of times now. So she's wandering, she's in civilization now
and she's wandering through a city and she discovers that
she likes the smell of food. So she goes into
this restaurant. She doesn't know what to order, but she
listens to what others at the table next to her say.
And this is a large group of people, and they

(01:08:47):
end up ordering boiled eggs, half of a roasted chicken,
and five jugs of wine. And so she just orders
the same thing. Yeah, She's like, I'll have what they're
happening and yeah, and the guy's like, that's too much wine.
But they bring it to her and she doesn't know
how to use chopsticks and she gets drunk, and drunken
wolf Woman is a problem. She like freaks out, rips

(01:09:09):
out her own hair, and turns into the Gensing Blonde.
And then the gensing Blonde is like, is a violent,
drunken mess and wrecks the restaurant and beats up all
the guys who try to stop her.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
Yeah, she's a mess. And this this whole sequence is wonderful,
Like it's just it's played for laughs. It's ridiculous, and
I loved every minute of it. The comedic sections of
some of these older movies they don't necessarily always stand
the test of time or translate all that well.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
But this is all perfect, yes, but unfortunately she is
eventually overpowered. I think because she's she's sort of on
she's not at her full potential because of the five
jugs of wine. Right, So the talentspeople capture her, they
beat her with rods, they tie her in a sack,
and then they dunk her up and down in the
well and a sad song plays.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
This this one. This was another just outrageous moment for
me though, because at least in the dub or the
tran or the subtitles, they were like, throw her in
the well, And I'm like, is this standard operating procedure? Like,
there is a magical monster that has been arrested in
your town, let us throw her into the town's primary
water source. Yeah, that just doesn't seem like the best

(01:10:21):
use of your well water. I'm I mean, I'm assuming
you're drinking that water or you're using it for purposes
around town. Let's not let's not drain and drown supernatural
beings in that water just to be on the safe side.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
Yeah, I'm confused about the strategy of the town's people here.
But then we get an intervention by a familiar face.
Wong shows up. He just happens to be walking by,
that's right, So he like goes and tries to help her,
but ultimately they are both thrown down into the well
and then something there was a disconnect here. I didn't
understand what happened. Somehow, Wong and the wolf woman are

(01:10:58):
both washed out of the well into a fishing hole
where Master Chew is there fishing. Yeah, did you understand
what that was?

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
It kind of felt like a scene was missing there.
But I guess basically it's like down the well in
water flushed out to another body of water. I guess
it's just it's all connected.

Speaker 3 (01:11:17):
So here is the scene where she meets with Master
Chew and Master Chew tells her about her history. He says,
long ago, about twenty years ago, your father, the warrior
of Steel Sparrow, fell under the charms of the Red Devil.
When he discovered the evils of the devil, he took
your mother and you and escaped. They could not outrun
the Devil's men, and when they killed themselves, you used

(01:11:40):
their warm. There was a typo in the subtitles here
that said blow dough. I think that means blood to
protect you. Then you were rescued by the White Wolf.
All this has been predestined, and Master Chew also tells
her that it is her destiny to fight back because
the Red Devil has wronged her, has killed her parents,
and he is the Wolf Woman's enemy, so she must

(01:12:03):
get revenge against the Devil. It is her destiny. And
then there is some double take editing here. Suddenly we
go straight from the scene where she's like being told
this into combat scenes just action where the Wolf Woman
is riding on horseback and whipping devil warriors heads off
with the knotted rope and they're like on a beach

(01:12:24):
and then a desert and she's whipping the rope. Their
heads are going everywhere. She's also flying off of city
walls and attacking the Devil soldiers again with the whip.
And we also see her wearing a different outfit, a
very cool costume change where it almost suggests she is
now fulfilling some kind of religious function.

