Picture of a Nymph (1988) 88 Films Blu-ray Review

Verdict

3.5

Summary

Plot:

A poor poet falls in love with a beautiful girl, not realizing that she’s a gateway for a demon to enter the world.

Review:

An orphan boy grows up under the tutelage of a Taoist hermit, and when he’s fully grown, the boy has become a man named Shih (Yuen Biao), a simple guy who happens to have skills in exorcising ghosts and demons, but his skills are new and he’s still learning. Meanwhile, a humble poet and scholar named Tsui (Lawrence Ng) has fallen in love with a woman (Joey Wang) he sees, not realizing that a demon has pegged her as a gateway into the world. When Shih accidentally burns Tsui’s house down, he takes him with him back to his master, the Taoist (Wu Ma, this film’s director) who knows not to keep messing with a demon he can’t beat. After Tsui’s story is related to the master, the scholar devises a simple, yet effective way to protect the girl he loves: He paints a picture of her, which becomes her doorway into a nether realm where the demon can’t find her, but each time she comes out of the painting, the demon attacks, desperate to inhabit her as its vessel. The Taoist master, his pupil, and the scholar team up to eradicate the demon, save the girl, and let love win.

A ghostly supernatural wuxia that sees characters flying and leaping around in weightless motion over rooftops, treetops, and air itself, Picture of a Nymph is an odd duck of a martial arts film that will appeal more to fans of this particular subgenre rather than “martial arts” movies in its broadest form. Yuen Biao has his fans too, but here he’s more subdued in a mostly silent role, and so the film falls into a crevice of the in-between areas of several types of films. It’s sort of a horror fantasy, with demons, warlocks, wizards, and a spooky, but not necessarily jokey atmosphere, despite having two completely out-of-nowhere musical sequences that try to alleviate the darkness of the film. It’s not entirely a success at what it’s trying to achieve, but as a lark of a movie with bizarre action sequences and a plot that goes completely sideways and leaves logic in the dust, it’s a curious piece of work.

88 Films brings Picture of a Nymph to Blu-ray in a deluxe, beautiful 2K restoration, presenting a gorgeous package release that comes in a hard shell clam case with a slipcover, a booklet, a double-sided art card, and plenty of bonus features.

Bonus Materials