A movie so ham-handed, misguided, and downright ludicrous that it should have been every bit as enjoyable as Chan’s previous movies. Unfortunately, whatever enjoyment might have been mined from the idiocy of the script is smothered under tons of truly horrendous melodrama and attempts at grimness that will have you checking your watch and wishing, believe it or not, that you were watching Forbidden Kingdom instead. But not The Tuxedo. If nothing else, this is at least better than The Tuxedo.

Severed is a great title for this movie. Not because of anything that it has to do with the movie — honestly, I can think of better titles. No, it’s perfect because it describes the way that it was just fucking tearing me apart inside to watch this film. My frustration stems from the fact that this movie could have been truly excellent, and instead crapped it up with derivative idiocies and poor choices, making it a movie that I can at best offer a neutral recommendation on. “Yeah, sure, I guess you could watch that.”

It’s easy to dismiss a film like Naked Killer. But, to me, it’s only the subpar exploitation films that give sex and violence a bad name, while the ones like Naked Killer put sex and violence back on the pedestal where they belong. Rather than the nihilistic sleaze-fest that one might typically expect from the Cat III genre, Naked Killer is a film that rages with vitality, and offers about as good an example as I can think of of cinema’s unique ability to show us a vision of our waking world merged with that of dreams.

Hsiao-Chien catches Ning’s attention with her guzheng playing, painting, and poetry composing — all artistic pursuits that are near and dear to the scholar’s heart. Ning gets busted sneaking into Hsiao-Chien’s room to help complete an unfinished poem, and the young woman doesn’t take too kindly to the lad’s prowler behavior. Still, after a stormy start, the two become closer, eventually even falling in love — which would be sweet if Hsiao-Chien didn’t turn out to be a ghost, her well-appointed villa an illusion covering a decrepit haunted house, and her mistress a demanding old ghoul with a taste for the flesh and souls of young scholars.

However, it must be said, that the climax is everything you’d expect from a film as weird as this. I don’t want to give too much away here, but I have to talk about one sequence. I can’t help it, and this sequence, in some ways, truly encapsulates the film. During the battle, Vampire Girl disappears up a tower. Frankenstein Girl has to follow her. So, producing a power drill, with a Philips-head screwdriver bit, she detaches her arm, which is holding a knife. Then, she reattaches the arm and the blade onto her head. Her arm and blade begin to spin like a helicopter propeller until she lifts off and flies after her quarry.

It’s not surprising that one of the central themes to emerge in the movie is that you should keep trying, find ways to keep believing, and always try to keep yourself moving forward while, at the same time, not forgetting what came before you. As if they were characters in the movie, the makes of Gallants went through an endless series of downfalls and rejections. No one wanted to finance this movie, this weird heart-on-the-sleeve celebration starring a bunch of people no one remembered or no one had heard of. Studio after studio slammed the door in their faces, until finally, somehow, word got around to Andy Lau.

In 2009, Chan made Shinjuku Incident. It was not the Jackie Chan movie people expected. This movie saw a much grimmer Chan, something more along the lines of the glimpse we got in Ringo Lam’s Crime Story. Here was a Jackie Chan who was no longer trying to deny his age. Here was a Jackie Can who was trying to make a good movie, with a good script and good acting. After years of poopy diaper jokes and Jennifer Love Hewitt striking Karate Kid poses, Shinjuku Incident seemed to be saying that it was time to start paying attention to Jackie Chan again. And then, in 2010, came Little Big Soldier, and Jackie Chan fans, covered in cobwebs and the dust of the wasteland, knew that our time in the wilderness was finally at an end.

If you are looking for a sign that Hong Kong is lifting itself out of the abyss its film industry collapsed into in the early days of the new millennium, Kung Fu Chefs is not the sign for which you are questing. It’s cheap, shoddy, sloppy, and generally idiotic. But it’s not lazy, it’s not mean-spirited, and it’s not lethargic. This isn’t the kind of movie that will turn someone into a Hong Kong movie fan, but if you’ve been one for a long time, and you remember the old days of renting VHS tapes from the local Chinese grocery store and sifting through all sorts of goofy junk while boiling your bag of frozen pot stickers, then you might, like me, find a movie worth enjoying amid all this nonsense.

This is one of those movies that’s difficult for me. On the one hand, it’s mind-numbingly boring. It’s a poorly made movie in pretty much every way the quality of a movie can be judged. On the other hand, it’s a movie that’s terrible in a way that makes for pleasant background noise, like a song you would never buy but can deal with when it comes on the radio (radios are what we listened to before mp3 players). Movies like this existed primarily to give couples something to make out during at the drive-in, and judged by that criteria, well, The Incredible Petrified World is definitely a movie during which you’d rather do something else besides watch it. Whether that’s necking with your sweetheart or cleaning the toilet, there’s nothing wrong with having The Incredible Petrified World playing in the background.

It quickly becomes clear that our visit to Curtain Guy’s office is for the purpose of a little pregame exposition, which is all pure 1960s spy movie boilerplate: A kidnapped scientist; a new kind of atomic device that could “destroy all human life” if it should fall into “the wrong hands”; a one week window to recover the device before those wrong hands that it’s fallen into start touching all over it; a clandestine atomic laboratory — perhaps located beneath the Mediterranean Sea — that needs to be located before it’s too late. The superior then outlines for the attendant anonymous functionary those attributes that the agent assigned to the job must possess: “Perfect understanding of Italian, French, and a complete understanding of nuclear science. And the man must also be an expert sailor.”