Stephen Chow delivers warm fuzzies in his extra-terrestrial new film. By JOE SHEPPARD.

IT’S A SHAME that kids generally don’t dig reading subtitles, otherwise the latest ingenious romp from Hong Kong jester Stephen Chow – complete with free stuffed toy! – would have been just the ticket to enliven a dreary Saturday morning. To be sure there were children at the Paramount, but I’ll wager the majority of the audience paid the full ticket price, and I caught a few of them wiping their eyes after enjoying a very funny and clever little tale with a surprisingly touching final act.

Once again Chow hammers home the worthy life of the penniless but honest man: little Dicky and his poor solo dad go without any creature comforts in their impossibly dilapidated hovel so that they can afford the opportunities that come with the most expensive private school in town. While all the kids gleefully play with their CJ1s – the latest in robotic dog toys – Dicky is lucky if his lunch isn’t rotten each day. But the father and son manage to make their own fun, bonding over simple pleasures like squashing cockroaches or window-shopping. When Dad finds Dicky a strange green toy while scavenging at the tip one day, could it have anything to do with the reported UFO sighting they saw on television that afternoon?

The name CJ7 obviously recalls ET, but that’s where the similarities end between Stephens Chow and Spielberg. The action centrepiece of CJ7 is a stunning and hilarious dream sequence that captures Dicky’s overactive imagination when he realises that his new best friend has supernatural powers of regeneration. The Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer shenanigans are obviously used more sparingly, but instead Chow has a lot of fun with the CGI of Dicky’s animated pet, and once more there is certainly no shortage of farce and slapstick.

And this might just be the fanciful projection of a Western mindset, but there seems to be something more complex behind the simplistic values and use-power-wisely moralising of the central plot. The cost of a human life is as cheap as the paper the building codes are written on when an horrific accident befalls Dicky’s Dad at the world’s most terrifyingly shonky construction site. And Dicky’s cover story – that his pet alien is only the latest kids’ toy – perhaps comments on the increasing technology and expectations of Chinese consumers, if not the growing gap between rich and poor.

There are clearly a lot of cultural differences – smacking children and torturing pets don’t go down so well in Aotearoa – but this is exactly the sort of film I wish they had shown us during AV time in Standard 3.