Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema rewind. This is Rob Lamb. Hey. You may have noticed we're not doing listener mails on Mondays right now. We're experimenting with a new format. We're running Weird House Cinema rewinds on Mondays. Listener mails have not gone away. We're going to keep doing them, but we're just gonna experiment with doing them like we used to do them, which is to say, run them once a month or so and have them be a bit longer, have a little more listener mail to choose from, So
keep writing in contact. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And hey, let us know how you think this experiment is going. If you prefer it the old way, fine, right in let us know we can have that discussion anyway. Back to the business at hand. Yes, this is going to be Child of Peach, a wonderful nineteen eighties Taiwanese action fantasy adventure film. It's a fairy tale, it has demons, it has ridiculous actions sequences. This episode original we published
three seventeen, twenty twenty three. Enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and today's film for Weird House Cinema is the nineteen eighty seven Taiwani is action fantasy film Child of Peach, A truly special work of art, without doubt, I will say, one of the most frenzied and fairal movies we have ever watched on this show. This movie is so bizarre, so much, and so fast, and it certainly has a reputation online for being just a tornado of weirdness that
I'm genuinely shocked. I had never heard of this movie before you selected it for today's episode, Rob, So how did you find Child of Peach.
Well, I think my earliest exposure to it was and everything is terrible two minute clip mashup of scenes from the movie. And I watched this at some point and was just blown away by the weirdness, but also just assumed, well, these are just the highlights they took the you know, get a weird movie, if you get all the weirdest moments, you probably got about two minutes worth. And so I laughed,
and then I kind of moved on. But then when we were talking about Thrilling Bloody Sword, another Taiwanese fantasy film. In the last year or so on Weird House Cinema. I ran across it again when I was looking into Taiwanese cinema in general, and some of the extras on that disc from Blue Justin to Clue of the Gold Ninja video, and that put it back in my radar, and I was like, oh, well, if we've enjoyed Thrilling Bloody Sword this much, then I guess we've got to come back around to Child of Peach.
There are certainly some esthetic ways in which this movie did remind me of Thrilling Bloody Sword, but I'm going to make a very strange comparison. I kept thinking it had another kind of bizarre but familiar energy, and I finally realized what it was, and it's that this movie kind of reminds me of Morose Co aka Jack Frost, the nineteen sixty four Soviet fantasy film that we covered a couple of years back around Christmas. And we can get into more of the similarities and differences in a bit.
But I was trying to think why that isn't I think one reason would be, despite the fact that you could argue these are both kind of, whether intentionally or not, a kind of psychotronic cinema. They're both actually based on folk tales, so they have a kind of old soul to them, despite how weird they are.
Absolutely, yeah, And there was something we've always have taken into mind when we're looking at a quote unquote weird film from another from another country's film tradition, you know, like how much of it is genuine weirdness? And I think there's a lot of genuine weirdness this movie.
Oh yeah, yeah.
But then there you know, there's certain aspects of it that are in trench within a different film culture than one might be used to. And then there is this aspect of it that comes from folklore. And of course folklore is also it's a it's a rich welve wonder but also weirdness.
Well, yeah, fairy tales are like all fairy tales are kind of weird. If you're unfamiliar with them. There's just like the set you grew up with, so they don't feel weird anymore. But you experience the fairy tales of an unfamiliar culture and you're like, whoa, that is odd?
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, the ones in your own culture are weird too, you just don't necessarily have the distance to realize that. Oh yeah, the idea of Paul Bunyan and a giant blue ox. That's strange. That's strange stuff. Yeah. But anyway, the particular folk tale here at the heart of this is a Japanese folk tale, the folk tale of Momo Taro. This is about a hero child born from a giant peach, and it's actually quite famous. It was I was reading that it was utilized in World
War two War proper Ganda animation in Japan. It's been it's been echoed in various video game adaptations. In fact, I was astounded by this. My son super into Pokemon. He's super into this Pokemon Scarlet and Violet game. It's the latest switch game for Pokemon. And there's DLC coming out that is going to have three characters in it that are based on three magical animals in this story
that are also in this movie. So it's like it's actually the moment Taro folk tale casts a long shadow, is just one that not everyone is exposed to or doesn't realize they're looking at it.
Wait, Rob, are you telling me that the three guardians of the garden in this film are now pokemon.
Yes, I've seen the photographs, my god, or they're not photographed. There's still they're not actual like wildlife photographs, but yes, they're on the way.
This will become more hilarious as we proceed to explain the plot.
I also thought it was interesting because, Okay, in this basic idea child a baby emerges from a giant peach and it is raised by old people. This story is also reminiscent of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, another
Japanese tale. This is about a baby found inside a stalk of glowing bamboo, which has also been adapted many times, including in the twenty thirteen Studio Ghibli film The Tale of Princess Kakuya from twenty thirteen, which I watched not too long ago, and it was quite good, beautifully animated.
Well, that's another thing that makes Child of Peach unique. It is mostly this a wild, mad cap dance of monsters and giant peaches peeing on people and stuff, but it also there are moments where it really has kind of a sweet core to it, especially with the story of the old couple who lives in the bamboo forest who end up adopting the peach kid as their son. There were moments there where we were genuinely like, this is so sweet.
Yeah, it's a movie that packs a lot. I mean, it's just bulging at the stitches. There's so much fact in here, and you know, it feels like a very full meal, but very satisfyingly.
Okay, maybe we should do the elevator pitch though this is one of those movies where you have to see it to understand it, just like explaining what happens, and it doesn't really communicate the vibe. But the pitch goes like this. When the King Devil steals the Sword of Sun from the peach garden, it's up to a baby hatched from a giant, obnoxious peach to kill the devil and recover the sacred mcguffin.
That's it, that's the quest.
And now there's also some rescuing of a princess somewhere in there. There's a big, old rotund knight named Knight Melon. You'll hear a lot more about him. There are guardians that turn into animals, so there's a lot going on.
And this is another thing that kind of reminds me of the Soviet fantasy film Morosco, because whereas in that movie you get the feeling that they're just combining so many different kind of fairy tale elements together into a single narrative, this movie I don't know if they actually come from fairy tales in every case, but this does have that very like lots of different stuff thrown together into a blender feeling.
Yeah, almost kind of a circus feel like, well, you got to have this act, you gotta any clowns, you gotta have your lion tamers, you got to have this, and so it's all there, three rings, all at once, look wherever your eyes take you.
Their similarity I think has to do in part with the gorgeously weird sets and costumes and the onslought of peculiar supernatural images and themes, which again I think these are partly unfamiliar to us because they are based in the fairy tales of a culture that we're less familiar with in childhood. But also they just contain a lot of strange original elements that I suspect would be weird
to anybody watching. So there's that in common. But then I think there's another similarity, one that's kind of hard to explain but really does color our experience of a film, and that is about the piecing of the introduction of unusual imagery and ideas. Do you know what I'm talking about here, Rob, Yeah.
