Friday, July 19, 2024

1986 - THE MAGIC CRYSTAL, dumb rip off of Spielberg films

Painful to sit through, hard to believe anyone covered themselves in glory with this martial arts/fantasy/comedy.  This film is an outrageous rip off of a lot of better films.

Andy Lau is a bounty hunter who works with the police to bring criminals to justice of course.  He has a moronic sidekick named Snooker who is in the film to provide unfunny comic relief.   Andy Lau also has a cute kid nephew named Ban-ban who is around to constantly get in some sort of dangerous situation.  Also in the cast is Cynthia Rothrock as a martial arts Interpol agent.  Enough about the cast.
The story involves Ban-ban finding a Magic Crystal which talks to him and gives him special powers. The crystal is supposedly a piece of jade but looks like lime jello that sat out on the kitchen counter  for a week. Some evil henchmen led by Australian marital arts champion Richard Norton want the crystal for its magic powers.  Cue the fight scenes, and there are a lot of them, although for the most part they are well done.

 

The Magic Crystal talks to the kid (E.T. ripoff), Snooker falls out of windows, Cynthia Rothrock hits a lot of people and the whole thing ends up in an underground cave where there is an alien spaceship that has been stuck on earth forever (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull ripoff).  The movie is just a forgettable mess which I unfortunately sat through after shutting it off 2 or 3 times.

 The running time is 95 minutes, the film was written by the director Wong Jing.  

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