KUNG FU KORNER: Buddha's Palm (2004)

Like a bad karaoke video on some serious adrenal-gland black-market steroids

Submitted by Rajorajorajo, 11/10/09 2:35 PM

Buddha's Palm, 2004
dir. Raymond Lee

I was rummaging through Queen Video's Kung Fu DVD section in search of something I had never seen or hopefully even heard of before, when Buddha's Palm caught my eye. I knew that my good buddies the Shaw Bros. made a completely insane film with the same title back in 1982, but this looked newer, and as it turns out, the Buddha's Palm I had in my regular palm was distributed by Tai Seng Entertainment in 2004. So I took it home, excited to see a movie about the most powerful fighting technique ever thought of in all of Kung Fu history, period. I mean… this is the Buddha's Palm we're talking about, here... a fighting stance that allows you to execute a devastating palm strike so powerful that it can rip through solid rock and make things explode real good. It's like the H-bomb of all fighting styles and it will seriously eff you up and destroy your town and probably lay waste to most of the countryside, too. We're talking limitless power, here... do not MESS with the Buddha's Palm!

Well, that couldn't be more true; this "film" is pretty much unwatchable. Despite boasting the involvement of the exceptional fighting choreographer Ching Siu Tung (Shaolin Soccer, Hero, House Of Flying Daggers), Buddha's Palm in actuality is at the same time completely hilarious, god awful, way, way too long to sit through in its entirety, and the very definition of a huge waste of time. Plus, it might give you a seizure if you aren't heavily sedated.

Now, I should mention that I'm usually not super critical of bad special effects, as there's a time and place for them (cheesy, campy films that don't take themselves to seriously). Every once in awhile, though, you'll stumble upon a film that's trying so hard to be taken seriously, yet the technical aspects of what you're watching are just not up to snuff. Buddha's Palm is that kind of movie times a kabillion. The special effects are really, really, really, really, really, really bad. Complete garbage. I could literally replicate most of the super-fake looking explosions, earthquakes, Superman-style flying and motion blurs seen here on my crappy old Power Mac 6500 using software you can get for free off the internet. Any 3D objects are all overly smooth and shiny, the CG animals don't look or move at all like they're supposed to, and there are plenty of unrendered jumbles of pixels masquerading as water or blood or whatever. And hilariously, they speed up the footage in a lot of instances to make horses run impossibly faster, just like I did back in my grade 10 media class. It doesn't help that the "film" was shot on cheap-looking video, either. Not HD video, and maybe not even Digital Beta... the quality of the image reminded me of working with Super VHS video stock back when I was in school. This film looks so, so gross. Nauseating.

There's some decent wire-work and yes, the choreography is fantastic but you don't really get to appreciate it at all, as the film is cut in such a way so that not a minute goes by in-between each and every fight, and no shot is held for longer than a second-and-a-half. The camera work supports this frenetic pacing also, as there are ultra fast zooms and whiplash-inducing pans that make you feel like you are riding The Scrambler at super-high speed. By 20 minutes into this film I had to pause it, just so I could catch my breath and take some Gravol.

As it turns out, Buddha's Palm was actually a television series in Hong Kong, and what I had actually stumbled upon was a condensed, DVD "movie" release of this entire, Xena-like series. That's why it's 180 minutes long. That's why the special effects cost $2. That's why it FEELS like a huge epic on permanent fast-forward. And that's why several transitional scenes in the story are just not there (throughout, characters declare that they are going somewhere followed by a hard CUT to: them immediately arriving. What's your hurry, guys?).

So, I guess I'm not really, actually able to give Buddha's Palm a fair shake, as what I basically had was the Reader's Digest version (as written and directed by someone high on enough crystal meth to reanimate a corpse). But I gotta say, I'm in no real hurry to track the real thing down either, as I'm a little bit scarred from watching the condensed version; it was just too, too much of everything, and none of it good (ok, except the fighting). Besides, the original is not available anywhere with english subtitles - shucks darn! Oh well...

So maybe the lesson here is that it's dangerous territory to randomly choose a King Fu flick to watch sight unseen... Maybe you can never just take a chance with some pretty-looking DVD cover art. Maybe you absolutely have to read up on this stuff before you seek it out. Just like you're doing now, I guess, you lucky, lucky devil.

Well, please trust me... Don't rent Buddha's Palm. Just DON'T!

Instead, if you are a glutton for punishment, watch the entire thing on YouTube... here is the first installment! I recommend fast-forwarding past the credits to see the opening "dream" sequence... Then feel free to lie down for awhile.

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