Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Butterfly Murders

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1979 Hong Kong wuxia film “The Butterfly Murders,” directed by Tsui Hark. The film certainly delivers on killer butterflies, but it’s also a moody gothic castle film, an action-packed showstopper and a bit of a slasher. (originally published 11/17/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. My name
is Joe McCormick. Today we're running an older episode of
Weird House Cinema. This was originally published November seventeenth, twenty
twenty three, and it is about the nineteen seventy nine
Hong Kong Woosha film The Butterfly Murders. Ooh, this was
a good one. I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
And I am Joe McCormick. In today's pick on Weird
House is the genre defying nineteen seventy nine Hong Kong
martial arts bonanza, The Butterfly Murders, directed by Shehawk. This
movie is great. It has everything. It's part Wusha, part
eco horror. I didn't expect it to be so much

(01:04):
like like Frogs and other eco horror movies we've done.
It's part murder mystery, but it's also all killer butterflies.
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
This one's a real treat. It's almost like a fitting
pre Thanksgiving dinner kind of a film because it's just
stuff to the gills as we as we'll discuss. No doubt,
this is perhaps a sense too of like talented filmmakers
first movie Syndrome, where clearly they had had so many
ideas that need to be unleashed on the world, and

(01:36):
they're all present, you know. So it's maybe a little
a little bit overloaded in that regard. But yeah, there's
so many interesting elements i'd throw in proto slasher, gothic horror,
and also there's a little bit of the old reading
of the Will drama thrown in there as well.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yes, absolutely, you know, one thing I really respect about
this movie is that I don't actually know what it
was called in the I guess original Cantonese marketing, but
the English title delivers on the promise in a quite
literal fashion. So it's called The Butterfly Murders, and the
Butterfly Murders is not about like a serial killer who

(02:12):
draws a butterfly at every crime scene or something. That's
what you would guess based on that title, right. It's
always that kind of annoying fake out, But in this case, no,
it is literally about people who are murdered by swarms
of bloodthirsty butterflies.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Absolutely, yeah, And I think my initial guess when I
started running across this title was, oh, it's a serial killer.
It's some sort of like, oh, he leaves a butterfly
as his signature or something, but no, it's straight up
butterfly sworms.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, there are human intelligences behind the butterfly crimes, but
they really are carried out via swarms of butterflies. Multiple
reviews i've seen compare this film to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds,
and yes, I definitely see some similarities. I think there
may have been some conscious relationship there. Except as absurd

(03:00):
as the premise of The Birds itself was, at least
birds have beaks and talons. This is about killer butterflies.
And the crazy thing is this movie succeeds at making
butterflies scary. Well, I don't know that was my opinion.
I don't know if you agree, Rob, but I was
shocked at how creepy it makes the butterflies.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Absolutely. I feel like it's essentially a goofy concept right
because you can break down and say, okay, well, there
are examples of butterflies and moths that have some level
of toxicity to them, but there's no such thing as
a killer butterfly. Butterflies are not threatening, and yet this
movie on the whole succeeds in making them feel like
at least sort of an ambient environmental threat.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
However, on top of just that home run of a
premise killer butterflies, I want to say, across the board,
I thought this movie was generally number one excellent, like
really well made, and number two bananas. It is just
nuts in basic every direction.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Now I do have to emphasize
that this movie in its currently available international form is
not an easy to follow film if you're trying to
just absolutely absorb every detail of the.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
So much plot.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Yeah it is, you know. It is a historic martial
arts fantasy adventure film, a wusha, but it's it's one
with the complex plot, multiple characters, parallel mysteries and feuding
factions and all. That's perfectly fair. But the English subtitles
are rough. And while rough subtitles can prove perfectly serviceable
for many films, Son of Peach and Thrilling Bloody Sword

(04:36):
come to mind, and those have some really rough subtitles,
but with this one, again, given on that complexity, it's
an uphill battle because there's just so much going on
to try and understand it just going off the subtitles.
There's also quite a bit of narration. So I'm not
pinning any of this on the film itself or the
people who made it, but it is a struggle to

(04:56):
piece all this together at times while also taking in
all the excellent details, those moody sets and the face
melting action.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
I'm gonna say that I think you can watch this
movie and get perfect enjoyment, like at least ninety percent
of the potential enjoyment of this film without closely following
what all of the factions and alignments and plot twists are.
And I was actually wondering when we get into the
plot description section of this episode, I kind of don't

(05:25):
know how I'm going to handle it because I made
detailed notes trying to follow the plot, but it is
so complicated. I'm like, are we gonna have to skip
over a bit of this? I don't know. Yeah. However,
I would not say that all of the complicated plot
machinations are just like completely extraneous, Like you can enjoy
the movie without trying to follow too closely, and at

(05:46):
the same time, I think all of the plot twists
are like really fun and exciting. It's just sort of
twist after twist in the second half of the movie. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Absolutely, it never really lets up. There's always something captivating.
It's almost too captivating. Again, if you're trying to follow
everything with the subtitles. All right, Joe, what's your elevator
pitch for the Butterfly Murders.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Let's say a scholar, a gang boss, and a wireflying
Marshall heroine walk into a castle haunted by killer butterflies.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
All right, let's hear a little bit of the trailer audio.
Note that this is from a rather long trails, like
four minutes long. I believe this is the original Hong
Kong trailer. So we're just gonna hear a little part
of it, but hopefully getting some of that excellent theme
music in there. Sang Sunset Sun say Junny.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Jump sum Away, see saw Babe? What can.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
Now? Before we proceed? You may be wondering, well, how
can I watch The Butterfly Murders? Well, it's not an
easy one to get your hands on. Unfortunately. Right now,
this is a film where the best available quality is
very watchable, but it has not benefited from restoration. Uh
English subtitles. They're not hard baked, but they are rough,

(08:02):
so if you are not a Chinese speaker, you're gonna
have some difficulties with it. It looks like it has
streamed on Prime before, back when they had loads of
weird stuff, but today you're limited to just a few
hard to find region free DVDs or international release DVDs.
We rented it from Videodrome here in Atlanta, and you
might find a watchable unofficial stream somewhere. But yeah, this

(08:25):
is one that it certainly has a following, and it
would be nice to see a, you know, a really
well produced release at some point in the future.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
I agree. I wish there was a really great Blu
Ray restoration of this because it clearly is a fantastic
looking movie. But even the DVD we had had a
lot of I don't know, it was not in good shape.
But there was a lot of like washed out color
and weird kind of like pop ins of different color
shades on certain scenes. So I don't know, it seems

(08:55):
like whatever source film material they were working from was
was not in the best of shape. I even found
there was something of a history of this movie being
hard to get in good format. I was reading a
post about it on I think dig hkmovies dot com.
This seems to be some kind of website about Hong
Kong cinema that points out that the only way that

(09:18):
for many years that English speakers could watch the film
was on a laser disc, which number one had like
an improperly cropped aspect ratio on the on the screen.
And also there was a quote commercial for an amusement
park at the end of side one. So I almost

(09:39):
kind of want to see it in that format. That's
like the like the commercials and the Star Wars Holiday special,
like they're part of the experience.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, I guess. I mean it's it's details like this,
and of course, sadly like this is still in play
for this film, but you know, it reminds you of
the links folks had to go to to watch some
of these films back in the day. You know, this
on top of various VHS dot and you know, VHS
dubs of a Japanese laser disc of some European release
and so forth.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
But like we said, there are some sort of under
the radar rips out there that are not great quality.
It's not the best way you're going to see it,
but this movie is worth seeing, so especially if you
can get access to to the DVD that's out there,
It's it's pretty cool. I'd recommend it.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Oh absolutely yeah, And again, the best version that's out
there is very watchable. This isn't one of those situations
like with pod people or extraterrestrial visitors, where the previously
available footage was just not great at all. More on
that because we're going to refeature that one as a
weird house rewind and I have some updates about the

(10:42):
available quality on that film.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Oh yeah, the old the old version of that was
almost like watching a movie being projected in a cloud
of smoke.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yeah yeah, this one though perfectly watchable. All right, let's
talk about some of the folks behind this. So we
already mentioned the director here Shika or she Heart or
Shia Hook. I think you'll hear his name referenced in
varying ways. We'll just keep referring to him as Hawk here.