Speaker 1 (01:12:44):
Yeah, it's like some sort of divine warrior garb, all
in white. So now she was like Wolf Devil Woman
the White come back to to avenge everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
Ah, yes, so wolf Devil Woman not Devil Wolf Woman
and Wong. They attack the Devil's hideout in the woods,
the one that Master Lee and his father and all
their men attacked earlier. And there are whoa what to
say about the scene. There's like flaming bats flying all around.
Suddenly Wong does seem like a competent fighter. Here we
see wolf Woman versus the vampire orc that was chasing

(01:13:15):
her parents, and she pins himTo a tree with swords,
just general crazy wooshat action. And then we cut from
there to Wolf Woman and Wong trekking through the desert,
and there's more. There are more fight scenes. Here's one
that's a great payoff where we see Wolf Woman's wolf
hunting skills that she used against rabbits used against the

(01:13:37):
Devil warriors, where she's like digging tunnels and popping up
from under the sand to yank them down and destroy them. Also,
there's just the gore effects here. I think fans of
the show will know I'm not typically a gore hound.
You know. Having a lot of blood and guts and
stuff in a movie is not something I usually get

(01:13:58):
excited about, but in this case it is because it's
like the way the Wolf Woman will like hit one
of the Devil fighters. She'll hit them and then we
just see like bloody severed limbs falling to the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
Yeah, there's almost just the right level of slightly over
the top but unbelievable practical bloody violence in a picture
can yeah take on its own reality, like this isn't
in the Story of Ricky Territory, But like Story of
Ricky is a film that I haven't seen it a
long time, so I don't know if it would still
hold up this way for me, but I remember enjoying

(01:14:33):
it on that level, and that it's like everyone but
the hero's body is made out of just paper mache
and jello and just comes apart immediately and nothing can
withstand our hero. And it's the same with Wolf Devil Women.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
It's like those action figure I don't remember what they
were called, but there were these action figures that had
like a button you could press and all of their
labels would just fall off of them at once.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
Yeap, that's exactly what it's like with anyone who dare
stand up against our Snowflower.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
So now Wolf Woman and Wong are suddenly in the
Devil's temple. How'd they get there, I'm not sure, but
they see Lee dressed in the garb of the Red Devil.
He's got the you know, the red veil on and
they're like, Lee, what happened to you? They want him back,
but the witches and the devils say no, you can't
have him. He's with us.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
There's more fighting, just general great fight scenes. I can't
recount every point here, but I love them. Somewhere in here,
somebody says, huh, she fights like a wolf, but this
seems to me using a whip and jumping a lot yep,
and the demon. The demon comes and tries to spray
them with his sleeve dust, which of course is very

(01:15:41):
very dangerous potent magic, and they beg Lee for help,
and this suddenly snaps Lee out of his trance or something,
and he jumps in to save them, and then he
flies away carrying wolf woman and Wong, and Wong has
been sleeve sprayed real bad, but he's not dead. And
then suddenly they're just somewhere else being treated by Master Chew.

(01:16:05):
It all happens. There's a very loose spatial logic to
what's going on here, and it happens so fast with
so little explanation. But I think Rob correct me if
I'm wrong. I think Lee explains that he was never
actually like hypnotized by the Devil. He was just a
spy learning how the Devil's Palace works.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
That's right, because Master Choo's amulet protected him from being
brainwashed by the Demon cult. So he's just been in
deep cover the whole time, which, as he pointed out,
includes beating the crap out of innocence in earlier scenes.

Speaker 3 (01:16:41):
Yeah, but I guess he thinks it was worth it
because he learned the secret of the demon, which is
that there's this golden needle which has this great power.
We saw it at the beginning being inserted into a
doll to cause pain, and it can be used on
the demons too, I guess. So we get a final
showdown scene where Lee, Wong and the Wolf Woman team up.

(01:17:02):
They go back to the Red Devil Temple. Uh, and
they're like, uh for there's some exchange. I'm afraid I'm
getting this wrong, but they're like, we're here to kill you,
and the Devil's like, you can't be serious, and they're like, no,
that is correct, we're here to kill you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
There's a great scene where they're they're you know, they're
attacking the the Dnomonic temple here and incomes the lead
demon priest and he said, or at least the subtitles say,
and I think maybe the dub did this too. He says,
look at me, fools.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
You know I am doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
That's this huge intro number. And then yeah, it's just
crazy fighting from there on out. Uh, there was this.
It was established earlier that our lead demon here has
like frozen would be heroes in a state of undeath. Yeah,
the temple and they can be brought back to life
by removing their needles, and when they come back to life,

(01:17:58):
they are essentially jung shi. They are the hopping vampires,
so without all the rules of hopping vampires, but they
are moving like hopping vampires in these sequences.