There's kind of a feeling like you're hit with one supernatural element and one speculative element and then wham, here comes a fairy and to narrate things from the other direction, and you can feel a little struck by it exactly.
Both of these movies have this habit of kind of throwing a strange new character or image or statement or behavior at you, and it usually does not give you time to be like, wait, what is this? You don't have that sinking in time. It's still just ripping ahead at full speed to the next thing, right right. Another thing about this movie, and this is partially a warning. Love this movie, but it does have these major who
is this for? Issues? So you look at this, you'd be like, oh, this would be good to show my kids. I would not recommend that. So it has a very silly, zany tone and subject matter that would seem to indicate that this is a movie for kids. But I think it is not at all. It is full of inappropriate content. There is almost constant swearing in the hard baked subtitles. So it has these subtitles much like Thrilling Bloody Sword.
At least in the version we watched, they seemed like they like burned into the film itself.
Yeah, and I and just to give ahead just a little bit on quality like this is they aren't really official. There's no official release of this film, yeah, outside of Taiwan, is my understanding. So any copy you find of it seems to be like the same, sort of slightly degread. It's very watchable content, but yeah, it's not restored, it's
not pristine by any stretch. And it has the subtitles in I believe Mandarin and English just hard baked in there, and sometimes you can't read them because those are white subtitles against white backgrounds.
Yes, yes, so there were parts where I really don't know what was happening in the plot because it's being explained. There's like exposition dialogue, and it's just white text on a white background. So I don't know. But okay, so there's a lot of swearing in the subtitles. I don't know if that means there is swearing in the original
dialogue or if this is a translation issue. Obviously, the as we will note in several ways, the hard coded subtitles we saw had a lot of I don't know what felt like very approximate translations.
Yeah, the subtitles are very rough around the edges anyway, and then they hit way too hard, especially with the swearing at times. And I guess I'm willing to attribute this possibly to just, you know, the crude nature of the subtitles. It's kind of like, what if, what if any of us were given the task of translating Bart Simpson's insults into a foreign tongue that we're not a
master off. You know, there's a certain nuance that has to be in place where you know, Bart is saying crude things, but they're not too crude or you want to imply this thing but not stated outright in clinical terms. So yeah, I kind of I've tended to give them a break on that and chalk it up to less than perfect subtitles in translation.
Okay, so you got the swearing. There's also some kind of jarring nudity, not of a sexual nature, but just like peach Kid running around naked a lot. And then I think there's a scene where your night Melon character gets pranked by just getting his pants pulled down and stuff. There is occasionally really gory violence, but mostly not like it. It's just these suddenly surprisingly gory moments interspersed with mostly more cartoony martial arts action.
Yeah, and generally the violence is directed at some sort of a demon underling. Yeah, but still you know, heads will pop, brains will bleed, that sort of thing.
Also, I don't know whether this one goes in the the kid's movie column or the anti kids movie column, but the movie is obsessed with urine. There is so much PP on everything. How many PP scenes were there. There's like Peach, the giant magic peach peeing on people. There's the dog like animal creatures peeing in people's food. There's other monster there's a lot of monster pee. I think there are at least four or five P scenes.
Oh really, I counted three, but I might have missed one in there. This is ironic though, because okay, today of publication, this happens to be Saint Patrick's Day, and originally we were thinking, well, we should do an Irish movie, and that ended up being a whole slog trying to figure out what Irish movie would be appropriate and it
would be fun. And for a little bit we were looking at nineteen eight six is raw Head Rex, which features famously features a urine scene, and we're like, I don't know, really, I want to talk about that urine scene, So we pivoted to Child of Peach, which has at least three urine gags. But like we were talking about before we came in here, I would say raw Head Rex is a urine movie and Child of Peach is a pee pee movie, and there's a big difference between the two.
And often what is in fact, in almost every case, the thing that's peeing in Child of Peach is not a human. It's big into animals peeing and peaches peeing, and Peach based Mex peeing.
Yes, and very much played for comedy.
Earlier, I did describe the weirdness of this movie as an onslaught, and I think that really is the right term for it. When we were watching it, we had to rewind many times because there'd just be something that was like what and then it was so bizarre, But then it was over too fast and we had to take it back and we were like, what just happened?
Yeah, this is actually a good movie to watch it on like a YouTube type format, because you need to be able to go back and re examine things you think you saw and think you might halfway understand. It is indeed just a NonStop sort of picture. I mentioned that everything is terrible two minute cut of Child of Peach and I'll embed that in the blog post for this episode at immutamusic dot com in case when anyone
wants to check it out. Like I say, with any other film, I would think, well, you got the weirdest moments and that's two minutes worth the footage. Fair enough, pretty fun, But no, there's so much more weirdness in the film. Like, if you just watch those two minutes with everything it's terrible and you think you've seen it all, you haven't. You can then go and watch the full film and it's still got so many things to exclaim about.
Yes, the treats just abound now.
As we discussed in our episode on Thrilling Bloody Sword, it's our understanding that Taiwanese cinema at the time was kind of the underdog versus Hong Kong cinema, and so there's this feeling Taiwanese movies of this period, particularly fantasy action films like this, the filmmakers really felt they had to go big. They had to be weirder than Hong Kong, they had to be riskier, and the stunts had to
maybe be a bit more dangerous. And I think you can totally see all of this in Child of Peach and a film that you can well imagine critics of the time and of the intended region thinking it might even be trying too hard, you know what I'm saying, like like, oh, well, they just really are trying too hard in this film. I don't think that's what most contemporary viewers make of the film, though it is certainly become a cult classic.
I don't know what that means trying too hard.
Like think of some outrageous comedy that not only has to have just a gag a minute, but also really wants you to make sure you got that gag. Hey, did you get that gag? We just did. Let me remind you of you know, like that energy of just like I'm going to assault your senses and I just really want you to like me kind of of energy. Which can be very obnoxious if you're encountering a film in its time, it hasn't had time to sort of you know, cure in the in the in the in
the cellar or anything as this film has. Like maybe I'm thinking of something like an ace Ventura, you know, And I don't know what extent Aceventura has matured in the Cellar either.
The Mega Dusk, Yeah is nineties Jim Carrey movies.
Yeah, yeah, not exactly the same energy, but you know, I don't know, just trying to think of movies that are a lot and maybe that changes over time and with different audiences.
Okay, I get you now.
But at any rate, this film, like we say, it seems to have been a hit because it spawned at least one sequel, Magic of Spell from eighty eight and perhaps Magic Warriors from eighty nine, both starring the same actor and both from one of the same directors. Now, there's no actual trailer that I could find for this film, so we're just going to listen to just a little bit of the audio from the film. Just give you
a little little tape. So this isn't going to be our normal trailer audio treatment, but let's have a listen. All right, Hopefully what you got from that is it's fun. Now if you want to watch the film before continuing on with the episode, just have to remind you that this one, this one's hard to come by. If you're looking for anything like an official release, I think you're generally going to be looking at him ported DVDs or
burnt discs. I know Video Drum in Atlanta that they say they have an acceptable copy of it, and you can find it streaming in various formats online. It's exactly the sort of film that I keep expecting Golden Ninja Video to put out at some point, but it hasn't come to fruition. So look around. There's there's some good places to find it. And also there's that everything is terrible two minute cut. If you just want to want a sample platter of what the full film would consist of.