(11:11):
He was born in nineteen fifty Vietnamese born, Texas educated
Hong Kong film director, producer, and screenwriter. He studied film
at Southern Methodist University in Texas and then at the
University of Texas at Austin. Graduated in nineteen seventy five,
worked in New York City for a bit. I believe
he worked on a documentary about New York's Chinatown and

(11:33):
then returned to Hong Kong in seventy seven. So this
was his first film, and it was a bold attempt
to revitalize with the Wushau genre with various genre influences
and excellent cinematic craft. While apparently not a huge hit
at the time, it's now considered a minor masterpiece. I
saw it referred to as such in an article in

(11:53):
the South China Morning Post by Richard James Havs, and
it's also considered something of a new wavessation in Chinese cinema.
It's long been a cult favorite internationally as well. I
was not surprised at all to see that Michael Weldon
had it cataloged in the Psychotronic Video Guide from decades back.
Now Hawk went on to have an exceptional career, and

(12:16):
it's still active as a director and producer. His directing
credits include nineteen eighties Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind,
nineteen eighties were Going to Eat You. That is a
cannibal film nineteen eighty three, Zoo Warriors from the Magic
Mountain nineteen ninety ones, Once Upon a Time in China,
ninety three's Green Snake, and twenty ten's Detective d and

(12:36):
The Mystery of the Phantom Flame.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
You mentioned Zoo Warriors from the Magic Mountain in multiple sources.
I've seen that movie highlighted as sort of his masterpiece,
or at least his masterpiece. If you're looking for like
like weird Hong Kong cinema more instead of his Western.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
Movies, all right, we may have to come back and
look at that one now. Purely Western audiences might know
him best from his films from two films particular, Double
Team from ninety seven. This is a film that starred
Jean Claude Van Dam, Dennis Rodman, Paul Freeman, and Mickey Rourke.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Have you seen this one, Joe, I don't remember if
I did. I saw it before I could appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
I think I look back to see what Ebert had
to say about it. Roger Ebert wrote, Double Team is
one of the most preposterous action films ever made. And
I do not mean that as a criticism. It will
give you some notion of this movie strangeness. If I
tell you that Dennis Rodman does not play the most
peculiar character.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Great, I mean, I want to see it. Now.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Another film that he did that international audiences might have
heard of his Black Mask two City of mass from
two thousand and two. It has a cast that includes
Tobin Bell that's old Jigsaw where he saw fans, pro
wrestler Rob van Dam, Tracy Lords of Blade Fame, and
also Tyler Maine, who I think he played Michael Myers

(13:57):
and some of the Rob Zombie films, didn't they And
he played saber Tooth in the first X Man.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, that's right, I have not seen it. I have
not seen it either. I guess I feel like I
don't think I've seen any of his other movies that
I recall, and I've got to fix that.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah, absolutely, because there's so many of them, and it's
he's had such a long career. Certainly the weirder entries.
I'm interested in Zoo Warriors, I'm interested in the Cannibal flick,
and who knows what else is in there?

Speaker 1 (14:28):
All right?

Speaker 3 (14:28):
The writers on this, we have Chiu Ming Lamb, who
is active from nineteen seventy nine through nineteen eighty four,
probably best known for this film along with nineteen eighties
The Buddhist Fist in nineteen eighty four is the Ghost Informer,
and then the other writer is Fan Lynn. This is
their only credit on multiple databases, including Hong Kong Movie Database.
All right, now, getting into the actors a bit. I'm

(14:50):
not going to highlight everyone, but try and hit our
main main ones here and Joe you may have to
jump in here because the names that I have are
mostly the character are mostly off of IMDb. You might
have a different version from the subtitles because I think
the subtitles to dB eight a little bit spelled differently.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, so our main character, according to the subtitles was
known as Fong. This is the scholar, the nerd of
the film if you like.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yes, And the actor here is Assuming Lao born nineteen
thirty one, Hong Kong actor known for nineteen eighty sevens
a Chinese Ghost Story, which we watched. He plays the
tree devil in that nice two thousand and six is
recycle nineteen eighty Seven's A Better Tomorrow two, as well
as the two thousand and three film the Medallion. I
think that's a Jackie Chan film. I don't recall offhand.

(15:42):
I'm also going to just looking sometimes I just enjoy
finding strange titles on especially international films. There's nineteen eighty
nine film titled Eat a Bowl of Tea? So why not?
Why not eat a Bowl of Tea?

Speaker 1 (15:56):
I like his portrayal of this character. So he is
the essentially the only non warrior character completely surrounded by
warriors in every other direction. So he's not he's a
he's a lover, not a fighter. But he's not really
a lover either. He's a chronicler.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
And yet they don't portray him as like a like
a coward. He is a brave non fighter in a way.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
Yeah, like other move other movies might have positioned him
as more of kind of like you're sniveling even comic
relief character, but he's more of a scholar in sort
of the traditional It's so it's sort of in the
traditional Chinese sense of of like, you know, he is
he is a he is a noble scholar who is
recording these strange events and sharing them with a with
with the with the with the surviving world. Yeah, all right,

(16:44):
we also have Oh what a character we have Green Shadow.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
I love Green Shadow. Sign me up for the Green
Shadow fan club.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Hees Green Shadow for specialty. Seems to be flying around
on wires and grappling hooks, and he's in like wire
based martial arts.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
I don't know when exactly this started in film, but yeah,
this is. Her performance in this movie is cited as
an example of what's sometimes called like wire fu or
like wire work in martial arts films, but it's not
one of those cases where like in some films, characters
are depicted as having kind of a energy or magic
power that allows them to sort of like fly or

(17:23):
leap beyond what would be normally physically possible for humans,
and that is achieved via wire based special effects. In
this case, she explicitly and openly uses wires. That that
is her martial arts style, Like she swings from chords
and wires and zips along on them and dangles from
apparently just out of the sky on wires. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, so yeah, she's a wire specialist and she's a
light played by Michelle Young born nineteen fifty six, Hong
Kong cinema actress. This was not her first film and
I think it kind of shines through because she has
this kind of I don't know, just this sort of
this effortless charisma in the film. Yeah, just just very likable.
She's a lovable scamp and just did a light every

(18:07):
time she's on the screen.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
In this situation of like death and disease and high
stakes conflict and factional fighting and betrayal and secret murders,
she's just always extremely cheerful and two steps ahead of
everybody else.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah. So yeah, she's a lot of fun. She's also
in the nineteen eighty cannibal movie We're Going to Eat You,
and she was also apparently a popular force on Hong
Kong television for a long time.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
Love Green Shadow, but I would say this movie actually
has a lot of really charismatic martial arts heroes in it.
The other main fighter hero we follow in this movie
is Boss ten or ten Fung, and he I also
found him super charismatic, even though he's less of a
nice character than Green Shadow.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
Yeah. Yeah, he's you know, he's a professional criminal in
and gang leader, but has this great stern face, this
great presence. I would almost compare him to sort of
a snake pluskin sort of a vibe, you know, an
Old West kind of a vibe. You know again, very
stern face, very stern presence, solid performance, great at great

(19:16):
great action role here. The actor is Shutong Wong, who
lived nineteen forty four through twenty twenty one, Hong Kong
actor and director, whose other acting credits include nineteen seventy
two's Five Fingers of Death. He also worked as a
stunt coordinator on various films, including this one.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, so obviously his stunt work in the martial arts
scenes is great since he's the stunt coordinator. But also
I think he does really well as an actor. He's
got a great face for the role. He has this
kind of stone like kind of immovability in many scenes
where you're just like, you know, no, he's not gonna
budge all right.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
The next character we have is the Master of the Castle,
Master Shum. I've also seen it as Shin in the credits.
This is another strong screen presence for reasons we'll get into.
But the actor here is Ku Chu Cheng born nineteen
forty eight Taiwanese actor, active from seventy four through present.
His other films include nineteen ninety one's a Brighter Summer Day.

(20:15):
Ninety six is Maijong and nineteen eighty one's Love Massacre.
That's not a horror movie. It looks like it's some
sort of a drama for some reason, as the English
name Love Massacre Oki doki. All right. Now, there are
a number of other like gang members and specialized fighters
we'll get into. I'm not going to highlight all of them,
but I have to mention the magic fire guy here. Yeah, Guya,

(20:39):
who's played by Eddie Coe born nineteen thirty seven. Easily
recognizable Shaw Brothers veteran active from nineteen sixty seven through present.
He acted in a lot of Wusha and did some
notable Hong Kong TV back in the seventies and eighties.
Eventually migrated to Canada and has appeared in such Western
films as ninety eight's Lethal Weapon four and twenty fifteen

(21:00):
The Martian, though I believe he's still quite active in
Chinese cinema and TV as well. But he has this
very expressive face, and in this movie he spends a
lot of time blowing stuff up, catching his enemies on fire,
and then laughing maniacally.

