Magic Crystal

Rock Alien Line

Magic Crystal
aka Mo fei cui
Hong Kong 1986
Directed by Jing Wong
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Magic Crystal is another of these great, 80s Hong Kong action films that companies like Eureka Masters Of Cinema and, in this case, 88 Films have been releasing onto a largely unsuspecting public over here in the UK. This one co-stars a young Andy Lau and a young Cynthia Rothrock as two of ‘the good guys’ who are out to stop the shenanigans of a Russian gangster played by Richard Norton (who’s lethal and ruthless but who has a magnetic and likeable personality in this one)*. Norton would also go on to co-star with Rothrock in her big break out US hits, China O’ Brien and its sequel, among others.

In this, Andy Lau plays... um... Andy Lo, part of a special, ‘get in trouble and we’ll disavow all knowledge’ police force unit called Falcons. After setting up his character and his comic relief side kick (we’re back to very broad toilet humour in this one... yikes) he gets involved with an archeologist friend in Greece, who is killed because of a green crystal he has found in an underground cavern. However, said crystal is hidden secretly in Andy’s sister’s kid’s luggage and, when they return to Hong Kong, the rock bonds with the kid, starts talking to him and uses its powers of mind control and the ability to grant superhuman powers, etc, to try and stay out of the clutches of the bad guys.

By now, Andy’s dead friend’s sister has gotten involved, as well as his own expert fighter sister... not to mention two Interpol agents, one of whom is Cindy, played by Cynthia Rothrock (why the heck is she always playing a character called Cindy in half of the Hong Kong movies she was in?). So there are action and chase scenes aplenty in this movie and, yeah, it’s really not bad.

I did find a lot of the humour way too crude for my liking (which seems to be a problem I have with a lot of these Hong Kong movies... I prefer it when they rein it in) but a lot of the fight choreography is impressive and there’s a quite surreal sequence where a licentious, comic relief character has his feet and hands swapped... which makes for some, well, interesting viewing.

There are lots of little Easter eggs in this for movie lovers too. For instance, when the young kid is given super kung fu skills by the crystal so he can defeat the school bully, he runs his thumb over his nose before going into action, just like Bruce Lee used to. And the end sequences, where several characters gather for a big fight in the underground chambers in Greece, is full of straight rips offs of the archeological trap scenes from the Indiana Jones movies... not to mention a bit of a rip off, both sonically and, perhaps, a little in the look of... the final alien of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. But on a much diminished budget, obviously... this is beyond bargain bucket in terms of the films it’s... um... homaging.

But I honestly didn’t mind it... despite the tone of a lot of the humour, I quite liked this and it’s another entertaining ‘beat ‘em up’ from Cynthia Rothrock, doing her thing on a blown out knee for a lot of the time, apparently... having to go full on kung fu after she’d injured said knee doing a scene earlier on in the shoot. Although, why the heck an Interpol agent would just happen to be carrying a case holding an unfolding spear rather than, you know, arming herself with a gun, is anybody’s guess.

Like many of these Hong Kong action movies of the time, Magic Crystal has a synth-pop kind of soundtrack but, it’s not the most irritating one I’ve heard and it pulls it weight when it needs to, helping the pace of the film when it most needs it. So, yeah, I’m glad I’m finally piecing together these early Hong Kong action films of future stars courtesy of some of the UK (for a change) boutique labels. Keep ‘em coming.

*Alas, Mr. Norton died a few weeks before this review was published, at the end of March 2025.

The Great Wall

Absent Without
Official Leave in China

The Great Wall
China/USA 2016 Directed by Yimou Zhang
UK cinema release print.

The Great Wall is a Chinese/American co-production directed by the epic director Yimou Zhang, who brought some great looking films such as Hero (which I loved) and House Of Flying Daggers (which I didn’t but which still looked like some pretty impressive eye candy to me anyway) to the cinematic table. As such, I knew I would probably get around to seeing this movie, even though there was some pretty strong backlash at Matt Damon being cast in the lead role. I don’t, in all honesty, understand the backlash on this one as it’s not once implied that the character was, in any way, a foreigner supervising the construction of The Great Wall of China... it’s already well intact before his character and his companion arrive on the scene. Nor is he playing a Chinese character in this so... yeah, it’s strange what some of the bizarre things you see flying around on the internet are these days.

None of that stuff matters to me, though, to be honest. When I go to the cinema I want to see a great work of art and, preferably an entertaining one. Although The Great Wall is less stylistically rendered than I’d hoped, all in all this is a fairly amusing piece although, it has to be said, it’s pretty much bobbins.

