Review: Owing more to silent-era serial films of fantasy from China than Hong Kong's early '90s New Wave, The Beheaded 1000 is a lumbering epic overburdened by a mix of genres, outdated visual effects, and intolerable melodrama. Overlong and mediocre in every way, the film is only notable for having one-time superstar Jimmy Wang Yu's last starring role and Joey Wong's last action role.

The Beheaded 1000 is basically a live-action comic book that gets progressively outrageous and inexplicable in action and story. Its major flaw is having a convoluted plot that rambles on aimlessly while frequently stumbling around amid massive holes. On one level it deals with the passing of old, regretful heroes and tortured villains forced to contend with their karma, but on the other it devolves into a comic book style, supernatural battle that has the wind plucked from its sails just as it climaxes.

Jimmy Wang Yu plays Ren De-tie, the region's top executioner who has successfully beheaded nearly 1000 convicted criminals including notoriously vicious members of the Blood Brothers gang. Despite their fierceness and martial arts skills these villains with names like Flower Shadow, King Pin, Claw Fingers, Blue Demon, The Flute Prince, and Cripple all fall under Ren's golden sword. Only the elusive Blood Lotus (Joey Wong) with her unmatched skill continues to escape capture. This is in part due to Lui Biu (Siu Yuk-lung), the captain of the guard whose growing love for her impairs his judgment. Surrounded by an ill-aura for the many deaths he has caused despite his righteousness, Ren retires and takes his wife, daughter, and his oddly named protégé Quick Kid (Chin Siu-ho) and opens a restaurant. But Blood Lotus takes advantage of the situation in order seek her revenge in a rather gruesome fashion. She's unable to finish the job, but the ghosts of the Blood Brother gang return to sentence Ren to death. A magical struggle begins involving the ghostly gang, Ren and Quick Kid, a mob of demon kids, one imp, and even the powerful Guardian of Hell (Wu Ma) who prefaces his actions with the amusing chant, "magic powers activate."

What could have been another decent Hong Kong fantasy film in the vein of The Bride with White Hair only falls flat under its own weight. The story is riddled with inconsistencies and seemingly random acts of nonsense that appear to be the result of quickly piecing together a script moments before each scene is shot. At over two hours in length, the film is in desperate need of major cuts to repair its sluggish pace. But that wouldn't help the fact that this film is merely a ragged patchwork of better Hong Kong films.

Joey Wong is cast in a role very similar to Brigitte Lin in The Bride with White Hair. She gives it the old college try, but she lacks Lin's intensity and ends up marginalized by the fantasy elements. Visual effects in Hong Kong films have been rare, even after being reintroduced by Tsui Hark in 1983 with the release of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. They only began to rival Hollywood when CGI was introduced at the end of the '90s. The Beheaded 1000 throws in just about everything including animated spiders, miniature sets, creature effects ripped out of Gremlins, and tons of cut and paste work resulting in unintentionally humorous beheadings and walking corpses.

It is nice to see Jimmy Wang Yu in one final action role, even if its in a film no better or worse than any of his other second-rate films produced since the mid-'70s. There really is very little quality kung fu action and only a single fight with thugs in a factory midway through that is worth mentioning. The rest of the film's action is all posing, effects, and other fluff. Much of it harkens back to the days before real kung fu action was introduced in the '70s. You will see Joey Wong fly around on a giant kite, Wang Yu performing only a swashbuckling style of swordplay, and even genre veteran Chin Siu-ho reduced to stabbing at thin air overlaid with poorly animated spiders. I actually don't mind these references to the film industry's roots, but it appears less an homage and more like the best some uninspired filmmakers could do on a small budget. For action fans, it certainly offers nothing of value, except to sate the curiosity of anyone looking for a lot of leftover, '80s-era special effects applied to an inferior min-'90s swordplay film.

The Beheaded 1000 would be tolerable if it had stuck to its modest action and fantasy effects. But the painfully contrived angst and ultra-heroic tone towards the end, especially when its drawn out endlessly is terrible. For this reason alone, there should be no regrets in passing up on this film altogether.