Adapted from Louis Cha’s Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils — the same novel that inspired Sakra — this has just 73 minutes to blow your mind and does it so many times.

Duan Zhengchun (Si Wai) has been caught in the bed of Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau), who he has already made pregnant, and uses his family’s martial arts technique — it’s a laser finger! — to cut off her husband’s legs. Twenty years from now, that man (Shut Chung-Tin) swears he will have revenge.

As fate and this movie would have it, twenty years into the future, we meet Duan’s son, Prince Duan Yu (Danny Lee). He hates violence and has promised to never learn martial arts, but he’s soon in the middle of the martial world, a place where the man his father cucked has a mechanical body with chicken legs and lives in a cave with a mutant, clawed fighting machine of a henchman.

Prince Duan Yu, no fighter yet, is protected by the snake-handling Ling-erh, who paints symbols on snakes and uses them in combat. He also meets a masked witch named Xiang Yaocha, who demands that any man who sees her face must marry her. You just know that our hero will see her naked mug and end up betrothed, but did you guess that she’s his half-sister?

How does one learn to fight in under 73 minutes? First, drink the blood of a large red snake, then swallow a poison frog whole. That’s how you get strong enough to rip the arm off a killer gorilla and go one-on-one with the Poisonous Moths Gang. Imagine Big Trouble In Little China, but with even less worry about making sense.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, features a high-definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has commentary by Jonathan Clements, author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts. You can get this set from MVD.