All right, you want to talk about some of the people involved.
Yeah, and I'm not going to go as in depth on the cast, but there are some interesting folks to discuss. Now. Just a note before I go to I had to use multiple databases to get some of this info, so IMDb,
TMDb and also the Hong Kong movie database. So some things, especially the movie like this something, are listed on one database and they're not on another, or names can be slightly different, So just keep that in mind as we proceed, all right, Starting at the top here, one of the two directors and also one of the stunt coordinators is
Chung singh Chow. Dates unavailable on this particular director. Taiwanese director and his stunt coordinating and directing credits include both Peach films so you know this one and then the Definite sequel, as well as nineteen ninety one's Twelve Animals, which I've heard good things about, nineteen eighty five's Drunken Dragon, and nineteen eighty fives Hello Dracula, which is a hopping vampire film and film franchise that is going to We're
going to mention it multiple times in the ourt discussion of the people in this movie.
I was looking this up. I think there is also a Korean TV series of the same name that is, as far as I can tell, unrelated.
Yeah, I have a lot of questions about Hello Dracula, like is it a definite franchise or is this like the Italian Zombie franchise where it's all about how these movies have been released outside of the original market.
Well, I was looking for a stream of Hello Dracula to try to see if I could, I don't know, just get a little flavor of it, because I loved the name. When you told me this, I first heard it in the big bopper voice, you know. But yeah, this looks like a franchise. I would love to check out if I can actually get a copy of this movie.
The other director is chun Ling Chin, who lived nineteen forty two through twenty sixteen. Additional planning and directing credits include Dragonball The Magic Begins from nineteen ninety one, and yes this is connected to dragon Ball Z.
So as somebody who was never a dragon Ball Z van, I've only seen little bits of it and heard other people talk about it. I did have friends who were into dragon Ball Z. It seemed like a show that was very oriented around the concept of powering up. Is that accurate?
Yes, I think, And I think it has almost as large, if not as large, a footprint in many people's sort of pop culture upbringing as Pokemon. But I personally don't know a lot about it. My son has not gotten into dragon Ball Z. But I know this is the kind of thing like if you have dragon Ball Z in your childhood, then it is a part of who you are for the rest of your life.
It seems like it provides a useful set of metaphors for whenever you're getting ready to do something important, you know, like you're going into dragon Ball mode. Maybe you're powering up for this test at school.
Yeah. Yeah. So this is a live action nineteen ninety one adaptation of the dragon Ball manga and TV series that led to dragon Ball Z. So, for instance, this movie from ninety one has Goku in it, if that means anything to you out there, But anyway, Chin also worked on Hello Dracula, all right, and then the writer for this film is Chin Kang Yao born nineteen forty six. Extensive screenplay credits between forty nine and fifty three films,
depending on the database you're looking at. His earliest credit is the Bruce It's Bruce Lee l I. I've also seen this pronounce Bruce Lai, which is kind of fun because it's not really Bruce Lee. It's just a guy who looks almost exactly like him. I guess are close enough to market him as such. But anyway, he is the nineteen seventy five film Super Dragon Versus Superman.
That's what title.
Yeah, good title, and you know, implies some certain things that I'm not sure the movie is going to deliver on. He also wrote Hello Dracula, Dragonball, The Magic Begins, One Armed Swordsman Versus Nine Killers from seventy six, The Seven Commandments of Kung Fu from seventy nine, and nineteen eighty one's Chivalry Deadly Feud.
Okay, a few good sounding titles in there.
All Right. Our star, though, is is wrapped up in this character of the peach kid, peach boy, whatever you want to call him. Basically, like we said in the movie, a male baby is born from a peach and is rapidly grown up into a youth. That youth is played by the female actor Saw Lao Lin or Lamsu Lao or also Sharon Foster, so the name is listed different ways.
I think these are maybe different aliases. Certainly, Sharon Foster is an americanized alias that was probably used as some of these movies were marketed in other parts of the world, but this movie was apparently big enough a deal for her that it kind of earned her the nickname Peach Baby. So I think we can call her Peach Baby if we want, or we can just call her the kid however you want to cut it.
But she doesn't play the baby. She plays like the grown up Peach boy who is ready to fight evil.
Yes, playing a male character, but definitely has this kind of punky brewster kung fu spirit to her. Very very peppy. I've seen her described as a hung fu wonderkin of her time. She apparently attended a peaking opera school in Taiwan but quickly made a name for herself as an
adorable fantasy action movie performer. On various databases, her acting credits go back to nineteen eighty, but her career seems to really take off with nineteen eighty six's Coong Fu Wonder Child, a wu Shaw film in which our youthful hero battles evil forces.
Okay, could also describe the movie we're talking about today, are probably many others.
Yep, yep. And then comes Child of Peach in eighty seven, which apparently earned her the nickname Peach Baby. The Peach sequel follows, as do some other general youth versus demon films. Including twelve animals, sometimes with the actor playing a female youth, other times of male youth, and she seems to cross over into Hong Kong productions for a while as well, which isn't surprising given the apparent exchange that went on between the Hong Kong and Taiwanese films seen during this time.
As Justin d. Klu discusses and some of the extras, I'm thrilling bloody sword But I think of a I've been seen one of the Hong Kong film she's in. I don't think it's a very big role at all. But nineteen eighty nine's The Iceman Cometh, a movie about frozen then thowed swordsmen from the Ming dynasty who then have to battle it out in modern day Hong Kong.
WHOA, that's a good premise.
Yeah, I don't remember much about it, but I remember I ended up watching it because became highly recommended from some particular like Hong Kong film enthusiasts, who were like, if you want to see a sword fight, watch this movie. It's the kids. Set your Highlander aside because The Iceman Cometh. Anyway, peach Baby's tremendous, so much energy, just wonderful charisma. She's wonderful. Totally agree. Peach Kid rules all right. Now we have an old man and an old woman who are going
to be important to the plot. They end up raising Peach baby, and the old man is played by Tuchin who lived nineteen thirty two through two thousand and one. Beijing born actor known for such films as Dragonball, The Magic Begins. He plays Gohan. If that means anything to you dragon Ball fans. He was also in Hello Dracula one, two, three, and five. Note they seem to go up to six. So he's a very fun actor in this. He has a lot of you know, old man act kung fu comedy.
He has one hundred and seventy acting credits on the Hong Kong Movie data base. He's also in Magic of Spells.
This is one half of our Bamboo Forest power couple who end up adopting Peach Kid from.
