Best Kungfu movie in China: Fantasy Mission Force ( 1982)
By admin on 2014-12-26

Directed by Chu Yin-Ping
Produced by Wen-hsiung Chiang
Yin Shen Hsiao
Starring Brigitte Lin
Jimmy Wang Yu
Jackie Chan
Chang Ling
Adam Cheng
Music by Way Tao Da
Release date(s) 1983
Running time 90 min
Country Hong Kong
Language Mandarin

Fantasy Mission Force (迷你特攻队) is a 1982 Hong Kong action-comedy film directed by Chu Yin-Ping and starring Brigitte Lin, Jimmy Wang Yu and Jackie Chan in a supporting role.

Although often marketed as a Jackie Chan film, Chan only appears in a few scenes. He reportedly starred in it as a favor for Jimmy Wang Yu, who sheltered him from the Triads earlier in his career.

Despite low production values, the film has attained a small cult following, mainly due to its strange combination of film genres, a convoluted narrative and a deliberately anachronistic mix of plot elements. The film includes elements of a comedic style common in Hong Kong films known as "Mo lei tau." This comedic style (which is commonly, but not exclusively, associated with actor Stephen Chow) frequently involves non sequiturs and anachronistic gags similar to those found in Fantasy Mission Force.

A number of reviews consider Fantasy Mission Force a movie that is "so bad it's good."

Plot

Nominally set during World War II, the film begins with a Japanese attack on an Allied military camp, which a map reveals to be somewhere in Canada. After four Allied Generals, including one who introduces himself as Abraham Lincoln, are taken hostage by the Japanese troops, Lieutenant Don Wen (Jimmy Wang Yu) is called in to organize a rescue effort (rejected candidates for the job include Roger Moore's James Bond, Snake Plissken, Rocky Balboa and Karl Maka from the Hong Kong film Aces Go Places).

With promises of a huge reward, Don Wen rounds up a group of misfits for the job, which includes two kilt-wearing soldiers, a hobo (Old Sun), a supposed escape artist (Greased Lightning), con artist Billy, and the femme fatale Lily (Brigitte Lin), who sports knee-high red leather boots and a bazooka. En route to the Japanese base where the kidnapped Generals are being held (apparently located in Luxembourg according to the film), the group encounters two small time crooks, Sammy and Emily (Jackie Chan and Ling Chang), who follow them in hope that they will lead them to a cache of money.

As they continue on, Don Wen is seemingly killed in a surprise ambush by spear-wielding tribesmen, and soon the group is captured by a tribe of cannibalistic Amazons led by an effeminate man in a tuxedo. After obliterating the Amazon tribe the group spends the night in a haunted house full of hopping vampires (a traditional Chinese supernatural creature) before reaching their goal.

Once there they find the Generals held hostage gone and the base littered with the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers. Before the group can figure out what has happened they are attacked by sword and axe-brandishing Chinese Nazis riding in 1970s-era muscle cars (it is of note that the highly anachronistic cars are also painted with swastikas and Luftwaffe-style crosses).

Here the plot takes a turn for the melodramatic as the group is wiped out one by one by a machine gun (that clearly does not have an ammunition belt installed), with another killed by a sword in the buttocks. In the end, with only Sammy and Emily left standing, Don Wen arrives and explains that he planned the whole thing from the beginning so that his rescue team and the Japanese soldiers would kill each other off, leaving him alone to collect the reward. Aiming to silence the last witnesses, Don Wen shoots Emily and Sammy is forced to fight him one-on-one.

After a long martial arts fight scene Don Wen is defeated as Sammy detonates explosives hidden in the main building, obliterating it. The Generals soon show up and demand to know why they weren't rescued earlier, but all Sammy does is dismiss them with the line "I don't know any Generals. To me you look like clowns."

The film ends with a wounded Sammy and Emily driving off together in a jeep, the Generals chasing after them.