The film tells of a couple of mercenaries who are after the secrets of the black powder (aka gun powder) and their expedition leads them smack into contact with an army at a secret base at part of the film's titular construction who not only hold the secrets of the explosive substance but who, more importantly, are defending China from a terror of which the Western world remains ignorant.

Originally treated as criminals for execution by Commander Lin Mae (played wonderfully by Tian Jing), Matt Damon’s character William and his companion Tovar (played by Pedro Pascal) join forces with the Nameless Order who are defending China against a foe that William and Tovar prove their worth against even before stumbling across their new allies at The Great Wall. So they collaborate although Ballard, another seeker of the black powder played by Willem Dafoe, convinces Tovar to help him steal the goods in a move which slightly fractures the clear narrative at one point but without doing too much harm to the film.

And, of course, it turns out that the common foe is a group of alien lizard creatures who landed on Earth centuries before on a yellow meteorite and who try to cleanse the land every sixty years. Personally I would have preferred dragons or something because I wasn’t a great fan of the design of these aliens and their weak spot eyes located in their shoulders. Nor was I impressed that the much talked about ‘Queen’ creature was really not that much different than any of her subordinate creatures and... yeah, that may be one of the reasons why I was suitably unimpressed by any element of perceived danger in the movie, to be honest. Whether these creatures were actually based on anything from Chinese legend is not something I can actually find out but, if they weren’t, then I think the creative forces behind the film could have been allowed to have done a much better job on the design of these creatures, in all honesty.

Now, I like this director’s style because his compositions are usually very tight and he often employs bright, saturated colours to create an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer. Well, he certainly did have his signature in moments during this film to be sure. There’s some impressive colour coding of the various clans of warriors fighting against the alien creatures in the story, with bright blue, red and yellow armour clad warriors all neatly aligned in different sections of the screen. For instance, the bungee jumping warriors of Commander Mae’s forces are all armoured in bright blue and this, to be honest, gives a certain order to the proceedings. There’s also a lovely moment towards the end of the film where Matt Damon and Tian Jing are ascending the inside of a thin, tall tower, the walls of which are regularly punctuated with stained glass windows which allows the director to throw in big, interpenetrating shafts of rainbow colours colliding on the screen at once. This is a great look and one almost wonders why the characters in the movie don’t stop and take stock of the opulence of their surroundings at some point.

That being said, I felt the movie seemed a lot less than ‘a Yimou Zhang movie’ than I’d hoped for and, though their were a lot of scenes with bright colours and somewhat interesting shot compositions, there seems to be a lot less of this stuff at play here than in any of his other works I’ve seen and it almost felt like it was being deliberately dialled down in some places for the US producers. Most of the time the film just felt like a big, pulpy, standard American action movie instead of the graceful, kinetic art that I associate with both the director and his country so... I don’t know, it all seemed a bit less than what it could have been, truth be told. I don’t know if this was because there were so many hordes of dullish CGI lizard creatures for the cast and crew to wrangle but it somehow seemed tired and yawn inducing when, really, what I was expecting from the director and cinematographer was for them to bring the ‘bright and shiny’.

However, the film is entertaining enough in a pulpy fashion and, although Ramin Djawadi’s capable and appropriate score made me think of Pacific Rim (reviewed here) a little too much, it reminded me of recent films like Victor Frankenstein (reviewed here) and The Last Witch Hunter (reviewed here) in that I felt they were the kinds of films the old Hammer Studios might have chosen to be franchises back in the early 1970s cycle of their studio. Added to this you had the principal actors plus a load of, somehow, familiar faces (including one of the director’s regular actors, Andy Lau) and everyone, including Matt Damon (who I would expect this of anyway, given his indisputably good track record), does a fantastic job in this. Willem Dafoe seems a bit wasted and could have done with a larger and better written role but I suspect, like a few of the actors (I’m guessing here) he only took on the role because he wanted to work with this great, almost legendary, director.

Yes, it’s bobbins but it’s hugely entertaining bobbins and, while I was less enthusiastic about it than I imagined I would be, it’s not a wasted trip to the cinema and I would certainly recommend it to lovers of period set fantasy epics. It’s no Ray Harryhausen movie but it’s certainly in the same cinematic ball park and, while I wouldn’t say the screenplay is any better than any of those early monster fests from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it certainly feels like it could have been written then and has that hokey, slightly toothless feel that a certain generation of cinema-goers might love. Although, like most of these kinds of fantasy films, this one could have been improved with the addition of Caroline Munro, to be sure. The movie even finishes up with an animated end credit sequence which is not a million miles away from some of those beloved, old Spaghetti Western opening title sequences like The Big Gundown (reviewed here). So, you know, there’s a lot of interesting things to watch out for. It’s not for everyone but you won’t know until you give it a try, I guess.