Speaker 1 (21:14):
You know, I was kind of surprised by the Thunders.
Like when they were first showing up, it really catches
you off guard because you don't really know whether they're
good guys are bad guys. And that really continues, like
long after they have appeared. You're trying to figure out
how to sort them mentally because this guy in some
scenes he's kind of You're kind of with him, he's

(21:35):
kind of one of the good guys, but also he
is like he is a nasty fire shooting killer and
he ultimately I don't well, I don't want to spoil
the ending just yet. We will have spoilers later in
this episode, but the ending is a shock and it
involves him.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
Yeah, yeah, so fun character. I did. When a Thunder
started really showing up in Earnest, I was also a
little bit worried because I'm like, oh, my goodness, is
getting more complex. Yeah, I'm not gonna give track of everyone,
all right, Just one other actor I'll mention Tino Wong
plays Thousand Hands Lea Kim. He was also the action
director on the film. I'm not necessarily all in the

(22:11):
clear on who did what on this movie, but he
is credited as action director and not just a you know,
like a stunt coordinator or whatever. His other films include
nineteen seventy eight Drunken Master and seventy eight Snake in
the Eagle Shadow.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Another great martial arts focused performance here.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, and then the score is by Frankie Chan born
nineteen fifty one, Hong Kong cinema composer, actor and director, who,
in my non expert opinion here absolutely knocks it out
of the park with a score full of more traditional
feeling wusha motifs as well as bonkers synth notes that
hit you right in the boards of Canada.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
And then there are funky parts.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
There's a little funk there too. Now I'm not clear
on like how I couldn't find any details about the score,
and I know sometimes you're dealing with a score in
these movies that maybe are borrowing from multiple sources, So
I can't say with any clarity how it all came together,
or if this is all original, or if it's coming
from other films or stock et c. But yeah, I

(23:15):
loved everything I heard in the movie. That first synth
cascade upon seeing a butterfly that really knocked my socks off.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
There are a lot of moments in this movie where
you suddenly get an extreme close up of a butterfly,
and then there's something that's I don't even know if
I would call it music. There's kind of a rhythmic
thumping or drumming sound that becomes very loud. It's almost
like you are hearing the movements of the butterfly's legs
or wings on the scale of an insect. But it's

(23:45):
like a John Bonham drum fill and it's really cool.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
He's credited with composing on a number of other films,
including seventy eight's The thirty Sixth Chamber of Shaolin, nineteen
eighty's Encounter of the Spooky Kind, seventy six is Mass
sur of the Flying Guillotine, And that one gives me
pause on this whole, like how the music come together,
because I know that's one that give memory serves famously
draws from Western music sources.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, too great effect, I mean, in a brilliant way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
He also is credited on seventy five's The Super Inframan,
seventy six is The Oily Maniac. A lot of movies
we've covered, yeah, And his directorial credits include nineteen nineties
Outlaw Brother.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
All Right, you want to get into the plot. Oh,
let's get into it, all right. So, as I teased earlier,
it's kind of difficult to figure out how to approach
this one, Like should we try to explain the whole
plot or employed the skip a bit brother principle from
Monty Python. I'm going to start off talking in some detail,

(24:54):
and then if if we find this is too too much,
maybe we can we can zoom out a little bit.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
Okay, sounds good, all.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Right, So the film begins with narration. It shows a
mist blowing in front of a full moon, and the narrator,
who we will later find out is Fong. The scholar
tells us quote, in the thirty six year period before
the New Era, two devastating wars took place in the
Marshal world, and the idea of a martial world seems

(25:23):
to be a sort of concept in this movie where
it's like, this is the world in which all of
the martial arts fighters sort of compete for power, and
it includes especially whatever this character will get to in
a minute, Boss Ten is doing. He's in charge of
something that seems to me to be maybe like mercenary armies,

(25:47):
maybe a criminal gang, maybe some sort of pseudo or
quasi governmental thing. But he just commands a lot of fighters.
So he's big in the marshal world. Is that how
you understood it?

Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, I mean he's kind of like a master of
a guild or guild of warriors kind of a thing.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah. So Fong tells us a narration that there was
this first war in the dim Chong Mountain. Many were killed,
Hungry condors filled the skies. There was a second war
in Wodong Mountain or in the bottom of Wodong Mountain.
It says there many were killed again. And then it
says from that time onwards, quote, most masters in the

(26:27):
martial world were all dead. Thus the martial world entered
the Quiet Period, lasting over thirty years. On the surface,
it was a strange truce. In fact, there were undercurrents
of unrest. Then emerged seventy two new forces termed these
seventy two Trails of Smoke, heralding the dawn of the
new era. And then here, while the narration goes on,

(26:51):
we see this barren sandy landscape with smooth white sand,
almost like a beach, though I don't think it's a beach.
I think it's a desert. There are mountains in the distance,
and then in the foreground there is a single, lonely
tree branch blowing in the wind.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
So already we're kind of in the deep end here.
But I love the texture that has presented because, at
least as far as I was understanding the subtitles on
all of this, like it's almost the post apocalyptic setting,
Like the warriors have become so skilled that they killed
each other and killed everyone off, and so we're in
this momentary, peaceful period, but there are still these undercurrents

(27:29):
of like reaching and grasping for the old military technologies
and tactics that will of course inevitably bring us back
up to where we were before.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
That's exactly right. Yeah, that's how I understood the setting.
There used to be a bunch of martial arts heroes.
They all killed each other. Then there were thirty years
without martial arts heroes, and now the martial world is returning.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
This would be a great They keep doing, you know,
sequels to all these fighting games, and it's always the
same thing every time, like do this instead.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, I think it's a good prim Okay, But the
narrator goes on to explain his own place in this,
he says. In these warring years, a traveling scholar, untrained
in martial arts, recorded the important events of the era
and sold them for a living. His name is Pong,
and I am that one, he says, to this martial world.
I was an observer, but inevitably I become totally involved.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
This is a good sort of taste of the subtitle character. Yes,
is that it's it's you can follow it, but there's
a little but there's some nuance missing there.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Yeah, there's some translation issues and things get clearly getting
lost in the translation to the English subtitles. We can
mention a few more moments like that as we go on,
but overall, yeah, you can follow what's happening. So we
see we see a man come over the horizon and
crunching through the sand. He wears simple robes, appears to
be a humble and quiet fellow, and this is Pong.

(28:51):
Fong approaches a castle surrounded by tall grass, and then
there is an explosion in one of its towers, and
then the narration continue. Returning from Tibet in the twenty
fourth of the New Era, I met ten Phone, leader
of the Ten Flags, and intriguing encounter and then in
a quite funny way, there's a sudden cut to just

(29:12):
like funk music like heavy funk groove and wikiwiki guitars.
So on screen we see a hand of an unknown
person reaching for the sky, fingers curled into a fist,
and then the hand opens to reveal in its palm
a butterfly. The butterfly flies away title screen, the butterfly murders,
and we get a song with lyrics. So I want

(29:34):
to say what the lyrics are. As translated in the
subtitles here, the lyrics are Smoke arises, Blood is in
the air, life of death. I must face it, trying
to escape, yet you are already trapped. Suspicious arise, Confidence shattered,
one whiff and I am down forever. Who is to grieve?
Who is to be glad? Isn't this all?

Speaker 3 (29:53):
From the Bridge to Metallica? Is one? Like I can
just imagine it, James Hetfield belting it out like da
da da da.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Dut confidence shot dada. But no, it's it's a kind
of uh lilting ballad sort of melody.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, it's nice. I think you probably hurt part of
it in the trailer audio we played. But now you
know what it's said roughly.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
All the while this opening credit sequence, while the music
is playing, it is trying really hard to make butterflies
look menacing, and to my surprise, succeeding. We see butterflies
landing and alighting from rocks along the bank of a
mountain stream. Then there are several shots where butterflies are
not flying, but perched on the rocks and just sort

(30:40):
of pumping their wings rhythmically while they stay perched there.
I've seen this movement before, of course, never thought to
interpret it as threatening, But for some with the right focus,
somehow it does look a bit that way. It does
look a bit like like some kind of I don't know,
like predatory animal flexing its jaws. It's interesting how framing

(31:02):
can change the way you see an utterly harmless animal.
Oh but also I thought, before the song is finished,
it just cuts off like in mid line and smash
edits to a roaring waterfall with no music playing. So
here it goes on introducing the characters. It says, the
powerful Tinfong leads his ten flags of men, so I

(31:23):
think he rules. The ten flags are ten different gangs
or guilds of martial arts fighters, and so overall what
he leads I think is known as the Tin Clan,
but there are ten different gangs within it, and they're
like color coded, so there's like the red flags and
the white flags and so forth. And the camera pans

(31:45):
and we see the bodies of many swordsmen lying dead
on the rocks in the middle of a river, with
blood running into the foamy rapids and swirling around them.
I think this is supposed to indicate like, these are
the enemies of Boston. Boston has defeated them all. When
it cuts to something else, it's like, Okay, here's here's
a scene for you. It happened in the twenty fourth
of the New Era, on the sixth day of the

(32:06):
sixth month in bar Bridge paper mill founded for over
eighty years, an unusual incident happened. That's the narration. So
here we see a pre industrial paper mill in operation.
Workers are boiling down wood products and rags in water,
pounding out sheets of paper and hanging them up to dry.
But it's not just a paper mill. This appears to

(32:28):
be a combination paper mill and printing press. So some
of the workers are in like a different part of
the setting, are arranging type blocks and pressing them with
ink and then pressing paper against them.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
I loved all the little details in this sequence. I
feel like he does a really great job establishing the
setting and the sense of enterprise here. It was just
really drawn in. Again, this is a technically a very
proficient film, so you know, all this stuff that might
be sort of wasted motion in a lesser film is
all very ink.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
I agree. I feel like this director is really skilled
with setting and situation. This is a movie where you
always have a really good feeling of where you are
and what it feels like where the scene is taking place. Yeah,
now here we get our first real time scene with dialogue.
A man, a kind of suspiciously behaving man, comes into
the paper mill with a proposition for the boss. They

(33:23):
sit down and share a cup of tea. The boss
I believe he smokes his pipe or something, and the
visitor produces a book in what looks like scroll form
from his satchel. He asks if the mill would be
able to print five thousand copies of this document within
ten days.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
What is it?

