The Film (3.5/5)

A bored fairy (Li Ching) decides to sneak into the world of mortals to discover what love is like. When she arrives she finds a world full of corrupt tycoons, gamblers, gold diggers, and card sharks. While witnessing mankind’s shortcomings, mainly greed, she discovers a man who resembles her long lost love. This man is Dong (Chin Feng), who runs a orphanage, which is sadly being bought out by Chairman Xu Cai Fa (Lee Pang-Fei). As our lovely fairy moves in with Dong, she decides to use some of her supernatural powers to get the orphanage back, all while singing pop tunes about being a good person.

THE HUMAN GODDESS (1972) is a wacky pop art infused Musical comedy from the Shaw Brothers Studio. As pointed out in the liner notes by Calum Waddell, 1960’s to 1980’s Hong Kong Cinema was a regular factory of entertainment. While most western fans know the Shaw’s from there many Martial art epics from directors like Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung, the studio also had a rich history with comedy.

GODDESS comes to us from Director Ho Meng Hua, who made a series of outrageous films such as BLACK MAGIC and THE VENGEFUL BEAUTY. Here Hua uses his trained eye to milk the comedy out of a wildly colorful world, which use the Shaw Brother sound studios to great effect. The sight gags are broad and outlandish with some misty optical effects, including a flying toy car. It all comes together to form a warm and welcoming escapist time at the movies. Everything is over the top from the Hawaiian shirts, zany sound effects, go go clubs, pop colors, and breezy jazz musical score.

The musical numbers are mainly aimed at moral center, talking about working hard and love that transcends the mortal body, But there is a few hilarious bits. My personal favorite song being Lee Pang-fei begging the fairy to be his mistress. While belting out the lyrics he throws around credit cards, checks, and fistfuls of cash.

Everything about the picture is insane by US standards. One subplot that lead to some classical Hollywood misunderstanding comes when Chin Feng first runs into Li Ching in the red light district. He assumes she is a working call girl, which brings on some Hepburn and Tracy like interplay. But the end of it’s short runtime I completely fell in love with this wacky like movie. Hopefully this release will lead to a series of these comedies hitting Blu-ray.

Audio/Video (3.5/5)

88 Films brings HUMAN to glorious Blu-ray disc with a new transfer and sound mix. Both are slightly rough around the edges. The Mandarin 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio track is clean and doesn’t have any hiss. But there is some volume control issues. Most of the dialogue is muffled for around 20-minutes, near the end of the film. English subtitles are included.

The 1080p HD transfer suffers in a few spots. Many of the panning shots have some motion blur, with the corners of the screen being a mess of unfocused color. Not the best remastered print of a Shaw Brothers’ title. The rest of the print looks picturesque with the usual high standard of Shaw Brothers sound stages and Hong Kong locations. Everything is vivid with loud colors.

Extras (0/5)

There is no actual extras on the disc. Inside the case is some liner notes by Calum Waddell.

Overall (4/5)

HUMAN GODDESS is a fun example of the Hong Kong comedy. A genre that is sadly underrepresented in most areas of the west. This is a release that deserves your support so we can see more hidden gems on shiny disc. Highly Recommended.