I was sitting in a Thai restaurant and couldn’t help becoming engrossed in a fantasy film with great production values and good actors despite seeing it from the middle. Of course it was in Chinese with Thai subtitles. The only thing that bothered me was a buffoon character, who at first glance looked like he was in blackface. The story went something like this:
Young boy-hero with gang of friends arrive at a pool in front of a palace and are rejoicing for some reason. While boy-hero is pre-occupied with drinking from the pool or something, the others are lured into the palace by pretty women-sirens who suck the life out of them by kissing them. A bearded warrior hero arrives and kills most of the women-sirens through projectiles, whereupon they vanish in a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, back at the pool, a white-clad woman-siren talks to the boy-hero. They seem to know each other perhaps. She does not seem evil. Bearded warrior comes outside and spots the two. He has a flashback when he sees the non-evil woman siren, to a time when he was beardless and she seems to be his love interest. Boy-hero and good siren run away and hide in the woods. Later they come back to the palace and are spotted by two remaining evil sirens who fight the good woman siren but then a bomb explodes and the good siren gets hit by shrapnel. Boy-hero comes, but is captured by bearded warrior and gets put on a horse and run off. Bearded warrior heals the good siren, but they have an argument, and bearded warrior ends up tied in a tree, while good siren and boy hero ride off. Then good siren rejects boy hero and pushes him down a hill. Wicked sorceress who seems to be the queen or mother of the sirens or something comes and talks to her and takes her away to torture her in her palace-lair.
Boy-hero goes to village and talks to villagers about something. Then he goes back to where he left Bearded Warrior, and releases him. They have some kind of argument. I imagine it’s something like “you shouldn’t go rescue that siren, she’s no good for you”. Then Boy-hero goes to temple/palace/lair and finds good siren lying on the floor. She is now dressed in black and white. He takes her off to his house in the village. They kiss, and at first he looks like he’s having the life sucked out of him too. They stop, he recovers, and then start again, but he seems to survive the night unscathed for some reason. He goes out to get breakfast. He encounters Bearded Warrior, who finds out that good siren is in boy-hero’s house. He goes and gets her and is dragging her down street when another hero arrives on horseback. This one looks like a Chinese Karl Urban/Eomer with the long hair. Chinese Eomer is very pissed about something, and engages Bearded Warrior in a fight, while good siren is lying on the ground in the middle of the street. Meanwhile another person arrives. This time it’s a Mongolian punk girl on horseback. She tries to strangle Good-siren. I forget what happens next, but the townspeople who are watching from the sidelines suddenly break out with some kind of skin disease consisting of lesions looking like mossy dirt. Mongolian punk girl stirs up some kind of concoction in a cauldron to cure the populace. Meanwhile, Chinese Eomer has won the fight and has tied up Bearded Warrior to the wall of a house, with a web of very intricate series of threads and bronze disks entrapping good-siren in the middle of the room. Chinese Eomer discusses something, and then triggers the contraption somehow, causing the discs to move along the threads and hurting good-siren somehow. Bearded Warrior has flashbacks again, and feels sorry for good siren. Boy-hero arrives with a sword and is about to cut a chain, when Mongolian punk girl arrives and shuts off the contraption properly. Apparently she had a falling out with Chinese Eomer who I guess used to be her mentor.
They all ride back to the palace where Chinese Eomer is battling the evil Sorceress and losing. Bearded Warrior joins fight, and a series of interesting magical spells occur (Chinese tropes I guess) The final result is, that at the end, Bearded Warrior has to stab himself with a dagger he pulled from Good-siren’s head in order to kill the Sorceress, who vanishes in a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, Boy-hero manages to free some souls who look like a bunch of will-o-the-wisps floating away. Bearded warrior is dying and Good-siren comforts him. Everyone else is shouting they need to leave because the palace is being sucked into a black hole. Good-siren begins to leave with Boy-hero, but then she turns back and sees Bearded Warrior where she left him. She tells Boy-hero she can’t leave, and goes back into the imploding palace, while Boy-hero, Mongolian punk girl and Chinese Eomer watch. They are later seen leaving from the village. That’s pretty much the end.
Sorry for the long post. I watched the credits, but it was hard to read them. The only credit I caught was in the middle of the list of characters. An actress named Miu Miu played a character called “Green Snake”. I searched on the internet with this information and couldn’t find a thing. The movie really impressed me for some reason (except for the buffoon character), perhaps because it was so well done, I didn’t really need dialogue to follow the story. It would have been nice to see it from the beginning. It seems to be a very recent movie made in Hong Kong. Some of the actors look familiar.