Speaker 1 (33:40):
The mysterious visitor says he came across this book by accident,
but that it is the memoirs of Pong describing the
quote unusual events of the last ten years, and this
causes like a music sting. The boss is surprised. He
almost sort of spits out his pipe, and the visitor
says that the boss will make lots of money by
selling this book. Okay, so the boss of the paper

(34:02):
mill is not just making paper, not just printing on it,
but I think also operating a bookstore and selling books.
But anyway, the visitor is like, okay, print up this book,
sell a bunch of copies. You'll make money. Oh and
just in the middle here we get this little interlude
where it's just showing us the printing the printing press
workers who are arranging the words on the type blocks,

(34:23):
and they're narrating. One is narrating the text to the
other while he puts the characters in place, and the
narration goes, my beloved came riding on a bamboo horse,
and the guy kind of sings along. I just really
liked this moment. Yeah, But the boss says he does
not think that these pages are authentically the work of
Fong because they do not match Fong's handwriting, so he

(34:45):
knows what Pong's handwriting looks like. And then next thing,
paper mill workers find the boss dead, hanging upside down
in the back of the print shop, and the visitor
is gone. He seems to have busted out through one
of the windows. It's very eerie. There are all these
papers hung up on clotheslines for the ink to dry,
and they're they're flapping in the wind from a smashed window.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
So already we have printing press drama in this film.
What was going on? What was this mysterious apparently fraudulent
work that was they were trying to get published and distributed.
We'll we'll find out later on in the film.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, why would this guy kill a print boss for
refusing to or for refusing to print this book or
for recognizing that it was not Fong's handwriting? Well, next
to the narration tells us that the bar bridge, the
place where the printing press was and the paper mill was,
was in the territory of tin Clan's White Flag. So
that's one of Boston's gangs. So it's like they control

(35:46):
that area. Uh, And so it says several days afterwards,
we see someone in a wide brimmed hat running through
a field of tall weeds pursued by a gang of
men with hooked blades. He has caught and unmasked, and
it is the guy from the paper mill, the visitor
who brought the who brought the scroll and apparently killed

(36:07):
the boss there, and the White Flag warrior who captures
him says, poisonous Wasp, you killed the paper mill's boss.
The White Flag leader tries to interrogate him, He's like,
why did you kill the boss, but the stranger doesn't answer. Instead,
he tries to fight his way out of the situation,
and he gets killed. So no answers there.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
They'll refer back to him, I believe as wasp. So
apparently poisonous Wasp was not like they weren't caught, you know,
it wasn't profanity. It was like, that's just his name.
He's poisonous Wasp.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, okay. Narrator goes on to say in the sixth
of the New Era, drought struck bandits abounded. The living
was difficult, starvation caused cannibalism. Those still strong enough were
busy digging up graves. Thirteen royal tombs in Wei Ying
were dug up in one night. General Ping Nam's tomb
in Butterfly Valley was rumored to be full of treasures.

(36:56):
Ah okay, so there's a grave full of treasures. And
we cut to a spooky scene of workers out in
the middle of the night, swinging pickaxes in a grove
of trees by yellow lamplight, and suddenly they stop digging.
One of the workers asks what's wrong. Another one says,
it seems like they're being watched. Then a lamp swings
from a branch, and these patterns of light and shadow

(37:19):
rock back and forth in the tree canopy while the
workers are watching, almost like they are expecting something to
come down at them from above, and there's this whispering wind.
The atmosphere in the scene is so cool, and after
listening for a moment, the workers start digging again. But
in the foreground we see a single black butterfly flutters
down from the sky and it lands softly on the

(37:41):
bark of a tree branch. Then you pan to tree
limbs directly over the worker's heads to reveal the branches
are covered in butterflies. Normally that wouldn't seem so menacing.
Here it really does. There are these very effective close
ups of the wings flexing and the spiral shaped probosis
like unfurling and catching the light. And so just when

(38:03):
the workers strike a hard surface at the dig site,
suddenly the butterflies explode with activity, swarming all around the men.
The men scream in pain, They're terrified. They fall to
the ground. Somehow the butterflies are killing them.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
And again like it's effectively done. The animals attack element
of this film is on the whole more believable than
most of the other all animals attack sort of films
that we've talked about in the past, Like far more
terrifying than frogs.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yes. Agree. Also, there was a green fireball in the scene.
I don't know what that means, all right. So amid
all these hard times and bad things going on, we
finally see a meeting of multiple tin Clan warriors. So
the White Flag Warriors meet with warriors dressed all in red.
I guess these are the Red Flag Warriors. They are

(38:54):
gathering on a cliff on a misty mountain slope. The
Red Flag gang is led by a woman named number ten.
The White Flag gang is led by a man named
number three. Number three says their boss has been acting
very strange since he acquired the twelve districts. I guess
that means he gained power over twelve territories. I don't

(39:15):
think this information is important, but just to give you
a flavor of like all the complicated like numbers and
factional naming that happens here. One of number three says,
since the Yellow Flags ran down the Pangs, the ten
Klan is the third most powerful of the seventy two.
Since then, Boss has quietened.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
Yeah, yeah, it does. Again. Part of it is the
fact that the subtitles are a little bit confusing. It
may not be the case if you're watching it, you know,
as part of the intended original audience. But yeah, a
lot of this feels like maybe we could have cut
this and maybe simplified it a little bit, because it's
not all going to be essential once we get into

(39:54):
the second half of the picture.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
But the Red Flag Leader and the White Flag Leader
discussed it. They talk about how they think Boss ten
is trying to gain repute and that there there's a
vendetta among the seventy two. I guess the seventy two
what was it called smoke trails? Yeah, that I guess
are different different gangs arising in this new era. And

(40:19):
so the fights between them cannot be solved. And their boss,
the boss of their gangs, is trying to look good.
I guess trying to get repute.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Yeah, just a great deal of martial arts gang drama
going on.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, and then done, dun done. Suddenly heavy music sting,
heavy bass and sudden, and the boss is here. The
boss pops up. This is the first time I think
we've seen Tinfung. He's also got another guy with him.
They sort of jump out from behind a rock and
everybody's like boss, and oh boy, Tinfong the boss has
magnificent hair. He's standing with one leg up on a

(40:54):
kind of pulpit of rock on the mountain side, overlooking
the gang members. Underneath him stands some kind of lieutenant
that we later find out is named Big Eyed, who's
wearing like pink robes and a cape. Tinfong himself is
wearing a cape or a cloak and this like cool
black outfit with kind of a V neck. He's just
got rock star hair. He looks really cool and stern

(41:17):
and like, yeah, he would be a good gang boss.
I think. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:21):
If he were to ask if we could dig it,
I would have to agree.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
We can dig it. Yeah, yeah, But he explains to
his fighters. He says, three days ago, Shume Castle sent
me a secret letter. The master of Shume Castle and
I only met once five years ago, yet he's asking
for my help. An unusual event occurred at the castle recently.
They say what event, and the Boss says, butterflies. Bathel

(41:45):
looks all around.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Now we have we have a call to adventure here,
we have the invite to the spooky Castle.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Then and then specifically, this is another one where I
would guess that the original line is delivered in a
very hard hitting fashion, but the way it's phrased in
the subtitles doesn't quite capture it. The sentence that he
speaks is they found butterflies which kill in the castle.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it, clearly it's better in the
original language, but that's what we get via subtitles.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
But here we get like a cut to an extreme
close up of a butterfly head. The heavy drumming sound
I mentioned earlier, and it's laying that groundwork. It's making
butterflies scary. So the Boss says, I'm going to go

(42:40):
to the castle. I need the white flags and the
red flags to go ahead and set up checkpoints on
the paths around the castle, to surround the castle and
monitor who comes and goes ahead of time, and I'll
be there in three days. Meanwhile, just to emphasize again,
like how cool a lot of the settings are here.
The landscape are Boston. While he's giving the speech is

(43:02):
just livid, like there are jagged rocks everywhere, the earth
is belching out these clouds of fog, and there is
just a steady rumbling sound under everything, like there's maybe
a volcano erupting in the distance or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
Also, Tinfung sends his lieutenant Big Eyed, to the castle
ahead of time to sneak into the castle find out
what's going on. So Big Eyed says, all right, boss,
and he goes to do that. But next we follow
Tinfung on the road, traveling alone, apparently in disguise in
a hood and cloak. There are a lot of disguises
in this movie, but he's walking along a path in

(43:40):
the country and then he suddenly stops and calls out,
you've been following me for two days, come on out.
And so whoever he saw he do does come out,
and it's green Shadow yeah, yeah, yeah, first Green Shadow scene.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Yeah, and she's just instantly delightful.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
So Green Shadow swings through the air, crosses the path
in front of him, then appears dangling from a rope.
Green Shadow is a young woman dressed in sort of
forest green robes. She is kind of a cross between
Spider Man and Predator. So, like like the Predator, she
uses the trees, you know, she swings from branch to branch,

(44:14):
but like Spider Man, she's kind of a web slinger,
like she swings from wires and ropes and zips around
on them. But also she's just so positive, Like Green
Shadow has a really friendly and exuberant personality and she
always knows something that other people don't. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Yeah, she's on top of the situation and she's she's
she's here for a good time.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Also in the scene, I don't know if tinfoone is
just he happens to be crushing a butterfly in his fist,
but he gets around asking Green Shadow, why are you
following me? And she says, I've always been interested in
other secrets. Yeah, we can tell Green Shadow you know
everybody's secrets before. Yeah, you clearly are are nosy. Now
they appear to have some kind of pass like they

(44:59):
know each other. It's not not really fully explained, but
I don't know if they've been enemies in the past
or allies, but they know each other somehow. I don't
know if you caught any detail on that I missed, Rob.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
Now I just kind of picked up like maybe it's
like a professional thing, you know. It's like, well, of
course I know Green Shadow. Everybody's heard about the exploits
of Green Shadow, and of course Fung is the boss,
so everybody knows who Fung is.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
But we do know she's not one of the seventy
two factions that are fighting because Green Shadow warns him.
She says, many amongst the seventy two are coming for you.
Boss Ten says they'll all end up the same. Green
Shadow says, I'm not amongst the seventy two, so I
should be the exception. So Green Shadow offers to help him.

