I've been doing this for a long time now. Teleport City, in one form or another, has been around since 1992 or so -- as a BBS, as a fanzine, then later as a website. And as long as I've been doing Teleport City, I've been watching the sort of movies covered on Teleport City for even longer. During these many decades, I've had the good fortune to be surrounded by people who or in places that made obtaining astoundingly bizarre cinema relatively easy. And of course, these days it's easier than ever. One would presume, then, that after so many years, after so many movies, a fellow would get just a tad jaded; that he would find himself possessed of a certain, "seen it all" world weariness. Sinful dwarves? Seen those. Corpse-fucking Germans? Yep, been there on several occasions. Santo and Captain American teaming up to kill the evil, chain-smoking Spider-Man, who rams women's faces into outboard motors? No problem. Flying kungfu squid that shoot out baby flying kungfu squid? Whatever man, haven't you got anything weirder than that?

And that's just a small sample of the weirdness the world has to offer, and after decades, yeah, I can see how you might thing you'd seen it all. But you know what? You'd be wrong. Never underestimate the depths of global weirdness, because no matter how far you dive, you're always going to stumble across another previously undiscovered trench that affords you a vast wealth of new material. Rather than being jaded, what my twenty-something years of watching and ten-plus years of writing about weird films from around the world has taught me is that no matter what I've seen, there's always something else waiting on the horizon. International cinematic insanity is a well that will never run dry, and this is one of the little miracles of life that keeps me so very happy.

Even within a specific subgenre of weirdness, the diversity can be expansive. We are, for example, concentrating here on the Weird World of Kungfu, and no matter how many of these films I see, something always comes along and delights me with something new and utterly strange. Such was the case when I sat down with the Shaw Brothers production, Buddha's Palm. Although it's not quite on the level of, say, Fantasy Mission Force in terms of pure unadulterated weirdness, but it certainly attains a sublime level few films even realize exists, let alone strive to attain.

Produced in 1982, Buddha's Palm represents the waning tail-end of the Shaw Bros.' illustrious run at the top. By then, the shining glory that characterized the studio's productions during the 60s and 70s was becoming tarnished. The studio found itself, much like Britain's Hammer Studios at the end of the 1960s, unable to effectively adapt what many saw as an outdated product for modern audiences. Young guns like Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan were revolutionizing the martial arts film, and while the Shaws had some great films and accomplished stars, there was nothing in their arsenal the caliber of Young Master or Prodigal Son. Their product split time between sleazy sexcapades, old-fashioned kungfu films of decreasing popularity, and batshit crazy attempts to adapt fantastical cartoons and comic books into live-action martial arts fantasies. While they managed to produce some good, if old-fashioned, kungfu films during the final years, it was in the arena of the batshit crazy fantasy that most of the truly memorable films were made.

Mind you, they weren't always memorable for good reasons, and memorable doesn't necessarily mean you could ever unravel or explain what the hell was going on. Buddha's Palm is a convoluted train wreck of a film with a story so scatter-brained, unfocused, and poorly relayed that it takes the studied concentration of a devoted Shaolin monk to make sense of even a tiny piece of it. Adapted from a Hong Kong comic book, Buddha's Palm tells the tale of a young fighter (Derek Yee, younger brother of Shaw superstar David Chiang) who learns the fabled Buddha's Palm technique from a blind swordsman, only to discover that he is being used as a pawn in the age-old battle for vengeance and control of the Martial World. Ahh, the good old Martial World. Where would kungfu stories be without it and megalomaniacs who want to be its master? Along the way, Yee befriends a flying lion-dragon-dog thing and people perform magical feats like shooting glowing animated swastikas (the Buddhist ones) out of their palms and making their foot and leg (but just their foot and leg) grow to a hundred times their normal size. What do you expect from guys with names like "Heavenly Foot, of the Ten Thousands Swords Clan" and Thunderbolt Devil? There's also lots of flying, beam shooting, and a snide, subjective narrator that makes fun of the hero of the film.

As is par for the course with wu xia movies, the plot is, at its heart, exceedingly simple. It's the madcap, breakneck way in which events are spun onto the screen that make the movie so difficult to follow -- which is, again, a common occurrence in fantasy films of the period. Every try to be a casual follower of the plotline of any of the Swordsman movies? Or the Brave Archer films? Yes, the plot is straight-forward deep down, but the surface is so jumbled with characters, shifting alliance, poor scripting, candy-colored special effects, and floppy griffon-things that whatever simplicity may lie at the heart of things is hopelessly barreled under in a blizzard of nonsensical weirdness. Which is fine for me and for, I assume, anyone on acid at the time of viewing. The action is still a lot of fun, the weirdness quotient is through the roof, and although the special effects are dated even for 1982 (in light of Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung making movies like Zu and Swordsman, among others), they still work great as psychedelic eye candy.

In fact, there is so much unbridled weirdness and such a lack of even the basic concepts of logic in both on-screen actions and on-paper storytelling, that by the time the flying midget starts shooting acid out of his goiter, you'll probably just throw your hands in the air and surrender to Buddha's Palm.