Super Peitou Fist

Hair-raising nonsense that only notionally adapts Tetsuo Hara and Buronson's Fist of the North Star saga for its 1980s Taiwanese audience. Director Wu Chung-Wan's Super Peitou Fist dispenses with the shattered post-apocalyptic landscapes of its source material, preferring instead to stage its action around concrete infrastructure or a sculptured greenery that frequently reads like a botanical garden. Water features cram into the frame, adding layers of twinkling movement to the deathly dull meetings of the terminally rigid principle cast. This nonsensically metropolitan grounding has a knock-on effect in Super Peitou, one that demands a conceptual re-evaluation. The mutant raiders, born from a massive exposure to swirling nuclear radiation in the original manga, now require an alternative explanation. This film's solution is a gang of drug-pushing imbeciles who kidnap children then pump them full of growth hormones. 

These injections transform the kids' racked, underdeveloped bodies into the tanned sinew of adult gym rats - instant henchmen wrapped in military fatigues and topped with deathhawk hairstyles that look like a cloud of chlorofluorocarbons has settled upon a startled raccoon. Lacking both the budget and filmmaking ability required to accurately translate the Japanese comic that inspired it, Peitou frequently abandons danger and physical intrigue to stage lengthy slapstick vignettes. Following one confrontation a masked villain finds himself spinning out of control on a speeding ambulance, an eye-catching distraction that builds into a wave of crashing physical comedy that (if we're being extremely generous) recalls the lurching blunders seen in Richard Lester's Superman sequels. Produced without the permission of absolutely any licence holder, Super Peitou Fist's humdrum aesthetic anticipates a couple of similarly bootlegged pictures from the period: Chun Liang Chen's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins (another slapdash comedy from Taiwan) and Wong Jing's Future Cops, a feature-length follow-up to the scene in City Hunter where Jackie Chan bumps his head on a Street Fighter II arcade cab then takes on a variety of pixelated personas.