(45:40):
At first, he's kind of stand offish, but she reveals
she knows a lot. She knows what's going on. She
knows he's going to the Shum Castle. She knows what
happened at the Barbridge paper Mill. She knows about the
murder and the eight pages of Fung's memoirs. She reveals
that she knows about the killer butterflies since they are
mentioned in the memoirs that were that the guy was
trying to get published at this paper mill. Tin Fung

(46:04):
is like, you believe in Fong's memoirs, and she says, yeah,
he actually knows a lot. And Ten reveals his anti
scholar bias here. He's like, it's easy for scholars to talk,
but there's a great difference between writing and fighting.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
Yeah, and this will come up time and time again.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Good point, So Ten isn't going to trust Fong. But
then Green Shadow makes a good point. She's like, at
least he's not amongst the seventy two, so you know,
Ten knows he's not one of the enemies that's coming
for him. So they agree to go to Schum Castle together,
just as he ordered. Tin Fung's gang is already there
ahead of him, and they report that there has been
neary a peep from the castle, no lights, no smoke,

(46:44):
it's like there's no one there. And Big Eyed, the
lieutenant who is sent ahead ahead of time to investigate
the castle and report back, nobody's heard anything from him,
so they go inside inside the castle walls. At first,
everything appears deserted. The courtyard is kind of barren. It's
the sandy rectangle of earth with no signs of life.

(47:04):
It's almost even like a lot of the like. All
the furniture has been removed from the castle. It's just empty.
And Tin Fung's men and they scour the grounds. They
run along the battlements at the top of the walls.
They run in and out of the buildings. Tin Fung
himself wanders into one room where a massive shape of
some sort is hidden underneath a curtain. He pulls the

(47:26):
curtain away to reveal a demonic statue. Seems to be
some kind of malevolent, predatory or dragon like figure. It's
got real like Pazuzu statue from The Exorcist energy.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Yeah, it definitely has more of the vibe of a
European or American Gothic castle set as opposed to like
a really ornate Chinese dragon. Because I mean, it is
obviously a set, and we'll see it later when it
of course explodes, because you can tell, you can tell
this was made to blow up. This thing's blow up

(48:00):
and crash at some point, and it will in spectacular fashion.
But yeah, this scene and all the other Like again,
the director just does a great job establishing location. You know,
where you are in the castle, and especially as we
begin to add on different sections of it.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
I agree as an aside, I feel like that is
a really important and underappreciated skill in filmmaking, underappreciated by
a lot of audiences. The importance of a director making
you using film to make you understand and feel a setting.
You know, there's some filmmakers who are really good at this,
like I would pull it, like the Coen Brothers are

(48:40):
really good at making you, like understand the feeling of
a room where the scene is taking place. Of course,
a lot of good directors are able to do this,
but a common feature of bad filmmaking is that like,
scenes are taking place in a setting where you don't
feel like you understand where you are right And this
is the opposite as we were saying, that the settings

(49:01):
are really well established, you feel them.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
Yeah, And it's effortless and it doesn't require language at all.
So it's one of those things that the subtitles don't
get in the way of that because it's speaking directly
to you no matter what your native tongue is right.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
But anyway, the White Flag fighters come to Tinfong to
inform him that they have found Big Eyed. Big Eyed
is dead, his body lying beside a pond in the courtyard.
His skin is covered in scorch marks and black smudges,
and inside his clenched fist is a butterfly. Of course,
Tinfung is furious at this to find his lieutenant dead.

(49:37):
Just then he and Green Shadow finally meet someone who
appears to be an inhabitant of the castle. It's a
young woman holding a lantern. Tinfong runs up to her
and tries to question her, but she seems either unable
or unwilling to speak, and she also seems afraid of him,
and they wonder why. Tinfongs like, why is she carrying
a lantern in the daytime, but Green Shadow, who again

(49:59):
always seem to be mentally one step ahead, says it's
because she came from underground. Green Shadow's right. They rush
around the corner to find a cellar door propped open,
and then the young woman with the lantern leads Tinfung
and Green Shadow down the stairs into an underground tunnel,
where they meet the master of the castle. It is
Master Schum. He's very glad they've come, and he escorts

(50:21):
them deeper into the rocky catacombs, where they find a
kind of improvised living space illuminated by torchlight. So down
in the space is Master Shum. There is the girl
with the lantern, whose name we learn is Chi. And
there is the Madam of the castle, Madam Schumer, Ladyshum.
Also there is another guest who has arrived. It is

(50:44):
the scholar Pong, remember him from earlier, He was the narrator.
This is the alleged author of the eight pages of
memoir from the incident at the paper mill. And as
we could expect, there is tension between Tinfung and Pong.
Boston does not trust him. He says, although your memoirs
have some repute, a scholar like you can only get

(51:04):
in the way and make things worse. He's not a
fan of these nerdy scholars. But Master Schum says, hey,
he needs Fong here. He invited him here to chronicle
the events that have happened and to make an accurate
report of what's going on at the castle, to serve
as a warning to others.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
All right, so already you know We've got this strong
mystery gothic plot developing here, mysterious castle, strange events. People
with diverse backgrounds have been invited to witness what is
unfolding there.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Here. Master Shum explains the backstory, and so we see
it like re enacted as he tells it. He says,
earlier this year, on the fifth day of the fifth month,
there was it was a day to commemorate his ancestor's death,
and so we see a sort of temple shrine within
the castle grounds and there are offerings. There's like a
roasted chicken and a pig's head and a fish being

(52:01):
offered up, I guess in honor of his ancestor. And
the first strange occurrence here is that during the celebration,
a servant finds a reeking display in one of the
rooms of the castle. It looks like some kind of
dead tropical bird hanging upside down with its feathers covered
in blood, and it has a butterfly in its beak.

(52:22):
Second event is one night Lady Shum is weaving in
her chambers and is bitten so that blood is drawn,
but she's bitten by a butterfly that lands on her
neck and then on her hand. After this, the servants
decide the castle is cursed. They start running away, leaving
the Schum family by themselves. One day, Master Shum finds

(52:42):
that masses of butterflies are swarming around the outside of
the windows, and the butterflies attack. They kill his last
loyal servant, as Master Shum himself barely escapes with his
life into the underground tunnels. So now it appears to
be just Schum, Lady Shum and she living down there
in the tunnels. Everybody else is dead or has fled

(53:03):
the castle.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
And this is a great set, Like the more details
we get, the more amazing it is. Yeah, it's like
they're living underneath the Gothic castle in this complex that
it seems just increasingly. I mean, it's expressly described as
a labyrinth later on, with lots of confusing twists and
secret passages.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
So just great setting, agree, And I love the rooms
they find in these passageways later on. But oh, we
also get some backstory about the third person there, about Chi,
the servant. Lady Schum explains that she found her alone
while traveling away from the castle years ago, that she
was deaf and mute. So the lady. So Lady Shum

(53:44):
brought Chi back to the castle with her to live
there and serve as her personal maid. So we met
all the characters here now. Later that night, Fong the
scholar and Master Schum have a conversation in Master Shum's
secret meditation chamber where he's got like a he's got
a go boards.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
I think, yeah, I guess it's supposed to be like
a study. I think we might more realistically think of
it as his secret study.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yeah, so Fong says, why did you bring me here?
And Schum says, do you believe in ghosts? Fong takes
a diplomatic view that I think could be read multiple
different ways. He says, ghosts exist if you believe in them,
otherwise they don't. And I feel like you could there
are a few different ways you could take that. I
don't know how you read it, Rob.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
I mean, I took it to be like Thong is
a no nonsense kind of guy. You know, it's like
that that realizes that belief in ghosts is a powerful thing,
even if ghosts don't exist.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's sort of how I took it too.
But then I also wondered if, well, maybe he means, like,
ghosts do exist and have power, but only over those
that believe in them. And yeah, but I don't know, Yeah,
either way it works. Yeah, anyway, Master Shum starts talking
about the anniversary of the death of his father, and
there is a there was a funny moment here with

