If nothing else, Jeff Lau’s latest outing makes good on its title. After unleashing his “answer to Transformers” last year (Kung Fu Cyborg, which made the original look like Citizen Kane), the one-man factory of cultural pastiche has now conveniently delivered his own classic two-parter, A Chinese Odyssey: Pandora’s Box and Cinderella, the Scary Movie treatment. Scattershot and relentlessly wacky, Just Another Pandora’s Box is really three movies in one: it is A Chinese Odyssey, Red Cliff, Titanic, and stir.

Deeply affected by the love story in A Chinese Odyssey, a fairy (Sun Li) decides to replicate the legend with her fated lover (Ronald Cheng), a small-time thief who’d rather trip through time with a pandora’s box than to yield to her insistent advances. As the pair land on the eve of the Battle of Red Cliff, Lau dishes out his zany parodies – misses more than hits – on recent movies (Painted Skin, Kung Fu Hustle, CJ7, Kung Fu Panda, and so on) with reckless abandon, while the narrative autopilots through its inevitable checkpoints (ship plus romance equals Titanic!).

Surely a cult classic in the making if it’d been made a significantly better (or worse) movie, this gag-driven farce will truly satisfy few other than fanatics of A Chinese Odyssey, who can have a ball watching some of the actors reprise their roles – after a 16-year interval, no less – culminating in an alternative ending to the heartbreaking original. And that, if not so much the 80 minutes preceding it, feels long overdue.

Edmund Lee