The Peach Oh. Yeah, there are a lot of fun. There are a lot of nuances to them and their relationship. Yes, old woman and again there I think these are their names, at least in the subtitles, because they refer to each other as such. They like old man to do this, and then he's like, old woman, do this and so forth. But anyway, The old Woman is played by Yume Fong born nineteen fifty eight. She's apparently only in eight films,
including Magic of Spell and Hello Dracula three. But I thought she was delightful in this very funny obviously a much younger actor playing an older woman, but it was. It's a very spirited performance.
She she does great.
Uh.
There's a whole like chase scene between her and the peach where it involves the peach peeing on her. It involves her butt catching on fire because she's going too fast at one point. Uh. But it's great, and she and the old man have some really great exchanges that I don't know exactly what is getting lost in the translation, but like the uh the moments where she says like I could born a melon and the old man says, you can't even born a potato.
Yeah, they're One of the main themes with her character is that, yeah, she desperately wants to raise a child. And at one point and their their their their agent. As they remind each other by the they're like, should we just raise melanite? What if we raised Melanite. What if Melanite was our son sent from the Buddha And they seem to entertain this idea until something better comes along.
Melanite, who is a very large, full grown man. Yes, yes, but they do note that he looks cute like a baby.
Yes, yes, he does have those big cheeks. All right. One of the villains we encounter in this is I've seen her credited as Zombie Mother, but I think we can think of her as the Witch. She's very much a witch character. There's some big Baba yaga energy to this role. And I didn't realize it was a drag performance for the entire my entire viewing of the film.
It wasn't until I started looking through the credits that I realized this was the case played by actor Lin Koang jung dates unknown to me, but a stunt performer and actor who has a lot of fun as are over the top hell Escape matriarch of Evil.
Yeah, there are multiple really good cross gender performances in this and yeah, the Witch is fantastic. She wears a ziggy stardust wig. Basically, Am I right about that?
I believe so? Yes, Yeah, so she has a lot of pizazz. She's a fun witch and basically she just wants to find a good match for her two sons, a nice princess for one of them or both of them.
To Mary, that's right, kidnaps a princess from a castle and like brings the princess back to Hell and she's like, well, you will marry my two sons now, and the princess is not interested, and then she yells at the prince. She calls the princess some cuss words, but she also says, you're engaging in fault finding with my sons.
So yeah, fun performance. This particularly actor. I think it looks like maybe did a lot of like smaller roles, but maybe some bigger ones as well. So a lot of like swordsmen, a lot of thug credits, so you know, in action film, so one of the underlings who gets into fights with the hero, that sort of thing. Oh, but then let's talk about night Melon. Also sometimes credited as Watermelon Boy. This is played by the actors Sam Ping.
You know, sometimes a movie like this will just cast a big guy because they like he looks funny in the scenes, or so they think, but it's it's not actually as funny as they think it is. In this case, it is like this guy has a lot of I mean, his character is written in a hilarious way, but also he has a lot of just kind of look into the camera moments where I don't know it works, he just looks funny.
Yeah, yeah, I mean they also he has kind of a ridiculous haircut. Yes, he's constantly in kind of silly looking clothes. So yeah, it's really played up. But yeah, so this is we're talking about a guy who's you know, obviously a heavy set, comedic Taiwanese actor, and you look at the various roles he's played and you see, like, for instance, in Hello Dracula, he just plays fat cop, which there's no way that that's not just a comedic bit part. You know, I'm imagining just a cop that
is frightened by a vampire and runs away. I would bet money on that being the case.
But in this movie, while he is certainly the butt of jokes and pranks by the demons and so forth, he's also a genuine hero. So he's like he is in this film both a figure of fun and a figure of strength and courage.
Yeah, and you know, I think something that really is telling about this is that this actor also played the character Pigsy from Journey into the West and at least three films. Pigsy for anyone who's not aware, this is one of the major characters in Journey into the West, alongside the Monkey King. And you know, I think this is that's kind of the energy of that character. It's like a rotund, poor sign character who is humorous but also is a hero is also you know, very much
fighting on the side of good. So that might be part of it, and we've maybe seeing some Pigsy energy in this role, because yeah, he certainly gets to act cowardly at times, he you knows, some pratfalls and lots of humor, but he also gets to just really kick butt too. He busts out a suplex at one point. There's a part where he does like a really killer centon drop. This is where like there's a demon on the ground and he jumps and brings all his weight
down on the demon, like back first onto him. So yeah, he gets to whoop some butt as well.
He also gets powered up for extra heroics at the end of this movie. I thought the mechanism they chose here was interesting. The way they power him up is they have the little fairy like do a cupid's arrow into him and the princess, so they, against all odds, fall in love with each other, and this brings him extra strength to fight the devils to rescue her.
Yes, yes, love is his energy source.
And then once she's out of her jail cell, they're just like kissing through the entire final battle.
Yeah. So lots of lots of fun with that character. I ended up. It grew on me, Like at first I thought, it's like, this is just going to be a one note, one dimensional comedic character. But there at least two dimensions in play here.
Oh totally. I love night Melon. I think he's great.
Okay, now this is a much smaller character, but at one point one of the demon underlings that they battle is referred to, at least in the subtitles as Hercules. He's very much this kind of muscly ogre character played by Wong gin Wii. And if you're wondering, hey, is this the same big muscled ogre dude there was in Thrilling Bloody Sword that got stabbed up the butt with the thrill Bloody Sword. Well, let me assure you that
it absolutely is no way. Yeah, it's him. He has sixteen bulging acting credits on the Hong Kong movie database, playing mostly like giants, muscle men and bodyguards, you know the type. His earliest credit his nineteen seventy three's Kung Fu Inferno, and this is actually his penultimate role before nineteen eighty nine's King of the Children aka Hello Dracula four.
What does he play a vampire?
I'm assuming he plays a muscle dude. I don't know what kind of muscle did.
Maybe a muscle vampire in this So he's a muscle demon here. But in Thrilling Bloody Sword, he was a statue that came to life. It was in that scene where each statue had only a specific place on their body where they could be wounded. And then with the I think he was the last one left and it's like, oh wow, we cannot find his weakness until finally The
Thrilling Bloody Sword also had a little fairy character. Yes, strange thing in common, but the little fairy in that movie like used her X ray vision on him to determine that he had to be stabbed, and I think I think euphemistically called it the thigh and then but when they show it, he stabs him in the butt.
So yeah, they had a different person on subtitle translation duties for that film. Yeah, I feel like the subtitles for Child of Peach would have been a little cruder. But speaking of that fairy, not the same actor playing the fairy in this film, Shadow Lou plays the fairy born nineteen seventy eight, a child actor who was in
I think mostly Hello Dracula movie. She played ten ten in Hello Dracula's one, two, three, and five, and I think she is actually a Dracula, a vampire, a hopping vampire O Junghi in that movie.
You mean the actresses in real life?
