If you’ve long lamented the absence of local film series the Light + Sound Machine or Zack Hall’s all too intermittent Basement Tapes nights at Third Man Records, have I got good news for you. Third Man’s projector is firing back up with the launch of Creature Feature, a film night in TMR’s Blue Room devoted to some of the wildest and weirdest in genre cinema that might otherwise have slipped through the collective cracks of society. And let’s be real: Society today, especially in Tennessee, is pretty fucking cracked.
This event — sprung from grindhouse memories, arthouse revelations, roadhouse whiskey and bastard magic — kicks off on Friday with Challenge of the Lady Ninja/Kung Fu Wonder Child/Little Dot Agitates the Oolong Pavilion screenwriter Hsin-Yi Chang’s 1981 epic Thrilling Bloody Sword. (The film is also known as Heaven Sword, or in a literal translation of its Mandarin title, Sword Moves Mountains and Rivers.) Billed all over the internet as a kung fu Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (which it is) but also as an episode of He-Man dosed with psychedelics and historical perspective (which it also is), Thrilling Bloody Sword has ass-kicking little people, alien pregnancies, epic fights, force-field-related disintegrations, arcane rituals, Hydra violence, faeries gone wild, a big ol’ devil, and Elsa Yeung Wai San summoning spirits and banishing demons with Sandra Bernhard-in-both-Hudson Hawk-and-Shogun Assassin energy.
Lovingly preserved by the noble freaks at Gold Ninja Video and the American Genre Film Archive from the last remaining 35 mm print in existence, this is the only way modern audiences can hope to see this kung-fu-fairy-tale freakout. It’s a blend of timeless folk-tale archetypes, extraterrestrial messianic narratives, Taiwanese splatstick, and the outfits from the best drag shows of both 1981 and 2071. This is as glorious a rededication of Third Man’s exhibition capability as any.
