Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Worms' (1970)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 1970 low-budget Taiwanese production 13 Worms joins The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles and Ninjas, Condors 13 on the list of weird and terrible martial-arts movies I have watched for this project. I can enjoy sitting through an endless stream of bad horror movies, but I get bored with even decent martial-arts movies, so getting through a bad one is a real chore. Luckily for me, I guess, 13 Worms crams in about five other genres along the way, handling each one in its bizarre, nonsensical way. It starts out, bafflingly, with a chess tournament (although the game depicted in the movie, labeled in the subtitles as chess, doesn't look much like any chess I have ever seen, and is probably actually some other Chinese board game), which the title characters (a band of roving adventurers and/or bandits or something) have somehow won as a collective. A mysterious chess master shows up and challenges them to a match, and they agree to perform a task for him if they lose. The Worms' leader (maybe?) is an old man who appears to have a heart attack and die during the chess match (!!), which is then finished up (and lost) by the second-in-command (?).

Anyway, the Worms (of which there are now only 12, because the leader died of a chess-induced heart attack) now agree to go on a quest to rescue a princess for this mysterious chess master. This involves them getting arrested for some reason that I didn't understand and then carted off to a prison where this princess is being held, and where the inmates are forced to move pieces in a giant life-size version of chess (or whatever Chinese game is actually in the movie). More crazy ideas like that would have made the movie a bit more fun to watch, but most of it is a tedious slow chase as the Worms track the soldiers who are taking the princess ... somewhere. Also, there are a bunch of songs, because this movie is sort of a musical? I don't even know.

I could go through the rest of the inane plot beat by beat, although I don't think I understood most of it, including what exactly the Worms were trying to accomplish at any given moment. There's a sequence in which they dress up as ghosts (covered in white sheets) to scare the soldiers, and bits where they pose as various workers (a boatman, a wine merchant, an innkeeper) that the soldiers encounter along the way. The princess doesn't seem all that upset at being held captive (she's never shackled or confined), and both sides are consistently foiled by a "beggar" who first shows up as the chess master's assistant (or something). There's a big twist at the end when this beggar turns out to be a woman, which is completely obvious the entire time but comes as a total shock to all the other characters.

These nonsensical martial-arts movies are usually at least partially redeemed by their fight sequences, but 13 Worms has surprisingly minimal action, most of which is confusingly shot and not very exciting. The final battle involves the Worms fighting some guy who's basically just shown up, and there are no consistent villains to root against. Even the heroes kind of come and go throughout the story, and the annoying beggar ends up being the most prominent character. I was kind of amused by the self-important songs about the characters' heroism and the dangers they face, but I'm sure a lot of their impact was lost in translation. That's probably true for the rest of the movie, which might have made more sense with more careful subtitling. I don't think it's really worth the effort to find out, though.