Maybe? Maybe? And then finally, there are other wonderful cast members in this But the last one I'm gonna mention is Hwang Chong Yu playing the Demon King or the Spirit King. There are various ways he's describe the main villain. Born nineteen sixty one, Taiwanese actor who seems to have played a fair number of wise masters, vampires, and so forth. He was also a martial arts choreographer and director.
King Devil also rules the villains in this just across the board have an awesome Hellish charisma. King Devil is great, the Witch is great, all the little demon fighters. We should get into more about the individual demon fighters as we talk about the plot, but yeah, everything from Hell is good in here.
All right, Well, let's break down the plot here, all right.
Well, it gets right into it. We just start somewhere in the mountains, and it is clearly it's an indoor set meant to represent the mountains. It's kind of like, you know, it's like the guts agro Crag, but with like trees and happy vegetation everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, we're told that this is somewhere in the Himalaya Mountain. It's the Peach Garden. It's lush and warm due to the power of the Sword of the Sun, which is embedded in the hilltop ex caliber style.
Now, pretty much right off the bat, you start figuring out that you're not going to be able to read some of the hard burned subtitles because it tells you, you know, we're here in the Peach Garden. And then you see but right there in the peak, there is a different world the Peach Garden as the natural power absorbed by the Sword of sun It and then it's just a white text on white background, so something about
the garden I'm not sure. But then a song kicks off and I rewound and listen to the opening song probably fourteen times. It's a great tune, really puts you in the mood for happy, happy fighting. And we get to see all of the Guardians of the Peach Garden going about their business and doing transformations. So who are the guardians.
Here, Well, the subtitles tell us that they are. Well, the songs, the song that says us tells us they are the Naughty Angels, right, They're the Guardians of the Peach Garden.
It says, it says turning into rainbows something I can't read that. Dad and moms start playing magic Naughty Angels dance on the roof.
Yeah, that's exaccurate. So yeah, these three Elfish guardians, the subtitles tell us that they are tiny cock, tiny dog, and tiny monkey. I believe in general these characters are associated with the pheasant, with a domestic dog, and with a monkey of some sort, and we encounter them in their animal forms, and then we see them in this scene transform into their human forms, and don't worry. They have a third form that we won't find out about
until the final battle. But they are the guardian angels of the Garden, and the Garden is ruled over by what is described as an intimate couple. I take that Demeano cult power couple who are raising a plump, cute baby boy on the magic nectar of a giant peach, the Holy Peach. So Mother Peach tends to the baby while Father Peach makes swords fly around their cavern home.
Yeah, he does sword telekinesis in the cave while the mother like harvests the nectar that drips off of I don't know if there's a word for this. What is the little nub on the bottom of a peach called?
Ooh, that's a good question. I don't know, but it's prominently featured in many of the peach designs we see in this film.
Yeah, okay, So the little peach nub drips nectar into a big glass punch bowl.
It's a punch bowl.
And then I guess she gets it from the punch bowl and then does she feed it to their baby.
I believe that this is like the sacred elixir that is making peach baby strong.
But these two are the masters of the garden. And then so they're living in peace and harmony. It seems like almost kind of like a perfect existence it's implied to be. But then uh oh they they one day some I think something feels a miss and they say, stranger is coming.
What is this?
And then like four big balls just roll into the garden.
Yep, and they explode. Out of them come devils where this is the Devil king or King Devil and his cronies. They have come to claim the magic sword better protect the baby. And just another myth note or folklore note here. I think this character is generally referred to as an one in the Japanese tradition and certainly has ony notes into the character design here.
So how to describe the King Devil? He's wearing armor? Is this kind of a Samurai armor?
Yeah, it looks very very Japanese and it's inspiration which makes sense given the origin of the folk tale. And has big onwy teeth.
Huge fangs that it almost like fangs that look funny to try to fit inside his mouth.
Yep. Yeah, like it's a mouthful like Luckily this guy's not actually having to too much live vocal acting. I think he's just kind of got ah and somebody dubs over it.
But he's got a huge red wigs, a red hair, gigantic bushy red eyebrows. He's got a pail makeup on his face, the sort of samuraiish armor. His helmet has a big oh what do you call that kind of the upward facing crescent moon shape on it, like horns.
Yeah, he cuts a great profile.
Oh yeah, King Devil is so stylish. And so he gets there and he says, I want the sword, and of course, you know the Master is the gardener, not just going to give him the sword. So he manifests. He has his balls explode and they transform into these devils with green hair and horns who are wielding these long like pole arm weapons. And then there's a big battle that breaks out and the battle is amazing. I watched the first ten minutes of this film multiple times.
Yeah, this is a film where I think a lot of people you might not expect the martial arts action to be this good, but the martial arts action and this is great. I think maybe the martial arts is stronger in this film than thrilling, bloody sword that was
still really impressive and thrilling, bloody sword. Like, no matter what your issues are with not being be able to understand all the subtitles or know what's going on plot wise at any given point, the action sequences absolutely make sense, like they have build to them, they have callbacks, they tell a story with the action, and I think it's kind of a testament to just the tradition of Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema at the time that this was just sort of this was so important to making a film,
So it's great, highly recommend the action. We'll keep talking about it.
But while the battle is going on with so you get the Master, the man from the cave, and the three guardians fighting off the devils, the king Devil goes up to the Sword of Sun and pulls it out of the stone, I guess, and then it's like shooting this green electricity all over the place. So as soon as he takes it, the garden turns dark and snow
starts falling. So again I think it was established earlier that the sword is what makes the top of the mountain habitable and a lush garden instead of just a you know, snow capped rock.
Yeah, and then things go downhill from there.
Yeah, so the King Devil. Unfortunately, he kills the man and the woman, murders them, and casts the Guardians off of the mountaintop.
But not before Mom makes a plan for Peach baby. She takes Peach baby, puts him inside, puts the baby inside of the Holy Peach, and the Holy Peach flies off.
That's right, So it is. You know, it's Moses in the basket, except it's a baby in a peach.
Yeah. And you know, since the peach is alive and has personality, it's not just like random like where will this baby wash up? It's like, no, the peach must find suitable parents for the baby.
That's right, it does a sentient peach. Also, while the peach is flying away, this is where we first meet the fairy. I think a fairy just randomly shows up, Yeah, and just says it's strange the peach garden is gone.
She's mostly here, I think, to move the plot along in multiple ways.
Oh and also, as the peach is leaving, she goes and talks to the dying woman in the cave, who she calls the woman Landlord. I thought was interesting. It was like, is the fairy paying rent? But okay, we cut from here to meet the old man and the old woman. They are living together in the bamboo forest and they are going to a shrine of the Buddha to pay homage. We see that they are a you know, they kind of crack wise, but they are also in
many ways a pious and kind hearted couple. And they go to the shrine of the Buddha and have a conversation about how they are unable to have children. But when the woman goes off to wash clothes at the side of the river, she comes across a giant peach and from here unfolds an amazing chase scene. Rob, I don't know if there's anything you want to mention about this, but well, it goes over sea, not see over river, water, air and land. It has like a sort of dragging
scene where the lady's butt catches on fire. It does involve the peach peeing on her, but she also does sort of catch it in the end.
