i absolutely love old 60s-80s wuxia movies and have watched probably close to a hundred of them just in the last year, especially if you include some of the more wuxia-adjacent kung fu films of the era, but without question my favorite wuxia subgenre is the string of films made mostly in the 80s plus a few from the late 70s and early 90s when hong kong and taiwan movie studios started to get really weird and high concept in an effort to stand out and were churning out all kinds of movies about wizards having laser battles and shit, but since computer graphics weren't really a big thing yet everything had to be done either with practical effects or just hand-drawing the effects on the film.
i say this without an ounce of irony or condescension. there is absolutely nothing "so bad it's good" about these movies. they genuinely fucking whip ass and the amount of effort and artistry put into such weird and wild concepts is mind-blowing, especially considering many of them were made to be practically disposable and some of them only survived to today by the grace of someone happening to save the original negative or just an intact 35mm print from being tossed in a dumpster.
to that end i've been compiling a list of films in this my most beloved of genres and if you love wizard shit then you really owe it to yourself to track some of these down and give them a watch:
80s hong kong/taiwan bonkers ass high fantasy films were the peak of cinema. wizard duels! hand-drawn lasers and fireballs on the film! hell
EDIT: forgot to mention that many of these you can find on public torrent servers like rarbg and there's a surprising number just on archive.org and youtube. but also if you can spare the cash, many excellent old hong kong movies are starting to get really nice physical media releases from boutique DVD and blu-ray distribution companies
oh hi i just dumped like 30-ish of my favorite chinese/japanese/filipino fantasy movies onto a google drive here. i'm gonna try and leave it up for at least a year unless i really need the space, but in the meantime go nuts with it. i might also occasionally add new films to the folder. the contents of the drive are not even close to a comprehensive overview of the genre but i've only got so much upload capacity and it's a pretty good introduction imo.
if you're wondering where to start, i will recommend the following, roughly in order, as first stabs into the genre:
Buddha's Palm (1982)
Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983)
Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)
The Miracle Fighters (1982)
Portrait in Crystal (1983)
Descendant of the Sun (1983)
The Battle Wizard (1977)
The Beheaded 1000 (1993)
The Ghost Hill (1971)
The Hidden Power of the Dragon Sabre (1984)
that last one is technically the third part of a trilogy but it's a long-gap sequel with tenuous continuity and the first two aren't nearly as crazy, and honestly watching them first wouldn't really make the film anymore coherent. in fact as a general rule for enjoyment of any of these i strongly discourage the impulse to make total sense of the plot. just let the wizard laser nonsense wash over you.
offhand, i think the only film in this compilation that really needs a content warning is Wolf Devil Woman, which is a kickass taiwanese fantasy film and one of the few that has a female lead, the inimitable Pearl Chang who also wrote and directed the film, but it also has a couple moments of on-screen animal cruelty to be wary of.
