Original titles: Dip bin; Die bian
The feature film debut of the superstar of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tsui Hark, is genre skipping wuxia epic that mixes the customary martial arts mayhem with a creepy mystery plot and seasons the resulting hybrid with a healthy smattering of Gothic horror and fantasy. Produced and released independently by Seasonal Film Corporation at a time when the mighty Shaw Brothers still ruled the roost in Hong Kong, The Butterfly Murders looked quite unlike any other martial arts film of its day and set Hark on a road that would see him stop off at several more of these fantasy tinged historical epics in years to come.
The story is frequently bewildering, certainly not helped on the print under review which boasts English subtitles so poor they manage to obscure more than they enlighten. At heart it’s a mystery story centering around eight pages supposedly written by the scholar Fong (Lau Siu-ming) which supposedly details a series of mysterious killings at Castle Shen seemingly committed by poisonous, vampiric butterflies. Members of the Tien Clan, led by Tien Fung (Shutang Huang) converge on the castle determined to get to the bottom of it, teaming up with the irrepressible Green Shadow (Michelle Mee), castle owner Shen (Chang Kuo-chu) and his wife (Qiqi Chen) and Fong who claims no knowledge of ever having written the pages. The butterflies are soon unleashed but they turn out to be the least of the group’s worries as a killer clad in black armour and a a trio of assassins known as the Thunders have all turned up and the body count starts to rise dramatically.
The Butterfly Murders was, by all accounts, not a hit with the Hong Kong public when it was released in 1979, audiences perhaps not quite ready yet for the new direction in which Hark was trying to take the martial arts film. It certainly looks like nothing they would have been used to up to this point, more closely resembling an old dark house thriller than a traditional wuxia. It also plays against expectations when it comes to the “supernatural” elements which are mostly not supernatural at all – they make look like they are but almost everything that happens in The Butterfly Murders has a more or less scientific rationale. The various fighters may have extraordinary, almost superhuman skills but the film suggests that they earned them through years of training rather than through magical means.
The horror comes from the swarming butterflies and their many attacks on the castle’s intruders. The attacks are expertly filmed, overcoming the not insignificant fact that butterflies are rarely frightening in themselves. But en masse, and bred to kill they make for a formidable force of nature that sadly get rather sidelined as the film progresses, pushed to one side to make way for expertly choreographed martial arts scenes. The fight scenes are well done but they’re no substitute for the creepy Gothic terror of the early scenes involving the killer lepidoptera.
Technically, the film is rougher than the films we’re probably more familiar with from Hark (the glorious fantasy Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain/Shu Shan – Xin Shu shan jian ke (1983), episodes of the jokey spy thrillers the Aces Go Places/Mad Mission series, the heroic bloodshed sequel A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon/Ying hung boon sik III: Zik yeung ji gor (1989) and wuxia masterpiece Once Upon a Time in China/Wong Fei Hung (1991) among others) but that’s hardly surprising, This is the work of a talented but as yet still undisciplined you director experimenting with a long-established and much loved form and still finding his way. The editing is sometimes choppy and the story perfunctory but The Butterfly Murders has style and atmosphere to spare, particularly in the lengthy scenes set in the caves beneath the castle.
The Butterfly Murders may have failed to connect with audiences at the time but subsequent re-evaluations have positioned it in the vanguard of the new wave of action cinema that swept through Hong Kong in the early 1980s, a wave that Hark rode not only as a director but as a highly influential producer (he oversaw Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story/Sien lui yau wan (1987), which helped to spark international interest in Hong Kong horror films, and John Woo’s genre defining heroic bloodshed classics A Better Tomorrow/Ying hung boon sik (1986) and The Killer/Dip huet seung hung (1989)). It’s a darker, rawer more experimental film than the still pretty wild but more slickly produced films of later in his career but is no less interesting for all that. It may lose its way towards the end (the climax is ridiculous) but it’s a hell of a ride getting there. one that should please anyone with a taste for more off the beaten track examples of Gothic horror.
The EOFFTV Review 