Following the wildly successful runs of Korean creature features, SPACE MONSTER WANGMAGWI and PULGASARI, earlier this year, Spectacle Theater now sets course due South, across the East China Sea, to discover what cinematic monstrosities the island of Taiwan has in store.
Though much less prolific than the neighboring film industry in Hong Kong, Taiwanese cinema exploded onto the global scene in the early 1980s with the emergence of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement. This crop of ambitious and talented young filmmakers— including Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chen Kunhou, and Chang Yi— sought to use cinema as a means of speaking honestly and openly about the issues affecting post-industrial Taiwanese society, crafting realistic and socially-relevant stories that resonated deeply with modern audiences.
But as Taoist philosophy suggests, just as every light has its dark and as every up has its down, for every TAIPEI STORY or CITY OF SADNESS, there must be a movie about a centuries-old zombie-fighting herbal deity or a semi-feral superpowered female ninja. And since our love of East Asian prestige cinema is only outmatched by our love of homegrown fantasy-horror schlock, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to present IT CAME FROM TAIWAN!, featuring two completely deranged, creature-heavy cuts from the stranger side of Taiwanese cinema.
WOLF DEVIL WOMAN
(雪山狼女)
Dir. Pearl Chang Ling, 1982
Taiwan. 85 min. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
GET TICKETS
WEDNESDAY, JULY 5 – 10PM
THURSDAY JULY 13 – 10:00PM
SUNDAY JULY 16 – 5PM
After her parents are slaughtered by the villainous Red Devil, a young girl is rescued from certain death and raised by the legendary White Wolf of a Thousand Years deep in the snowy wilderness. Twenty years later, now more monster than man, she must learn to harness her ninja-like animal instincts to take down the Red Devil and reclaim her humanity in the process.
The inimitable Pearl Chang pulled quadruple duty as director, writer, producer, and star of this loose adaptation of Baifa Monu Zhuan (白髮魔女傳) aka Romance of the White-Haired Maiden. Chang pulled no punches for her debut feature, mashing together hopping vampires, gorilla ninjas, wire fu stunt work, and voodoo magic effects in this psychedelic masterpiece of lupine lunacy.
Content warning: This film contains brief depictions of animal cruelty.
GINSENG KING aka THREE-HEAD MONSTER
(三頭魔王)
Dir. Wang Chu-chin, 1988
Taiwan. 86 min. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
GET TICKETS
FRIDAY, JULY 7 – 5PM
MONDAY JULY 10 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 14 – 10PM
TUESDAY, JULY 25 – 7:30PM
Cynthia Khan (IN THE LINE OF DUTY series) stars in this tale of a young boy who encounters a thousand-year-old anthropomorphic ginseng root known as the Ginseng King. The herbal deity is highly sought after for its legendary healing abilities— rumored to be powerful enough to even raise the dead— putting the boy at odds with the hordes of demons, wizards, hopping vampires, and zombies of the Nazi persuasion, all seeking to capture the knobby necromancer for their own gain.
The film is a truly one-of-a kind work: A family-friendly, fairytale-adjacent kaiju flick that features some of the most batshit character design ever put to film. The Ginseng King’s look is worth the price of admission alone, with its bulging eyes and mane of roots that falls somewhere between the thing hanging out behind the Winkie’s dumpster and a partially melted wax statue of Marty Feldman. Needs to be seen to be believed