The surreal kung fu comedies of the Yuen Clan form the basis for this maniacal rollercoaster ride of Taoist sorcery, severed limbs, fat jokes, body slamming kung fu, and enough bizarre gadgetry to fill at least two James Bond movies.

DRUNKEN DRAGON (aka EXCITING DRAGON) is essentially a loose reworking of Yuen Wo-ping’s THE MIRACLE FIGHTERS (1982), the first in a series of surreal kung fu comedies released near the end of Hong Kong’s classic kung fu movie boom. That makes a lot of sense considering that the writer, director and co-action director is Chiu Chung-hing, a protégé of Yuen. Joining Chiu is MIRACLE FIGHTERS star Leung Kar-yan essentially reprising his role as an aged master, with Venoms alum Chiang Sheng filling in for Yuen Cheung-yan as the aged female master. Chiu also borrows elements from some of Yuen’s other nonsense movies including SHAOLIN DRUNKARD, TAOISM DRUNKARD and DRUNKEN TAI CHI. While not as purely zany as Yuen’s latter surreal kung fu films, DRUNKEN DRAGON is still fiendishly fun.

The movie opens with a scene that’s hard to top. In glossy rock star gear that would make Sun Ra look dowdy, stunt actor Philip Ko Fei leads a deadly assault on a Taoist temple to obtain a powerful martial arts artifact. He wields a vicious mechanical hand weapon that cleverly simulates, with a spring-loaded device, the magical effect of flying palms as seen in the movie BUDDHA’S PALM. But his two henchmen are more than a match for the unsuspecting priests. One uses a large red candle mounted on his head as a flame thrower to incinerate his victims, while the other sends an aeroprop emitting poison gas whirling over the heads of more victims. In the same stroke, the gas triggers the temple’s own booby-trapped food testing apparatus which kills the abbot with an arrow through his skull.

Once they get past a series of traps and arrive inside the chamber that houses the object of their desire, the assault team is faced with a crippled old master who uses two paddles and a mini row boat on wheels to fight back. Too bad for him the baddies came prepared with an extendable dumbbell weapon with spinning saw blades for weights that’s capable of severing heads and legs with ease. Yet the mission turns out to be a failure when Ko discovers that the only way to unlock the artifact is by getting his hands on the Seven Star Armor, which is now hidden away with one of the Taoist master’s disciples.

The pace at this point slackens a little, but the insanity continues as we’re introduced to the heroes. Venoms star Chiang Sheng takes on the gender-bending role of Granny, the aged protector of the Seven Star Armor who has raised Doggy (Suen Kwok-ming) and trained him in kung fu.

In a minor subplot, the pair gets mixed up with a local ruffian who poisons a woman’s husband so he can take advantage of her. When Granny steps in to use her Taoist magic to cure the victim, the villain tries to have her arrested for using witchcraft.

Meanwhile, Doggy’s concern is the reappearance of an old childhood sweetheart named Ms. Tiger who turns out to be anything but sweet. She’s big, bossy, has superior kung fu, and as Doggy’s supposed bride-to-be, is making his life miserable. She’s played with gusto by Chow Mei-yee. Despite bearing the brunt of numerous fat jokes and having a kung fu style that involves literally throwing her weight around, Chow ends up being the most entertaining cast member. She eventually returns home with an armload of meat buns, vowing to get thin and we sadly never see her again.

Philip Ko and his thugs eventually turn up looking for the armor. This leads to a couple of incidental run-ins where Doggy’s inferior kung fu is barely able to keep him from getting torched while Granny spars with a Peking opera performer whose body has been turned into a living marionette. The performer is briefly played by Taiwanese acrobatic ace William Yen, a discovery of cult filmmaker Robert Tai, who appeared in a number of similarly outrageous kung fu movies including SHAOLIN VS. LAMA.

Acknowledging that Doggy’s kung fu stinks, Granny sends him to train with an old Taoist temple schoolmate and entrusts him with the armor as well. Thus enters kung fu star Leung Kar-yan (LEGEND OF A FIGHTER) in one of his strangest roles. He’s an eccentric inventor of oddball contraptions ranging from a blunderbuss fitted with a shower head for a muzzle and a love letter made of Chinese characters scrawled on a Rubik’s Cube to an elaborate silhouette-making camera in the shape of an owl that also happens to be explosive. Although reluctant at first, Leung puts Doggy through a bizarre training regime set to the theme music from STAR BLAZERS that includes pounding rocks with a sledge hammer and getting poked with needles or beaten with a Looney Tunes-sized mallet. Doggy is even subjected to having a kung fu manual read to him in his sleep by Leung, although it mistakenly turns out to be a sex guide.

After dispatching with Granny, Ko takes her place in an attempt to fool Doggy into handing over the armor when he comes to visit with the amorous Leung in tow. After a brief fight, the pair make their escape, but not before getting some snap shots of Ko’s techniques. After more training, Ko catches up with them and a final match ensues.

Action direction appears to have been a collaborative effort with Chiu being one of as many as five choreographers. Like Yuen’s movies, the choreography emphasizes highly imaginative and often humorous combat with some truly painful-looking stunt flips and falls. The camera is frequently undercranked to achieve unrealistic speeds while fighters frequently get punched, kicked or thrown insane distances, but this only enhances the ridiculous nature of the movie. It helps that the stunt actors are genuinely talented screen fighters, stuntmen and acrobats. The trick editing and camera work accentuates their abilities rather than covers for a lack of skill as with lesser films.

DRUNKEN DRAGON regularly veers into the territory of lunatic genius when it comes to B-movies and comedy. The movie is raunchy, excessive in every way and full of amusing surprises despite being a rip off of the Yuen Clan’s work. (I hail the fishbone comb used by Leung Kar-yan as one of the best used movie props of all time.) Even when it drops to the basest of levels where juvenile puns are made out of farts and erections in an open challenge to what little pride any discerning cinema viewer might still possess, the overall fun factor cannot be denied. This is Hong Kong cinema at its best and worst and like a car wreck you can’t take your eyes off it.