The Bride with White Hair (1993)

one of my absolute favorites!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Back in the 80s, the Hong Kong movie industry was making some of the best action-fantasy movies around and this was maybe its high water mark, combining historical action fantasy with quite a touching central romance. Adapted from the 1954 Chinese novel 'River Lake' and set during one of China's many historical periods of internal unrest, Bride is a lush folk tale about a martial artist who wanders into the woods and encounters the Wolf Girl, a legendary recluse who had been raised by wolves, playing one of those yard-long wooden Chinese flutes. They circle one another playfully at first but eventually their passion can no longer be contained. A love affair crossing their two obviously separate and incompatible worlds proves impossible and hardship, misunderstanding and tragedy follows. The whole production has an operatic quality to it, with haunting music, sweeping camera work, dark magical elements and STUFF blowing around quite often, perhaps symbolic of the swirl of events and political chaos around the principles. Brigitte Lin (39) and Leslie Cheung (37) were quite a bit older than the 20-something characters in the book, but still make an attractive romantic pairing. Recommended.

What happens when you mix 'Chinese Ghost Story' and 'Fantastia' together? You get 'The Bride with White Hair'! Not only does it have killer Siamese twins, random wire work and men growing breasts, but it also invents a new form of weaponry: killer hair! Now come on, ladies, who wouldn't want a superpower like that? And it has a goat! Who doesn't love a good old goat, eh? So, in conclusion, beautifully filmed, badly dubbed (in the English version there's a farmer guy with an Irish accent) but completely and utterly mad.But if this isn't your cup of tea, go and watch Kurosawa's 'Rashomon';thats always a good laugh!

This is a great movie. Acting is excellent and cinematography is among the best I've seen by the cinematographer who won an Academy award for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Bridgette Lin is amazing. I would actually classify this as a romantic movie.

Firstly I Have to admit that I watched 'The Bride With White Hair' while I was drunk. That said, it wasn't as entertaining as it should have been for saying how drunk I was.The 'story' concerns a wimpy, yet hard as nails wu-tang disciple, who is the hot headed heir to the clan (the clan is also the strongest of all the 8 clans and therefore orders them about). Their main rivals are a black magic type clan lead by a pair of crazy (and incestuous?) Siamese twins. One is a screechy annoying girl the other a moany, yet crazy man. Their chief assassin falls in love with wu-tang man and that love eventually turns her into the titular 'Bride With White Hair' (albeit very late into the film). People withstand internal injuries and limb loss with aplomb and get decapitated at the drop of a hat (sorry). Reading back it sounds more interesting than it actually is. It takes a while to get going, everything is very dark and the story doesn't always make sense. The wire work isn't the best and the actual fights are mediocre. The score is O.K but I saw the dub and the voices were the typical screechy charicature's that occasionally mar this genre.The bride with white hair is many things, but it certainly isnt the classic many consider it to be. It's a decent watch and things rattle along at a fair pace (often at a detriment to the plot. You often get the feeling half an hour was left on the editing floor). With so many better examples of the sword and sorcery genre currently flooding out of Hong Kong, I would advise you hunt yourself out a classic elsewhere. You wont be missing that much. I also half expected this to be a tacky cat III exploitathon, given the title (and the fact that unless you are Michelle Yeoh, a woman lead in HK cinema pretty much means one thing), but to its credit, it remained smut free and the love scenes were genuinely part of the narrative and not at all added in for pure titillation.Im just glad my ex-girlfriends didn't do that when I dumped them ;-)