Monkeying Around.

Awhile back, I mentioned that I saw a poster for this movie. Last week after Die Hard 4.0, I had some time to kill and it was still cheap "Men's Day", so I watched Saiyuki.

The opening using Chinese puppetry and music and was the best part.

Otherwise, Nice costumes, great score, some good fight scenes, but all-in-all, pretty humdrum. The main dude (the SMAP guy) had two styles of acting...being loud & being very loud. I'm sure it was within character to scream throughout, but it got very irritating to me after a few minutes. The other characters were far less annoying but relatively boring by comparison. The only reason I really saw the movie was to listen to the Monkey Majik song, Around the World played during the end credits. I thought another tune might have creeped in during the movie, but no such luck.

My suggestion, should you want to see this movie only for the MM boys, is to sneak in for the last 5 minutes.
Or just watch this...



The tv show from 1979 only lasted for 13 episodes, but it also had a feature movie in 1978. If you really want to research it (it's not worth it), you can always read up on it here or check out the original Chinese book here (which does seem worth it.)