The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Original title: 魔

When his brother Wing (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei) is so badly hurt in a ring fight against a rather evil Thai Boxer (Bolo Yeung) he’ll never be able to walk again, gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) swears vengeance. Before he can do much about it apart from setting a date with the villain, his daily life of fighting and tough-guying is interrupted by a glowing buddha-like figure who spouts water like a rather improbable water fountain. Said figure wants Hung to come to him, for reasons he’s not going to explain.

As luck will have it, when Hung comes to Thailand for his grudge match against the Thai Boxer, he stumbles upon a temple whose abbot the glowing figure apparently is. Said abbot was close to achieving either nirvana or bodhisattva status when he was cursed during an extensive long range magic duel against a black magician. Now, instead of attaining a glorious state, he’s starting to slowly rot away.

Which is a problem for Hung as well, because in a former life, he was the abbot’s twin; they are still spiritually connected, so the curse will kill Hung as well, eventually. The only way out is for our very reluctant protagonist to become a monk (abstaining from sex is a real problem for this friend of the female breast) and learn some proper Buddhist magic. And even if Hung should manage to beat the magician, there are further complications in front of him.

This bare description of its first forty minutes or so does not in the least do justice to the incredible amount of macabre craziness Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Boxer’s Omen gets up to. Much of the film is taken up by a series of magical duels that take place on black sound stages with mood lights, during which an incredible amount of some of the weirdest stuff ever put to screen takes place. Heads rip themselves from bodies, eyes turn to maggoty holes, little bat skeletons slow-motion hop away, and so on, and so forth until one is overwhelmed by the film’s sheer focus on being weird. Once things have gotten going, which does not take long at all, there’s no stopping Kuei’s – or screenwriter Szw-To On’s – imagination when it comes to body horror, strange uses of body parts, and whatever you might imagine belongs into a film like this.

I’ve seen enough black magic and Buddhist horrific folk magic in movies to actually recognize quite a few of the tropes and magical basics on display here, but The Boxer’s Omen uses their more traditional weird only as a springboard for flights of wild and macabre visual fancy that are peculiar even for the weirdest stage of horror filmmaking in Hongkong. Despite the film mostly consisting of a couple of – pretty great – martial arts fights and drawn-out magical duels, there’s really never a dull moment here. That’s not only thanks to Kuei’s willingness to make every idea he encounters weirder, but also because he has such a great eye for creating a mood of the truly outré throughout, a hand for the exalted camera angle as well as for the most bizarre lighting choice for any given scene. The film seems to set out to stretch the concepts of the folk magic concepts it uses to such extremes, they leave the actual logic underlying them behind and become a form of pure free-floating weirdness. It is an exhausting joy to watch.

Reflecting on the film afterwards is rather more like trying to remember a vivid and utterly bizarre nightmare than thinking about a movie I’ve seen, which either is a huge recommendation or a terrible insult, depending on who is reading this.

In short: Blood Revenge (1974)

When they hear that the official Kong who was responsible for their arrest has grown ill and defenceless, a quintet of bad guys with charming names like Big-Little Eye and Big Beard (overcompensating much?) break out of jail. To prove that they are really evil, they not only proceed to kill their designated victim, but also add a little extra wickedness by raping and killing his wife.

Fortunately, the couple's daughter Tsui Fung (Liu Siu-Wai) isn't at home when all that messy violence takes place and lives to swear vengeance on the unknown assailants, as any good child would. It's just a bit problematic that Tsui Fung doesn't know who did the dastardly deeds.

When she visits the grave of her parents, she meets Wei Shi (Phillip Ko). The young man is the son of another couple that was killed by the gang before they were jailed and so has his own good reasons for hating them. After explaining the identity of the enemy (which he just guessed), Tsui Fung and Wei Shi pick off the killers one by one.

The Taiwanese Blood Revenge is vengeance minded martial arts cinema reduced to the bare minimum. It feels nearly dishonest to speak of the film as having a plot - a bare-bones reason for people to kick their faces in is set up, a few additional bits of characterization and exposition are thrown in from time to time, but the only real content is the kicking and hitting in various locations.

It is quite obvious that this no-content approach to filmmaking is director Li Su's way of coping with a very low budget and the lack of time and possibilities that usually comes with it. This is not as huge a problem for the film than one might think. It is a very fine line that separates a minimalistic genre film from an impoverished one and somehow Li Su manages to keep his film on the more interesting minimalistic side.

He has the professionalism of everyone involved on his side. Li Su's own style of direction isn't exactly what I'd call impressive, but he has no problems keeping his film moving (which, as I always say is the most important thing when you make an action film) or framing the action in a satisfying way. The actors aren't brilliant, but aren't bad either, especially seeing that they aren't giving anything to work with by the film's script. The editing is tighter and cleaner than one would expect and the fight choreography isn't pretty but convincingly brutal. You get the gist.

Of course, all the professionalism in the world can't hide the film's lack of substance. The heroine's love for cross-dressing and the film's sudden absurd turn against vigilante violence in its last five minutes are the only elements besides the fights worth mentioning about Blood Revenge and both are just thrown in there without ever actually leading anywhere.

This does not mean that I didn't have a fine ninety minutes with Blood Revenge, though. As a fan of martial arts cinema, watching people kick each other's faces in is sometimes exactly what I look for in a movie, and Blood Revenge nicely delivers on that point.

 

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