Legend of the Mountain (1979, King Hu)

So titled because I Married a Witch was already taken. Scholar-dropout-turned-copyist Shih Chun takes a gig to copy some holy sutras, heads to a quiet place in the country where he can focus, and that plan sure does backfire. First he gets wasted at the annoying neighbor’s house while her daughter Melody plays trance-drums, then he wakes up and Melody claims they slept together, so they get married. Now he has a new wife, an annoying mother-in-law and a contradictory host, and they’re all being circled by the host’s deranged servant Old Chang who looks suspiciously like a vampire, plus a disappearing hot flautist called Cloud, and a Lama. Movie is good for its entire 3+ hour runtime – King sure knows how to frame a shot and set up a scene. And it gets slowly weirder and more unsettling, until after two whole hours of gradual build, we’re rewarded with a dance-fight wuxia scene. This is post-Star Wars but instead of using light beams to portray the magic, he sticks with flashbangs,…