Yuen Biao is The Peacock King 孔雀王子 孔雀王 劇場予告編 1988

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Peacock King (1988) October 19, 2025 Matt There is a long tradition in Hong Kong cinema of combining martial arts with supernatural and horror elements, although it’s one I haven’t really gotten to delve into—even the possibly adjacent previous subject The Oily Maniac from the Shaw Brothers studio really only features a minimum number of martial arts scenes, while Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West is more fantasy than horror, although it definitely has some horror-inflected scenes. Thankfully, here’s Peacock King , which is far closer to the the traditional hybrid of wire-fu fight scenes and creepy monsters, brought to us by the prominent Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest and director Lem Ngai Kai, a former Shaw Bros. employee who is probably most famous for the completely bonkers mutilation epic Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky . You won’t find as much wacky bodily harm in this as in his later movie, but there is a decent number of ghoulies running around in this pan-Asian story that is heavily based in Buddhist lore. Like Story of Ricky , the film is based on a Japanese manga (Japanese title Kujaku Ō ) by Makoto Ogino that ran in the eighties, which was about a Japanese monk fighting demons. Probably the biggest change this makes in the adaptation (among the five credited writers of which are regular Jackie Chan collaborator Edward Tang and Akira co-scripter Izo Hashimoto) is one likely done to better appeal to the hometown audience: introducing a second protagonist, a Chinese monk who is on equal footing with the original protagonist. I don’t know if this feels like some incongruous element to people familiar with the original, although I think the dynamic between the two characters certainly makes for a more interesting story in this case. The opening of the movie provides efficient table setting: a crew uncovering some ancient ruins accidentally unleashes “Hell’s Envoy”, the wild-haired Raga (Siu-Fong Wong), as well as “Hell’s Virgin” Ashura (Gloria Yip, also in The Story of Ricky ), the latter possessing the ability to put in some painful-looking contact lenses and mentally throw slow-moving fireballs, both things that she will not really be doing that much through the rest of the movie. After trashing the excavation, Raga is quick to specify their goal, which is to open the three remaining secret Gates to Hell and release the King of Hell to reign over the Earth, as well as identify the main characters of the movie who will stand in their way. From there, we are properly introduced to our duo protagonists, the straitlaced Japanese monk Kujaku/Lucky Fruit (Hiroshi Mikami), and the brash Chinese monk Kôngquè/Peacock (Biao Yuen, a member of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung’s clique), who are told by their respective masters to head to Tokyo in order to monitor and close off the first Gate to Hell before Raga and Ashura get to it. It’s always nice when everyone is on the same page! The early scenes do the most to establish the place of these two characters in both the world at large and in relation to each other—with their traditional monk robes, they look mostly out of place in modern (read: late eighties) Tokyo, and people on the street notice their incongruity, but apparently monks like them are a known quantity and can be hired for exorcisms, as we learn when the owner of a shopping mall specifies that he called in Lucky Fruit to bless his centre to prevent any supernatural nonsense during the big opening. While Lucky Fruit seems particularly old-fashioned, Peacock is a showman and a generally more modern presence—he sometimes wears sunglasses, the first sign of what a hip, modern dude he is—who isn’t afraid of, say, accepting a monetary reward for his monk work, which at first rankles his Japanese counterpart, although we quickly see that both are pretty effective at their jobs. Peacock’s skills are first demonstrated as he wanders the streets and is the only person who sees an entire Styrofoam Big Mac container full of cute little stop motion critters, who he attempts to shoo away and/or feed to a nearby dog—the monster stuff comes early, and is shown to sit in the margins of our world, apparently visible only to someone who knows to look for them. Lucky Fruit shows off a similar stop-motion sensing power in a meeting with the mall owner and his assistant Saeko (Narumi Yasuda), when he plucks a grubby little beast off her shoulder and shows it to her—although I’m not sure if the subtitles referring to it as “a porn bug” (which “feeds off a woman’s desire”) are entirely accurate to the original. The little puppet critters—with silly, very toy-like designs and a Will Vinton style of animation—are mostly a first act presence, and are a prelude to the monster action we’ll be getting throughout. The section in the mall features not just the “porn bug”, but also a giant monster hand leaping out of a woman’s locker, and then a T. Rex model for a display that is brought to life by angry spirits (the mall was built on