(55:01):
like the way the subtitles work, with like the timing.
Master Shum says he's killed by butterflies ten years ago,
and then there's a music sting and Fong bolts up
from his chair. But then Master Shum says kind of
sadly that his father didn't believe in ghosts, and for
this reason, he had no worries about trying to dig
up the buried treasures of the General of Pinan or

(55:24):
General Pinan. I think this is maybe the same tomb
we saw being dug up by people earlier in the movie.
I don't know if it was supposed to be a
depiction of the same scene, but you know, people digging
for treasure in a general's tomb, though the general's name
appeared to be spelled differently.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
Yeah, it has to be the same, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
Master Shum says his father lived peacefully for ten years
after this act of grave robbing. But then one day
ten years later was attacked by a swarm of killer butterflies.
They assaulted the castle in the form of a cloud
and descended to slaughter many men that day, and in
the reenactment we see butterflies circling the towers in the
castle walls. They leave soldiers and servants lying bloody in

(56:04):
the courtyard. There are a lot of these sickening close
ups of butterflies crawling over dead men. And then another
line where I think it's not supposed to be funny,
but something gets lost in the In the subtitle, Fong says,
don't worry over it, let's work out together.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
Yeah. The subtitles are again generally confusing in places, but
rarely like actually, goofy, This is I think maybe the
one real exception, And I had a nice hearty laugh
about it.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
I think what it must mean is let's work it
out together. I think he's saying like, we will solve
the problem. That's how I took it, right, Yeah, that's
I think clearly what they meant. But I also I
couldn't help it. Then imagine like, yeah, let's go work out,
let's let's hit the weights Yeah, some of these characters
might work out together, but I don't think it would
be Fong who would do it. He does not even lift. Okay. Meanwhile,

(57:01):
we get a report to Tinfung about Big Eyed and
how he died. They say that his wounds are made
of numerous tiny holes and his skin is swollen, all
symptoms of poison. And in a line that will be
repeated by many characters many times throughout the film, someone says,
are there really killer butterflies? It's sort of unanswered. It

(57:22):
seems like maybe there are. There are some general creepy
stalking around in the tunnels in the dark. Who's following who?
I don't always know, but Green Shadow is in the
mix here somewhere.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Yeah, kind of the Scooby Doo section of the film.
There's a lot of creeping around. Who's creeping? You're not
really entirely sure, but hopefully masks will be pulled off
later on.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Oh boy will they? So Suddenly the sneaking around is
interrupted by a scream. One of Tinfung's White Flag soldiers
is found lifeless on the ground up above, killed in
the same way as Big Eyed. I guess by the butterflies,
they're really piling on the butterfly deaths at this point,
so Bosston he comes up with a solution, gets his
warriors together, and he says, cover the castle in nets.

(58:04):
So surely these nets will prevent any butterflies from getting in.
Is that going to work? Is it going to work?
Of course not?

Speaker 3 (58:11):
But will it look cool? You bet it will.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
They're like, they're really just like stacking butterfly murders every
couple minutes at this point between the flashbacks and and
what's happening in the present, So we also see the
Red Flags out hunting. It's mostly like the White Flag
warriors who are hanging out at the castle with Boss Ten.
We see the Red Flags out hunting for butterflies with

(58:36):
handheld nets, and they remark that there is not a
single butterfly to be found in a twenty mile radius.
Where could the killer insects be hiding. But here we're
about to get into some investigation scenes, and just a
warning if you want to go into this movie without
any of the surprises spoiled, you know we're about to
spoil things as we go along, So before warned. Inside it,

(58:59):
Night Fong, the Scholar, and Green Shadow meet in one
of the tunnels to discuss the castle. They conclude that
there has to be a secret entrance to the underground labyrinth,
but they cannot find the door, even though they've both
been looking for it. So while they go looking around,
they come across a hidden room with these hanging screens

(59:20):
covered in thousands of dead butterfly specimens. It's like a
lepidoptery collection.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
Now this is highly suspicious. Now we seem to be
getting somewhere with the butterfly mystery.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
Right, So Fong and Green Shadow discuss whose work the
collection could be, possibly the servant Chi. They note that
they both thought that Chi had been with them separately
at the time the White Flag soldier was found killed
the previous night. So how could Chi have been in
two places at once. Hmmm, we'll come back to that,
but oh no. Next, Master Shum is attacked by butterflies

(59:54):
inside his meditation room. He's but he's like locked inside
the room, so they cannot go in help him. The
door is locked from the inside, and everybody's watching through
a grate in the door as he is killed by
a swarm of butterflies. Eventually they are able to blast
the doors open with gunpowder but it's too late. Master
Shum lies dead on the floor, surrounded by pieces from

(01:00:16):
his go board. Oh boy, Rob, I know you like
a will reading scene, don't you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Yeah, this is where we get the will reading, where
it's like, oh, he left a will? Should we read it?
Should we gather everyone together? Are there agents or individuals
out there who don't want us to read the will? Oh?
I think that might be the case.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
So yeah, Lady Shum says, Master Shum left an unusual will.
It says, quote, my dear wife, I have a wish left.
Let out the message carrying pigeon, and in three days time, Shin,
Quack and Lee will arrive. I have a letter to
be read to them. Remember, read it in all three's presence. Remember,

(01:00:57):
So these new characters are being introduced in Quak and Lee.
Who are they? Well? Fong says that it's rumored that
ten years ago a very knowledgeable hermit lived. Not only
was he an excellent martial artist, he was also learned
in the human sciences, and he had four students known
as the Thunders. Now one of the students, one of

(01:01:19):
the Thunders, was named You, and You is now dead,
but the other three are Lee Schin, and Quak, and
they are the three mentioned in the Will. So here
we get a summary of the three Thunders courtesy of Fong.
Fong says, first of all, Lee, Lee is best at
small hand weapons. He is called the Thousand Hands. His

(01:01:39):
attacks are totally unexpected. His expertise is second to none.
Second we have Quawk. Quak is also known as magic Fire.
He quote has the most killing power. And here we
cut to a raven flying a scream and men lying
scorched on the rocks. And apparently he wiped out a
sect known as Fireball in one night. So there's some

(01:02:02):
indication that Quak can like send a bird that somehow
leaves men lying scorched on the earth. How does that work?
Who knows. Finally, there's Shin, who is known as Flying Cloud.
Nobody knows what he looks like, and he once went
through the Forbidden Palace. They say, I don't know what
that means. Do we eventually see Flying Cloud. I'm a
little hazy on this. I you know, I'm confused. There

(01:02:25):
may be something I missed. I totally admit that it
may have gone past me, But I don't think Shin
actually appears in the film. Okay, unless it's like the
secret identity of another pre existing character and that's revealed
at some point and I missed it. Okay, I'm not
alone there, Okay, I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Okay. The other two we definitely see though, and they
play important parts, especially Quark, who mentioned in the cast.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
But they're both really cool. So the Thunders are on
their way, and Tinfoam warns his fighters not to confront
the Thunders. This is a danger situation because on one hand,
you've got Tinpholm's warriors. You know, they're fighting for power.
But the Thunders are these other extremely dangerous martial heroes,
you know, these people from the martial world, and you

(01:03:14):
put the put them all in the place together, They're
they're going to fight. I think at some point Boston says,
two Tigers can't exist at the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Now, not discounting other influences, of course, but I mean,
one can't help but be reminded of John Carpenter's later
film A Big Trouble in Little China, in which we
have the four Storms, who are exceptional martial artists slash
sorcerers who have all sorts of crazy weapons and abilities,
and you know, here we have the three Thunders. So

(01:03:45):
you know, I can't help but wonder if this had
any influence on the ultimate form.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Of that film. Well, I think I've read somewhere that
the same directors other film, Zoo Warriors and the Magic Mountain,
was a major influence. It's on a big trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
All right, we'll have to come back to Zoo lawyers.
It just sounds too entyson, but.

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
The film goes a great length to express and it's
good to hammer home here that this is a dangerous
situation having Boss ten and the Thunders in the same place.
Because these are rivals, they are likely to come into conflict. Now. Next,
there's a scene where Fong, the scholar, questions Chi, the
servant at the castle. He asks her about the lepidoptery

(01:04:25):
room with all the butterfly specimens, and she confirms that
it is Master Schum's room. And then Fong asks her
why there are two cheese, because you know, remember he
and Green Shadow both were with Chi in different places
at the same time. She acts frightened by this question
and tries to run away, but she leads Fong to

(01:04:47):
a different hidden room, a strange room that is revealed
to be something like a cross between an arsenal and
an alchemist's lab. It's full of these weird ancient scientific instruments,
things that look like weapons, and containers of powders, and
these like wooden planks with burn marks on them, almost
like I don't know, like explosives or incendiaries have been

(01:05:08):
tested here. And so here Fong meets with Green Shadow.
They explore the room and they discuss the the sort
of a principle of like gunpowder I think being explored here.
They discuss a sort of secret history of gunpowder weapons,
including a legendary secret weapon known as the fire gun.

(01:05:30):
So it's a question I think, like was the owner
of this room trying to create a like secret gunpowder weapon.

Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
You know, it's again kind of interesting synchronicity here because
for our Crossbow episodes that aired earlier this week, I
was reading, you know a great deal and need them
about about gunpowder innovations and gunpowder weaponry in ancient China,
many of which used crossbow or crossbow related elements, And

(01:05:59):
you know, none of what we see in this film
here even really captures like the weird variety of gunpowder
based weaponry that was developed in China over the centuries
is pretty amazing stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
Now, next we're going to meet some of the Thunders.
They don't arrive at the castle conventionally because, like the
White Flag Warriors are sort of outside awaiting the arrival
of the Thunders. Instead, we see the Thunders meeting each
other in secret, already underneath the castle. They're in the
tunnels beneath the castle. It's a very cool creepy scene

(01:06:34):
where Lee and Quak here appear in shadow, wearing hoods
and cloaks at first, so their faces are hidden in darkness.
At first. They're almost even a little suspicious of each other.
They say, why did Master Schuman invite them to the
castle early? They say, Shin used to be the first
to come here. Why isn't he here yet? But then
suddenly their little rendezvous is interrupted by discovering that Green

(01:06:56):
Shadow is there. Green Shadows spying on them again, always
one step ahead, and they like try to they try
to like throw weapons at her and stuff, but she's
too quick. They can't catch her. And so here eventually
all of the characters meet one another. We get the
full all cast introduction, and the Thunders kind of get
up to speed on what has happened so far at
the castle, but they're still a waiting for Shin the

(01:07:19):
third Thunder to arrive so that the letter can be read,
and more characters ask the same question that keeps coming
up to kill her. Butterflies really exist? The Thunders discuss
this in secret between each other. They're very wary of
the others Lee and Quak. They say that anyone who
is in our friend is our enemy, and these people
don't seem to be friends.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Yeah, a lot of distrust here, but yeah, but it
would also seem like, well, we finally have all of
the characters in play that are going to be in play.
He might well think this, but he would also seemingly
be wrong, because they are more mysterious individuals who are
going to show up and impact the plot.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
Right, But before the last really important character shows up,
we'd get a few more sort of like scenes of
Green Shadow and Fong, our two main investigators working out
what's going on here. So they meet one night. First
of all, it's funny because Pong's just like out for
a walk and Green Shadow does wire stunts like just
dropping in on him while nothing's going on. So they

(01:08:17):
talk about killer butterflies. But then Fong and Green Shadow
sort of compare notes. They say, you know, the Thunders
seemed to know the castle well and they were close
with Master Shum. Why didn't he call them for help initially?
Why did he call Boss ten instead of the Thunders?

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
You know, coming back to where he said about Green Shadow,
it really does feel like Green Shadow has not just
walked down a hallway or just strolled from point A
to point B in a very long time. It's always
on wires.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Yes, I love it. She's living that wire life, you know.
Also more plot updates. Remember those eight pages of Fong's
memoirs from the paper Mill, Well, Tinfong shows them to
Fong and Pong confirms, Yeah, the guy the paper Mill
was right. I did not write this. This is not mine.
Somebody is forging works in my name. Fong reasons from

(01:09:05):
this because the pages of his memoirs are stories about
killer butterfly attacks. He says, there must be someone trying
to use my name to spread the rumor of killer butterflies.
I wonder if that same person is controlling the butterflies.
And then oh whoa. Things totally do a major shift
once again, we get our first slasher movie scene, basically

(01:09:27):
Madame Schum in her chambers at night is attacked by
this film's Jason Voorhees, the Armored Warrior. Rob What do
you want to say about the armored Warrior?

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
And the scene, Oh, the armored Warrior is just absolutely terrifying,
just you know, black armor, seemingly just impossible to hurt.
You can't name him or stop him. Just a strong
proto slasher vibe here. And he eventually busts out. A
lot of his action is just more like punches and
grabs and throws and then like some sort of like

(01:10:00):
more minor cloth type stuff. But he also has this
other strange weapon that he'll he'll bust out that looks
kind of like a cross between a lacrosse stick and
a deep fryer basket, only you know, more deadly looking,
and it seems to slash and shred when it comes
into contact with human flesh.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
I was going to compare his weapon to the goat
foot lever that we talked about in the Crossbow episode.
It's like it's a claw hook weapon that's got like
two toes on it. But yeah, this rough material almost
like barbed wire strung between the two toes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:33):
I looked around a little bit. I couldn't find anybody
talking about this and comparing it to known weapons. So
I don't know if it actually has anything like a
real world analog, if it has something it's supposed to
be inspired by, something to do with butterflies. I don't know.
I'm assuming for now that it's just, you know, purely
a creation of fantasy. But it's very effective.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
But the scene is interesting because it starts as like
it's like a slash or horror scene. This, you know,
this monstrous war attacks Lady Shum in her chamber. She escapes,
the fighters get there in time to defend her and
chase this warrior off. But then there's like a series
of awesome fight scenes. So it's like Tinfong versus the
armored Warrior, and Tinfong is cool. We finally see him

(01:11:19):
in action. He fights with this another strange weapon. It's
like a very short baton. Do you know what this
would be called?

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
Rob I'm not sure now does this baton shoot things?
Or am I thinking this is just a straight up baton?

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
I don't know. There are some things that shoot things.
I don't remember if his shoots things.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
Yeah, things get very The fighting is again kind of
mind melting, and there are a number of unique weapons
being utilized. Pure fantasy action here.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
But then there's also Green Shadow versus Armored Warrior, and
she uses wires in her fighting of him. But eventually
the Armored Warrior escapes into the night. He gets away,
so they don't get to catch him. They don't get
to unmask him or know the identity of the killer.
Now Madam Schum thinks she knows the identity of the killer.
She thinks it must be the third Thunder who hasn't

(01:12:08):
arrived yet, Shin, And she's like, maybe he wants to
get to the letter or the will that Master Shum
left before everybody else does. But hey, remember that thing
about how Boss ten was saying, you know, two tigers
can't exist. At the same time, we see some real
conflict breaking out because the Red Flags and the White

(01:12:29):
Flags end up fighting with the Thunders, and the Thunders
just mess them up. There's like a scene where the
Thunders attack the Red Flags in the forest and are
just like chopping their arms off and stuff, and they
fight with the White Flags. The White Flags are no
match either.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
Yeah, the Thunders are not to be messed with. You're
gonna get shredded, you're gonna get blown up, you're gonna
get caught on fire.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
But then later the two Thunders we see investigator. They're
running around in the tunnels underneath the castle and this
is Lee and Quak and they catch sight of the
Armored Killer. They see him and they're like hey, and
they chase after him in the dark, and this leads
to the Butterfly room, the one with all the butterfly
specimens mounted on screens, and another amazing fight scene. So

(01:13:11):
there is an attack where the armored Warrior like tries
to attack the Thunders by throwing I guess the poison
butterflies at them and the thousand hand Thunder Lee he
intercepts the butterflies with darts and it's this awesome, scary
fight scene in tight corners. I thought this was a
really good one. Again, the armored warrior, whose identity is hidden,

(01:13:32):
he's using the strange claw hook weapon is very visceral
and scary and up close and personal. And there's one
moment where you think Lee has won because like the
armored Warrior goes down, but then he suddenly pops back
up and he is victorious. He kills Lee by like
ramming his head into a clay pot.

Speaker 3 (01:13:51):
This is a great kill sequence, and it's one of
these where like the way we describe it, like okay
puts them in a headlock, rams his head into a
pot that it doesn't sound as impressed, but the way
that it shot, it's very thrilling and feels like just
very viscerally violent, even though it's not like super bloody
or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
Okay. Next we get some big reveals. Like we said,
there are a lot of twists that come in this movie.
So next we follow Chi in the underground tunnel by herself.
Remember she's the servant who carries the lantern, and she
wanders with her lantern and wearing a mask over the
bottom of her face. What's she doing? Oh, suddenly we
see her walking not just through the tunnels, but she's

(01:14:29):
walking into a cavern like an opening in the tunnels
where she's surrounded by butterflies, and yet she's not afraid
of them. They don't seem to be harming her. She
kneels beside an underground pool and then she puts something
in the water and makes it foam and sizzle. And
it produces these white fumes. The butterflies seem like affected

(01:14:49):
by the fumes. Rob, what did you did? It seem
almost kind of like the butterflies were like boiling up
out of the water or something.

