Monkey Goes West dir. Ho Meng-Hua (Shaw Brothers, 1966) [released with three sequels under the umbrella title: Monkey – Journey to the West, Siren DVD, 2008] Based on Wu Cheng’en’s Buddhist quest novel Journey to the West, this meandering film-cum-musical seems almost entirely without point or consequence… except to establish prototypes of nearly all those iconic visual elements featured subsequently…
