Review: “He uses weird flute music to control a fighting toad. It’s deadly, watch out for it.” What you have just read is dialogue from Shaolin Drunkard, and doesn’t even begin to describe exactly how insane this Yuen Clan comedy is. In fact, trying to describe a Yuen Clan comedy to the uninitiated is pretty tricky, because movies like ‘Shaolin Drunkard’, ‘Young Taoism Fighter’ and ‘Miracle Fighters’ seem to exist in their own reality, unbound my realism and logic, but free to speed along a stream of warped consciousness.

In other words Shaolin Drunkard is a Kung Fu film which plays to the rules of the Loony Tunes cartoons, with the look of a magic show or street mime performance in Peking Opera costumes.

Plot doesn’t really have anything to do with the movie, yet it still manages to be busier than a bar on payday. For instance, the bad guy escapes from captivity right at the start of the film, but this is no ordinary prison escape. He is rescued by a ninja who uses a paper monkey to poison a wooden robotic guard, then unlocks a magical sealed door, and fights his way past a giant ‘domino rally’ to get to the bad guy, who then bends the bars of his cell before jumping through a brick wall. Within this short sequence, there are lots of surprises and ingenious touches, and things rarely slow below this pace.

The characters are all wonderfully cartoony. Sunny Yuen Shun-Yi plays the monstrous bad guy in the way that only he could (and often does in many movies), and Simon Yeun Yat-Choi is a likeable young hero. It’s really Yeun Yueng Chan’s movie. He plays two roles - granny (also seen in Miracle Fighters) and the mischievous but genial drunken monk.

Shaolin Drunkard is a must-have movie for the film fan who enjoys the more eccentric cinematic experience. Giant toads, vampires, kung fu drinking competitions, buck-tooth alcoholic shaolin monks, giant marionette fights and hallucinogenic stylings to mash up the head of the most hardened hippy all add up to a most enjoyable trip.