Last Night’s Movie: Stormriders

Feeling sickly, it actually took me until this afternoon to finish watching this 1998 Hong Kong historical fantasy martial arts flick, released in Asia under the title Feng Yun. Sound like a recent Oscar winning fantasy flick? I’m not aware of any personnel or studio connections between the two films but the heavy use of wire work (so the characters can fly, for example) and other SFX as well as the reliance on Chinese folklore for plot makes one wonder. I wish the DVD had an English dubbing option instead of just English subtitles but I did enjoy watching. For a martial arts film, there’s a suprising amount of plot and character development and not as much fighting, which is fine, but the one sex scene–don’t worry, no female semi-nudity–wasn’t worth the 120 seconds of screen time. The film, which was one of the highest grossers in Asia at its release, is an adaptation of a bestselling HK comic book series. DVDReview.com has a good writeup.