Right, right, It is a frantic chase. This chase sequence is well represented in that two minute. Everything is terrible cut and yeah, it's just includes a lot of antics with indeed, the peach peeing on her to put out the fire and so forth. But eventually she catches it and kind of locks it in a room back at the house, and so when the old man shows up, she's like, old man, you got to get in here and deal with this peach. And he's like, oh, old woman,
you were just making things up. I can handle this, and then goes in and encounters the peach.
Yeah, he says he's going to eat it up. I'm gonna go in and eat the peach up.
Oh.
There's also a very funny moment where in the foreground the old man and the old woman are talking and he's saying, you know, that's okay, I'm hungry, prepare a meal for me, and she's like, no, there's a haunted peach. And then in the background you just see the peach zooming around like behind their backs. It's like a ghost in a horror movie.
Yeah, just just zooming around ominously in the back. They have no idea what's about to happen.
And it's doing Poultery guy stuff. It makes the furniture dance and spin around in the air, almost exactly like Trumpy from Pod People. It has similar powers yeah, but I think the fight stops when the fairy shows up to convince the peach to stop doing satanic black magic.
Is she Yeah, there's kind of a fight that happens, where like the old man jumps up on the rafters and the Peach chases him and he's like, you stink, peach.
Yeah, it's so good.
But yeah, then the fairy shows up and she's like, hey, Peach, cut it out. These are some good folks. I think you need to open up and let them raise the baby.
That's all right, he says, this couple are good persons. And then so the peach cracks open, it hatches, this beautiful holy light comes out of it, and then there's the baby. And so the old woman grabs the baby and she says, old man, take a look at it. Real cute. And from here they adopt the baby, they make it their own, and it is actually shockingly sweet.
Like there's this sort of montage of her rocking the baby and singing to it as it falls asleep, and then we see the baby growing older in this bontage, and Rachel and I were watching this and she was like, what and why am I having feelings?
I know, I felt the same way, like, the baby is very adorable, and she's there's the part where she's singing, touching your head and touching your hands like a little lullaby, and it's very sweet. It's legitimately sweet.
Oh and we should mention earlier when they were at the Buddha shrine in the forest before they get Peach kid, this is when they met night Melon. So they're like, they're saying, we wish we could have a son. And then I don't know where night Melon comes from. It's like he falls out of the sky.
Yeah, I don't know. He's on some sort of adventure.
Right, yeah, and he drops down and at first you're like, who is this But they're like, oh, here's a big baby, let's raise him. And then they realize like, oh no, he is cute like a baby, but this is a grown man. And then we discovered this is night Melon. He's out hunting birds, I think, with his retainers, and they, oh, he shows off his strength by chopping down a giant stock of bamboo, like a tree sized one with his hands to get the bird out of it.
Yeah. Now there's a wonderful jarring transition though, because we have this wonderful lullaby, you know, rocking, nice, sweet, my sweet peach kid into into slumber, that sort of thing. But then immediately we cut and it's like, meanwhile in Hell, in Hell.
So the King Devil returns to Hell where there is a frozen old witch and all her evil demon children. And this scene is actually I think quite atmospheric and spooky.
Yeah, so this is supposed to be one of the cold hells. Now, there are numerous cold and narakas in Buddhism. I've seen it listed that there are total of like maybe eight cold hells, and they're defined by the cold sounds that the inhabitants make and or what sort of damage it does to the body. So are your teeth chattering at at hat in the cold? Or are you going ah ha in pain? Is your body merely covered with cold blisters? Are those blisters bursting and then the
pus freezing over your body? Or are you so cold that like parts of your flesh have fallen away and we can see your internal organs?
I don't know, it's one of those. It seems real bad here because the demons are crying out for relief. You see the demon children walking up to a mound and and then this old witch comes up out of the mound, like she pushes away the earth at the top of it. And the demons are saying or I don't know if they're demons, that maybe they're damned people.
I don't know.
The people there they're saying, get up, mom, get up, mom, And they say, Mom, we don't want to stay here. But the witch says it's destined because we've done evil things before. I think that means, like in life, maybe they did evil things. So they're stuck here in jail. She says, we're all cursed. We're locked up in jail. And they say, Grandma, get us out of here. And then she says, it's impossible. Let's spend our life.
Like this.
Again. I think maybe something is getting lost in the subtitles here. But then the King Devil shows up and he's got the sort of Sun with him, and with the power of the sort of Sun, he turns Hell into a kind of peach garden. He's like, Okay, now Hell isn't cold anymore, y'all can chill out.
Yeah, So he's recruiting himself some minions here with the power of the the sort of the Sun. And yeah, instantly, all of these newly won demonic minions take on a new air, a new likeness. So the old mom, the old witch here is suddenly suddenly has the ziggy stardust Wig. We see Hercules, the big muscly ogre dude. There's some other specialized demon troops as well. I think one of
my favorites is the wind guy. He's like this demon underling that has a big sack of wind that he uses in battles either to blow his adversaries away or to create a really stiff wind that they can't walk into, kind of comedically.
And the payoff on the wind bag demon is fantastic.
Oh yes.
But so the King Devil has defrosted the demons of Hell, and the Witch says, thank you, my King Devil, you give us new life and interesting, interesting take on the harrowing of Hell here, And so the Witch is obviously interested. She's like, King Devil, what's the sword in your hand? And the King Devil explains that he's taken it from the peach garden, and I think he explains what he plans to do with the sword. But most of the
subtitles here are against a white background. So I do not know what he says his plan is, but it seems to me that his plan is to do evil maybe and to rule over the people of the world and make them miserable.
Yeah. I mean, not to get too deep on this, but in freeing these people from one of the hells, like from the Buddhist perspective, like he's interfering with like the natural order of the universe, because again in Eastern traditions, the hells and hell realms are more about transforming into something better like this is No matter what the subtitles might say, I think we might infer that these are people who are being processed through this realm and eventually,
in another incarnation, will be better for it. So he's interrupting that, he's and he's breaking out so they can continue to be bad in a way that's out of alignment with the universe.
I think in one of the subtitles they do say, well, we've got a thousand more years here. Yeah, but yes, he breaks it breaks it off short. They clearly are are not redeemed. They have not improved their souls at all, So there's they still just want to do evil and they're going to help King Devil in that regard by brutally attacking a village. This is the next thing we see them do, Like the the witch shows up and she says, hmm, I get a thrill as I smell
these people. I want to taste their blood, and she gets all excited, and they just attack all these people in a village. That one part, they're like setting fire to houses and beating people down and just slaughtering them.
