Director Lam Nai-Choi had a relatively short career, with about a dozen pictures to his credit over about as many years during the 1980's and early 1990's. Besides his last film, 1992's kung fu gore-fest classic Story of Ricky, most of his filmography has fallen by the wayside, at least to the average viewer.

That's a shame, since Lam showed himself to be a creative and inventive director despite having tiny budgets to work with, putting a unique spin on what might be your usual genre pieces. Lam's 1989 Hong Kong/Japanese co-production Peacock King is no exception. At first blush, this would appear to be a standard martial arts/fantasy film, something Hong Kong was cranking out by the boatload at this point at time, but Lam's inclusion of horror elements sets this movie apart from the pack.

In the film, Yuen Biao and Hiroshi Mikami play Peacock and Lucky Fruit, two monks (and brothers who were separated at birth) who are charged with stopping a pair of demons (Gloria Yip and Pauline Wong) from resurrecting the Hell King. There is more to the story than that -- this film is based on a 3000 page manga named Kujaku-Oh, so obviously there was a lot of source material to work with.

But whether it's the somewhat slap-dash nature of the story-telling or the terribly mistranslated subtitles, most people aren't going to get the intricacies of the plot anyway, so it's best to view the story simply as a method to tie the action scenes together. Don't get me wrong; the exposition scenes aren't horrible, they're just confusing. Yuen Biao is very likeable here and it's still fun to watch him, even if you might not exactly get what the hell he's talking about.

Where Peacock King succeeds is in its' action scenes. This film wears its' influences -- most notably The Thing and Alien -- clearly on its' sleeve and then mixes it up with traditional kung fu and wu xia (fantasy swordplay) under the direction of Stephen Tung and Phillip Kwok, two of the best action directors to ever work in Hong Kong cinema, resulting in some wonderfully kinetic and schizophrenic cinema. Is it Citizen Kane? No. But, on the other hand, this film was never meant to be something intentioned for inducing deep pondering.

Many reviews point out how the special effects undermine the action scenes. While I will grant that the stop-motion monsters and animation that looks like it was taken from a small-town showing of Led Zeppelin Laserarium aren't going to knock your socks off, I appreciate and enjoy the old-school feel. It is at least much more visually appealing (at least to this reviewer) than your typical modern CGI effects, which have become the bane of many an action picture over the past decade, even in productions that obviously had much more cash to work with than this effort.

RATING: 7