The Wooden Man's Bride

From the director of The Black Cannon Incident, this is a piece of raunchy myth-making in the vein of Red Sorghum and The Swordsman in Double-Flag Town. A peasant bride is hijacked by bandits on the way to her wedding. Her intended husband meanwhile meets an untimely accident and bites the dust. Undaunted the groom's family presses ahead with the wedding ceremony, marrying the rescued girl to a wooden effigy of the dead man. The melodramatics and sexual exotica are routine for the genre, but the film looks good and plays well. Its most intriguing element is the gay subplot involving the bandit chief, a cross-dressing aesthete who gets a crush on the strapping hero.