And there's one part where I think a demon attacks some kids that are swimming in a lake and their dad is on the on the lake shore and he I think he calls them like Bobby and Denny or something in these subtitles, and then he jumps into the water to save them, and then they send like a mutant shark after him.
Oh yeah, they're shark demons, that's right.
Yeah, those will come up again later.
Yeah. So they just they burn this city to the ground or this town to the grounds, village. And this is something this film has in common with Throwing Bloody Sword. Both films have, at least to my terrifying fire effects. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to this kind of thing now, but I'm like, oh, geez, It's like, like, that's that's not just a magic staff shooting a little bit of flame. I think they're using a flamethrower that looks like cheldy gasoline.
Yeah, and we do see what seemed to be unsimulated footage of like houses burning down, so they burned some real huts and stuff for this.
So the devil is up to some bad business and it really needs to stop. We need a hero, is what we need.
We need a hero. And what do you know, back in the bamboo forest, Peach kids all grown up, super strong. Now he's split in wood with his bare hands. He goes and he digs out a well for his parents so they can have water.
Now at this point, yeah, that the fairy has intervened sped up the development of Peach Kid because the fairies like this isn't happening fast enough. We need to hear out pronto. And so by this point it is the grown actor Peach Baby playing the Peach Kid.
Oh yeah, I think there'd been some earlier scenes where they were just like, wow, Peach Kid sure eats a lot, but needs to grow up faster.
Yeah, and the grandma and the grandpa, the old man and the old woman. They couldn't be happier because there's like, oh, our son is so strong he can carry us around.
Yes, So we see peach kid carrying there. I think they work as like, I don't know, loggers in the forest. We see peach kid, I think, by himself carrying a whole tree that has been feld. But then also just yeah, carrying the old man around in the forest, and the old man says.
This is my son. Me up, yep, yep, he's very proud, very proud.
Now somewhere in here, the king Devil and the Witch attack a castle and kidnap a princess. I recall this going by very fast, but suddenly they've just got a princess captive.
Yeah, and then I forgot about the princess for a while until she becomes important again. So yeah, it comes by it very fast.
But the witch says, it's your lock to have a chance to marry my son, and princess doesn't want to marry her sons, and the witch doesn't like this. She cusses the princess out and she says, you're indulging in fault finding on my good sons. And then the sons say mom, I want the princess. But anyway, the fact that the King Devil has kidnapped the princess leads to the organization of a gigantic rescue effort. So they're like these armies as symbol they're going to go to Devil
Island to get the princess back. And who's in charge of this rescue plan but Night Melon himself.
Yeah. There are a couple of other kind of military individuals who there's one one guy that is referred to as Bowie and the subtitles for a smug priest, the Dallas Priest.
He's very yeah, he's very like full of himself. When he shows up, he's like, I will defeat you know, I will go with you. We will defeat the King Devil, and Knight Mellan taunts him by saying, like, what, You're going to defeat him by praying at him.
Yeah, Yeah, he's very cowardly in this too. The first peeing scene comes about though, because our hero, the peach Kid shows up and it's like I'm strong, I'm ready to help. There's also a lot of back and forth where the father, the old man, is like, I will go to war. You shouldn't have to go to war and fight the Tavil. But then they realize the old man is too old. He can't do it. It's got to be peach Kid, so tears in their eyes. Peach
Kid goes off to join the army. But then the aren't The generals in the army are like, you're too young, you can't do this, And then the three Guardian animals show up in there, like how can they bully our master? Like that, let's go pee in their drinks. And so that's right. The monkey and the dog go and pee in their drinks that are set out without anybody, you know,
looking out for them. And then they show up and they're like, oh, let's have our alcohol now, And so they start drinking their drinks that now have animal urine in them, and they start making comedic gross faces about how weird it tastes.
I think they have to run a night Melon and Priest Bowie have to run behind a curtain to vomit.
Yeah, a good time is had by all, Oh.
But Peach Kid eventually, so yeah, we assemble the characters. So you've got night Melon and Priest Bowie and the armies and then Peach Kid eventually proves his worth by wrestling a bull I think, is that right?
Yes, yes, like slams it.
Yeah, slams a bull down. And then also Peach Kid is joined by the three animal guardians from the Peach Shrine on the mountaintop. So they're allied with Peach Kid. Now, I think maybe were they recruited by the fairy?
I think so, yeah, yeah, because they were a part of the original guardian crew for the Peach Baby, so yeah, yeah, they're loyal. And they also eventually tell Peach Kid what's up, like, tells Peach Kid about Peach Kid's birth parents and so forth.
Right, so they pee in the food and all that. But eventually Peach Kid is accepted into the Night Melon's retinue here and they're going to go attack the Devil Island together, but unfortunately Night Melon's forces are decimated by a vicious witch attack on the army encampment that involves an attempted seduction of Night Melon the destruction of his forces. Rob, do you're going to describe this in some more detail? What all goes down here?
Oh? I mean, it's a frenzied action sequence with also that seductive sequence of where the Witch shows up pretendis to be the princess. Night Melon's like, oh, I will kiss you, and then she transforms into the Witch before he can kiss her, and hilarity ensues. But then yeah, the demon force attacks and yeah, it's a great action sequence. Stuff flaming in the night. We get to see the wind Demon and yeah, I think one of my favorite mini battles in the whole picture is Peach Kid versus
Wind Demon. And we see this first tussle between these two in this sequence, and win Demon kind of gets the better of Peach Kid.
By blowing the wind out of the bag through a pipe, right.
Yeah, and we realize, like this isn't over. These two have a scored a settle later on.
So night Melon survives this attack. I think, does Priest Boe just run away?
I think he does. He's like, I better pretend to be dead so I can survive, and then he does that and then he kind of crawls away.
Yeah.
So the forces that are going to oppose the Devil King are decimated, but our key heroes survive. And at this point it becomes clear that this this effort is not going to succeed as a as a pure military venture with siege equipment like it originally was headed. No, this is going to be have to be a hero squad oriented action. We're gonna have to send our heroes in to the inner sanctum of the Devil King and stop him.
That's right. So for the final for the Final showdown, peach Kid, Night Melon and the three Animal Guardians mountain assault on Devil Island. And I don't know we can talk about the various elements of this, but I will just say the final battle is a religious experience. It will open eyes you did not know you had.
Oh Man so much. There's so much to talk about in it. Just for starters, since I mentioned the first part of it already, we get the second half of the battle of peach Kid versus the Wind Demon. And in this one, like peach Kid has learned the tricks and like the language, like the physical language of the
fight sequence is so great. And eventually peach Kid gets the upper hand and they do this bit where they both have this tube and they're blowing into the tube and peach Kid can blow harder and stronger at this point than win Demon, and she makes the Wind Demon's head explode scanners style, and we get a freeze frame of like head chunks and gore exploding from this creature's head.
Peach Kid as Michael Ironside as Darryl Revick, Yes.
