A warlord’s lusty nephew destroys a simple farming family’s pastoral idyll and sends its favorite son into tropical exile in Sun Yu’s delirious combination of Chinese peasant drama and Hollywood-style decadent island exotica. Brokenhearted after his family’s ruin, our hero (Zheng Junli) winds up in a South Seas hellhole seemingly borrowed from some leftover Lon Chaney film set, where saloon brawls, sleazy floor shows, and oblivion await him. A sultry dancing girl (Li Lili, in the Joan Crawford role) promises salvation, until the warlord’s nephew suddenly reappears—and that volcano starts to erupt.