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
Right, So there's that going on. There's just a lot
of tremendous fighting in this final showdown. There's the Witch
who's using her spider and cobweb powers, and then there's
also a big twist slash identity revealed that is then
double twisted and undermined if I understood correctly, yes, sort of,

(01:18:28):
so like the Red Devil, they get his mask off
and he reveals his identity and oh no, it is
Master Lee's father.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
Bump bump bum bum bum bomb.

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
And he's like, I wanted the white gen sen Root
so that we could rule over the world, and you know,
you and I as father and son, we could rule
the galaxy his father and son. But then I think
Master two walks in and is like, no, he's not
actually your father. He's just a shape shifter who can
look like anyone.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
Bump bump bomb. She just like strolls out from behind
a pillar and tells everybody this, Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:19:04):
It's so good. Yeah, and of course the good guys
win in the end, and yeah, I loved Wolf Devil Woman.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
It kind of comes to an abrupt end though after
that it's just kind of like, okay, forces of evil
or defeat it and that's it. Everybody can go home.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Yeah, it's not clear what's happening to Wolf Woman at
the end, Like they defeat the Devil. Oh, and Master
Chew reveals that he was his evil brother, I think,
and that he killed Lee's father and then turned to
look like him. But anyway, they defeat the Devil. Devil
turns to ash. But we were told earlier by Master
Chew that it would take all of Snowflower's magical gin

(01:19:43):
sen strength to defeat the devil, and then after the conflict,
she would wither and die. And now here we are
after the conflicts. They have defeated the devil and wolf
Woman is shown to be woozy and reeling and Lee
goes to kind of steady her, and I guess we're
supposed to be in suspense, like, oh, is she gonna
be okay? But we don't find out. They just cut

(01:20:04):
to the end, So no resolution on what happens to
Wolf Woman. I do wish there was a happy epilogue.
I wanted to see them going to restaurants again, all
four of the heroes going to restaurants together.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
That would have been good, Like see if she has
really learned how to use chopsticks yet or if she's
just gonna, you know, end up eating the fish with
their hands again.

Speaker 3 (01:20:26):
More more wolf Woman eating too many boiled eggs and
drinking too much wine.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
So yeah, that is Wolf Devil Woman. Quite a picture.
Never a dull moment. This is This is not one
that is a slog to watch by any stretch of
the imagination.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
Hats off to Pearl Chang. I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:48):
Yeah, all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close
up this episode of Weird House Cinema, but we would
love to hear from everyone out there. Are you a
fan of Wolf Devil Woman? Do you have additional context
to share regarding Wolf Deevil Woman and Taiwanese Cinema. Do
you have a personal history with this film or did
you watch it for the first time after hearing us
bringing it and bring it up. If so, maybe you

(01:21:09):
have some thoughts as well. Anything's fair game, you know,
if you want to talk about right into us, talk
about past episodes of Weird House Cinema, movies we covered,
ages back, movies we just covered, as well as movies
we might potentially cover in the future. We're always open
for suggestions, and those suggestions can come sometimes, you know,
push things up on our possible list of future episodes.

(01:21:30):
So yeah, keep it coming. We'd love to hear from you.
And if you do want to see what we've covered
in the past on the show, well you can go
over to letterbox dot com. It's l E T T
E r box d dot com, which is in general
just a really cool sort of social media site for
reviewing films and tracking films and putting films on lists
and to watch lists and all while we are on there.
Our username is weird House and we have a singular

(01:21:53):
list there of all the movies we've covered so far,
and sometimes there's a peak ahead of what we're covering
in the next week or two.

Speaker 3 (01:21:59):
Huge Thing access always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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