4 Chinese fantasy wuxia films featuring weird monsters, ranked from worst to best

We recall a lurid mix of wuxia and witchcraft, Cheng Pei-pei in Dragon Swamp, and two films featuring a risible lizard and non-giant spider

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(From left) Wang Chung, Ching Li and Yueh Hua in a still from The Web of Death (1976), one of several Chinese fantasy wuxia films to feature weird monsters.

Published: 4:15am, 9 Mar 2025

“Special effects” were simply scratched onto the celluloid in early martial arts fantasy films, and monsters were just men dressed up in funny costumes. Things got a bit better around the 1970s – but not much.

Here, we look at four ghostly and monstrous wuxia films, from worst to best.

1. The Web of Death (1976)

The main problem with this magical wuxia from Chor Yuen is that the monstrous giant spider depicted on the poster turns out not to be giant at all – in fact, it is tiny.

To make matters worse, the spider is static for most of its brief appearances, and when it does move, the model makers have designed it to rear up like a horse and fire a death ray. So the sight of groups of expert swordsmen cowering in its venomous presence looks extremely ridiculous.

Chor Yuen is one of the great directors of Hong Kong cinema, having excelled at melodramas and mystery thrillers in the 1960s and then romanticised martial arts films, often based on the works of martial arts novelist Gu Long, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although his best works are infused with a definitive style, he has been described as the studio director par excellence. He loved working under the umbrella of a big studio, and consequently would make pretty much whatever the Shaw Brothers studio asked him to make without argument.

That was the case with this shoddy 1976 outing, which came straight after his martial arts classic The Magic Blade.