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
I guess, Yeah, this was one of the moments where
I'm kind of piecing it together. But I'm blaming the
subtitles for my lack of a pure understanding of what
we're dealing with here, because again, so many things in
the film like just makes sense on a visual level.
You don't need the subtitles to explain what's happening. But
there's some sort of like magical potion based explanation here,

(01:15:19):
and we're not getting.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
All of it. I mean, I think I'm following what's happening.
I could be making mistakes, but essentially here Chi is
caught Green Shadow and the scholar Fong appear they have
been watching her, and they reveal they say, we know
you're not Chi. You are Madam Schum disguised as Chi.
That's why there were two cheese. There's the real Chi
and then Madam Schum has a Chi costume that she

(01:15:42):
puts on and she like hides part of her face
to pretend to be her. They say that she has
quote butterfly controlling medicine and that Lady Shum has discovered
the art of controlling butterflies. Apparently, Fong talks about it
almost like the art of controlling butterflies is something that
is known to have been known in the past, but

(01:16:04):
was lost and now has been rediscovered.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
Okay, all right, fair enough, Okay, it's all making sense now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
So Green Shadow and Fong here are confronting her. They're like,
now you're gonna tell us everything that's going on, because
we know you're in on it. But they're interrupted by
the armored warrior in the black armor, the mask, the weapon.
He comes out and Madam Schum is killed, and the
armored warrior escapes, and we see butterflies crawling over Lady
Shum's dead body as if to mourn it. And then

(01:16:33):
later the armored warrior comes back and caresses Lady Shum's
body as well. Here's the scene with the killer reveal.
The killer is unmasked and it is Master Schum himself,
the Master of the Castle. He's not dead after all,
and he's confronted by Fong alone this time, who's put
all the pieces together. He says that Master Schum is

(01:16:56):
actually you. Remember when they were describing the thunder there
are three thunders still living, but one of the thunders
was already dead. Well, it turns out that that thunder
was you, and he wasn't dead. It's Schum, the master
of the castle. So this is a plan of the Thunders,
many years in the making to create secret weapons here
at the castle, to protect the secret of the weapons.

(01:17:19):
And now you must be doing some new stage of
the plan.

Speaker 3 (01:17:23):
Okay, I'm buying all of that, but I still don't
know why we invited people to the castle. I don't
know why the secret will. I feel like there's a
lot of stuff that I can't quite stitch together.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
Oh no, no, no, I think I understand it. So
take me Master Schum and Madam Schum here. They used
killer butterflies first of all, to get rid of all
the spies in the castle, because there were spies here
sent by the other thunders to keep track of you. Okay,
so they drive all the spies out with butterflies that
either killed them or made them flee. And then they

(01:17:58):
keep using the butterflies and attack so all around to
create a confusion. Then Schum created the false memoirs of
Fongs to spread stories about the killer butterflies killed the
paper mill owner when he saw through it. The whole
point of this was to get the other Marshal heroes
to get Tin Fong and Green Shadow to the castle

(01:18:20):
to make them fight with the thunders, because you wants to,
I think, rule over everything. He wants to be in charge.
So he wants all the other Marshal heroes to get
together into a tight space, to be in the same
place and have to fight each other, just like what
happened and we heard in the backstory when all the
Marshal heroes fought each other and wiped each other out. Okay,

(01:18:42):
he wants to be the last one standing.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
Okay, so everything is going is going according to plan here.
It's about getting these all these great warriors together, having
them destroy each other so that he can rule over
everyone instead.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
Okay, yeah, that's right, all right, I could again.

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
I feel like I would have been on top of
it had the sub titles binge is a little tighter, ye,
But I'm there now.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
I mean, it is a complicated plot, but I think
it's a good twist, and so Schum basically admits, yep, Fong,
you figured it out. But men who know too much
cannot live. So he reveals his claw weapon and he's
gonna kill Fong. There's like a chase, and then all
kinds of different fighting happens. Schum ends up killing Chi,

(01:19:23):
the actual servant. Chum then fights Green Shadow. Fong watches
as Shum fights Green Shadow. He's helpless, he's not a fighter,
he can't intervene, and then Tin Fong shows up and
he gets involved in the fight again. It's like trading
off between the different heroes fighting the Armored Warrior. But
Schum once again escapes into a tunnel.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
I have to and I have to drive home here
that you know, I'm not like a Hong Kong action
completist or anything. There are a number of like very
prestigious Hong Kong action films that I haven't seen, so
I can't like speak universally in all of this. But
all of this action is just blistering. It's just very
like technically proficient, you know, well shot inventive. It's just

(01:20:06):
you never know what's going to happen next. And so
even though you get just multiple fights and different pair ups,
everything is just captivating.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
And I really love that the different heroes have their
different like fighting styles, so when they trade off fighting
the villain. There there's a lot of variety in the
fight scenes. It's not just like a samey kind of
fighting over and over. You get Green Shadow with her
like wire stuff, you get Boss ten with this little baton,
you get of course, the you know, the Armored Warrior
with his scary visceral kind of fighting with the claw weapon,

(01:20:36):
and then of course you get the Thunders. So after
showm escapes, Fong says, this is the terrible situation. This
is going to turn into an all out war between
Tin Fung and the remaining Thunders. So Fong leaves the
castle at dawn to avoid the battle, and then we
see the final battle going on. Again. Two tigers can't

(01:20:56):
exist at the same time. So we've got ten Verse
says the magic Fire Thunder, he's the one left alive.
The Armored Warrior returns and it's a three way fight.
They're sort of like all trying to kill each other.
They end up there's like an explosion. I think it's
when the statue, the demonic statue explodes. They fighters fall

(01:21:17):
through the floor into the catacombs below, magic Fire is
pinned by a falling pillar. Then you and magic Fire
have this like conversation. You says, you know I was
left here to protect the secret gun. Why did you
other thundersind spies to report on me? And you know,
they're like hashing out their grievances, and you is giving
a speech as the victorious villain. But meanwhile Boss Tin

(01:21:40):
sneaks up on you and as he does a maniacal laugh,
Boston springs from cover and there's another fight again. There's
some ground grappling, there's some sliding along on wires, and
then finally the villain is defeated when Tin like slams
his head into to a rock face while while running
down a done the length of a wire.

Speaker 3 (01:22:01):
Yeah, kind of like a hyper accelerated zip line death
sequence that if I when I explain it like that,
it doesn't really sound like like you probably can't picture it,
but within the context of this ridiculously elaborate three way
fight scene, it's highly effective.

Speaker 1 (01:22:20):
Oh but it's not over because Magic Fire is still
alive even though he's like trapped under a pillar. He
sends his killer bird after ten and you don't know
what the bird's gonna do. It's just like a bird
flying around chasing Boss ten. What's going to happen? Well,
you think Green Shadow comes to the rescue. She's here
to save ten. She flies through on a wire, She's
going to save the day. But then, oh, the most

(01:22:42):
devastating ending do you want to explain, rob.

Speaker 3 (01:22:45):
Oh my goodness, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to
say that the stunningly nihilistic ending came out of nowhere
because issues with subtitles aside, it does seem like we
were ratcheting up to it. Like there's this sequence when
the sky there's leaving where Hang and Fung have this
last little conversation and Fung is like, I hope you win,

(01:23:08):
and it feels you know, very stark and and and
in dark, and we end up like flashing back to
that here in a bit. But yeah, so Green Shadow
like zips into the scene with her you know, general optimism. Uh,
and she goes and like catches the bird in mid air,
and the bird explodes like a hand grenade, just blowing

(01:23:30):
Green Shadow up. Like there's no way she survives this,
like just killed instantly, and and you know, Fung is
like like no, and then it comes flying right at
Fung's face and explodes in his face freeze frame, and
that's pretty much the end. And I was like, wow,
like that was just jaw dropping, because again with this

(01:23:51):
feels like a major Wusha subversion here, like this is
not our heroes conquering evil or it's not a you know,
the sort of tropes that you would expect to encounter
in a film like this. No, this is like all
of our heroes are dead except for the scholar who
only survived because he left ahead of the cataclysmic final battle.

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
Yeah, but there is a symmetry like it talked about
in the backstory with the narration at the very beginning.
The movie seems to end with all of the martial
heroes have killed each other. They're all gone now, and
the only one left is the chronicler to tell the story.

Speaker 3 (01:24:29):
Yeah, so I mean it really really packs a punch. Again,
just a fitting way to cap all of this just
you know, essentially like high tech fantasy martial arts that's
happening here and just have this just again just very
nihilistic ending where everybody dies. But again, like I say,

(01:24:49):
it doesn't it. They were clearly building up to this
in many ways, so it doesn't feel forced in any
fashion either.

Speaker 1 (01:24:55):
So in the end, I'd give a big thumbs up
to the Butterfly Murders. It is not only it's Bonker's
premise of killer Butterflies. It is that, but it is
so much else. It just gives you so much to
work with and it keeps you guessing.

Speaker 3 (01:25:09):
Yeah. Absolutely, so, yeah, highly recommend this one. And you know,
I hope it gets a better release at some point
in the future. It would be great. But on the
other hand, I didn't see any indication that that's coming,
So I would say, don't you know, don't waste time.
If this interests you, go watch it in whatever format
you can find it in, because it's it's worth the journey.

(01:25:30):
All Right, Well, that's it for this episode of Weird
House Cinema. We're going to go ahead and close out,
but a reminder that we're primarily a science podcast with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film here on the Weird House Cinema. If you
want to see a list of all the movies we've
covered over the years. Go to letterbox dot com. It's

(01:25:51):
l E T T E r box d dot com.
Our user name is weird House, and we have a
list of all the movies and sometimes a peek ahead
at what's to come. If you would like to follow
us on social media, while we're in the usual places
as Stuff to Blow your Mind on Instagram, we are
stbym podcast and that's worth following for Weird House fans
because currently our social media crew is putting up a

(01:26:14):
little video kind of like teaser of the film, so
you can quickly go there and get maybe a taste
of the trailer in addition to the trailer audio that
you'll hear in the actual episode.

Speaker 1 (01:26:24):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.