Yes, absolutely wonderful. Like if the movie had ended at that point, I would have been like, fine, that's great, I can go home happy. Oh.
Also, before the fight starts to get a return of the mutant sharks.
Yep, there's a brutal fight with them in which was one of the sharks has the shark mutants has their fins sliced off by peach Kid, and then after the battle, they're like, hey, where'd Melon go? And then Melon comes swimming up with like a bunch of shark fins from the shark demons, and he's like, these are nutritious. I'm
going to eat them. So we get a shark fin soup joke in there, which you know, I wasn't crazy about, though, I guess we have to keep in mind this was the eighties, and I think the messaging against the you know, the ecologically harmful and ethically problematic practice of shark finning, it didn't really come until like two thousand and five or so, and so yeah, and then also, I guess it's better in that at least it's played up as kind of a dufust move on Melon's part, because they're like,
don't eat that Melon, You're gonna poison yourself, and he's like, oh okay.
Oh yes, because they're demon shark fins, not regular shark fins, so yeah, oh, I didn't think of that.
So anyway, they get him to leave the shark Fins and then they keep going into the inner sanctum for this big battle yet and then the battle ensues. The action is just sizzling. We get that final encounter between Peach Kid and the Wind Demon. Meanwhile, we have Melon going to rescue the princess. And we mentioned earlier how that the Fairy uses love to power him up, and it's also in this sequence where he has to battle Hercules.
Hercules, remember the is the demon from hell who's got big muscles and like a spiked club.
Yeah, very much, this kind of onny ogre, kind of a figure brute strength, and it's it's ultimately a really fun fight because Melan holds his own his own pretty well against Hercules, but he's he's just not getting it done. But after the love sinks in and takes effect. He's able to just kind of like casually kill Hercules like he's walking away with his princess, and then he kind of like flicks a spear with his foot back behind him and impales Hercules through the heart. Is beautiful.
That's the power of love.
Yeah, they could have played it would have fit perfectly.
But but but we haven't gotten yet to the most amazing thing that happens in this film, which is the emergence of mecha Peach.
Oh. Yeah, because everybody's at this point trying to I think the Witch gets dispatched. She gets blown up with a rocket shot by one of the three animal Guardian kids, and then it so it's just them against the demon King. But the demon King has this magical sword, and it's quickly becoming obvious that the crew cannot take him out. Like he's busting busting out against melon. Melon hits the dirt.
The three kids take on hybrid forms, which are hilarious because one has long monkey arms, one has like a dog claws, and the other one has a single uh pheasant wing. And so they jump into battle and these these these sort of wild form path of the beast. Uh weapons seem to work well against the demon underlings, but they are no match for the King. The he's punching in with the wing. Yeah, and so it evenings are good for I don't know, but they can't they
can't do it. They can't pull it off. And even Peach kid it seems unable to get the upper hand against Demon King.
So they've got a they've got a power up and we get we get a power up here.
Yes, it's the return of the Holy Peach. Peach comes flying back in Demon King. What slices the Peach up with the sword and the slices become other Peaches.
I forget exactly how we get the transformation into Meca Peach. What is the sequence here?
Yeah, I think Peach shows up, Peach gets sliced by the sword, but then the Peach pieces a symbol voltron style into this large kind of like a Peach golum, like a big Peach marionette. Every time Mecha Peach is on screen on the screen in this movie, it manages to be the weirdest scene ever committed to screen. It's just such a god Bonker's presentation.
I couldn't believe it it's and it looks so weird but also so familiar. This is something we were talking about before we started. I was like, Mecca Peach feels like something I've seen before, even though I know I haven't. I think it's just that Mecha Peach in its puppet form has like some visual similarities to other objects.
Yeah, like I was getting notes of mister Bill, notes of a QP doll, and notes of Panic Peete, that little squeeze toy with the bulging eyeballs.
That's really good.
But then very much is its own thing as well. And it's it's got a weird energy too, because it laughs with a Donald Duck laugh or something very much like a Donald Duck laugh, going.
Like so like the King Devil tries to rush it, but Mecha Peach blows a bunch of I don't know, the fog in his face and knocks him back. And then Mecha Peach peas on him.
Yeah, peas right in the Devil King's face, and he makes a he makes a weird face about it, and the subtitle say tiss off and that. But the Devil King's not gonna, not gonna stop. He comes in again
with the sword. This time, there's some like back and forth with the sword, and then the mecha Peach like bites the sword out of his hand and seems to swallow the sword, and then we get this awesome moment so that there's like, I think the first thing that happens is Mecha Peach just like knocks the Devil King away and like slams him through a pillar, which is a pretty spectacular looking stunt on its own right. And then he gets up. He's standing in front of his
devil throne and Mecha Peach opens its mouth. Out of his mouth comes flying Peach Kid with the Sword of the Sun in hand, and Peach Kid violently skewers the Devil King like through his torso and stewers him to the throne in just an absolutely quality kill.
Magnificent. I don't know what else we could say.
Just great. Like the only really way to close things out at that point is to have a jumping freeze frame ending, which they do.
They do, Yeah, and the credits are all and we get the song again.
Yes, oh my god, and it's just so yeah, so delightful to end on that note. Where here are heroes, here's the Peach monstrosity still standing behind them, which again, is this this perfect balance of like awkward, weird. I guess it was a marion that like a large marionette that they used like cranes or scaffolding to create Like this was not a it's not stop motion, it's not
you know, certainly not CGI. So it has a It looks kind of bad as you might expect, but also wonderful, and it definitely has a physical reality that you can get behind.
Naughty angels dance on the roof once again. Yes, okay, do you have anything else or should we wrap it up there?
Oh? We should probably wrap it up there. But there's I mean, there's so many little details in this movie. It's like, I say, you can watch the two minute cut, but you won't. You certainly won't get everything. And then once you watch it, you may have to go back through it and watch it again to appreciate all of the stuff that they just pack into this This.
Picture, Child of Peach truly a monumental achievement. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of fun. So you know, maybe it's not the most Saint Patti's Day of movies. We could have picked, but a lot of fun. And you know, i' like today is also my This is my fifteen year work anniversary since I started with How Stuff Works. So you know, this movie's a party, so it's my party.
Congratulations, Oh thank you.
All right, Well we're going to go ahead and close this one out, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Are you familiar with Child of Peach? Where are you familiar with it? Or are you familiar with it now? What are your thoughts on it? We'd love to hear from you. Also love to hear from anyone who's just more more expertise in like Taiwanese cinema in general.
If you want to see a complete list of the movies that we've covered on Weird House Cinema, well you can go to a couple of places like, I say, a blog about visas summutamusic dot com. It's a personal blog of mine. And then also the show Weird House Cinema has a profile at letterbox dot com that's L
E T T E R B O x D dot com. Great, you know movie reviewing cataloging website that I recommend We're a weird house on there, and if you follow us, you'll find a list has all the movies we've covered, and sometimes a snapshot ahead of what we're covering in the week to.
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