Weirdhouse Cinema: The Boxer's Omen

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe dive into the grisly black sorcery and mind-bending Buddhist magic in the legendary Shaw Brothers film “The Boxer’s Omen,” directed by Kuei Chih-Hung.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is Rod Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
today on Weird House Cinema, we are going to be
talking about the nineteen eighty three Hong Kong action horror
film The Boxers omen directed by Kwai Chi Hung. This
movie is a lot of things. First of all, it
is just a lot through one lens. It is an
action packed martial arts revenge film. Through another. It is

(00:39):
magical insanity, just an overwhelming storm of rituals and magical
items being combined, magical recipes, necromancy. You've got creaky bat skeletons,
needlenosed tarantulas, red devils, skin balloons, crocodile skulls, rotten guts,

(01:01):
bikini mummies, just all kinds of stuff. Basically more unhinged sorcery, slop, gore,
and wizard battles than you could imagine being crammed into
a single film.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's right, it's pretty wall to wall, and the connective
tissue in there is when when the film isn't being
just absolutely crazy, there's some very well crafted connective tissue
that I think also adds to the weird feeling you
get watching this picture.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, well, I was going to say, I wonder if
this is what you're alluding to through yet another lens.
It's a kind of interesting exploration of like Buddhist monastic
piety and the quest for immortality.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, yeah, I don't think now. To be clear, you're
not going to learn much about Buddhism watching this picture.
But as we'll point out, there's some very nice locations here.
There's some nice almost docu mintary style scenes of like
street processions and normal people going about their everyday business
in Nepal and in Thailand and also in Hong Kong,

(02:11):
which you know, I can I can kind of like
provide this real world setting that really works to make
all the crazy stuff feel like a real injection of
another world into ours.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, that's right. Though, I also want to acknowledge what
this movie is mainly known for, which is just wet madness.
It has a reputation among the midnight movie crowd for
being an exercise in extremes. It's kind of like, oh,
you like Hong Kong horror movies, I have got one

(02:44):
you're not ready for. And maybe you're not ready. I
would not recommend, as I told I watched this one first,
and as I told Robin JJ, I would not recommend
watching this while you're eating, though I think maybe you did. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
I ate during part of it, and JJ ended up
eating doing part of it.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, that could be a bad move, depending on how
strong your stomach is. But I would recommend watching it
to some extent if you have a tolerance for this
sort of thing, at least, because it is one of
the most amazingly stupendously bizarre and remarkable films I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Absolutely it is pure magic. And it's fitting because we
say that because the film's original title is Mo, which
just means magic or devil and can certainly mean dark
magic depending on the context. We get to see both
light and dark magic here. Mo is also part of
the word magwai, just to give it a little more

(03:42):
clarity there.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Oh, I see, did you have a notice like the
character the Chinese character Mo is the thing that appears
at the beginning of the film.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
It is, and I think it's really interesting here, and
maybe Mandarin readers can break down what's happening here a
little bit. But we Yeah, they're gonna they're gonna put
up the kanji for mo, but they kind of roll
it out in three phases, and so initially the character
that is added is the character that means ghost, and

(04:14):
then and then the rest of the character is added
that spells out the pure I mean, the full title magic.
So I don't know if if if a if a
Mandarin reader, a native Mandarin reader would interpret that as
like ghost magic, Like does that affect the the title
of the movie as you read it or or what,
because we don't. I guess we sometimes have things like this,

(04:35):
and like like English language titles for pictures where it
looks like it's gonna spell one thing and then it
spells another. But I don't think i'd seen this done
before in like a Chinese or.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
A Japanese film.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, that that is interesting. But it's also interesting just
thinking about the title being in one sense magic or
you know, sorcery, enchantment, whatever this refers to, uh, because
that is like actually the main theme of the movie.
And so in English, we've got this title the Boxer's Omen,
which paired with the opening scene makes it seem like

(05:08):
this movie is going to be about kickboxing, which is
a real bait and switch.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, it does seem very concerned with kickboxing for a
little bit there, but then really goes goes off the off,
the off the cliff here into realms of magic and
demons and sorcery and all sorts of gross and mind
bending things that are pretty far removed from kicks to
the head.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Not only that, does it not only moves mainly away
from the kickboxing plot, it literally like forgets to conclude
the kickboxing plot. Yeah, there's a kickboxing thread running through.
It's like a revenge thing, and it never it never finishes.
We never get the final showdown.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, we were we were joking about this off Mike
that perhaps Shaw Brothers came to the director Kuwaiti Hung
and said, hey, we want you to make a kickboxing movie,
and he's like, got it.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, yeah, this is about as much about kickboxing as
like The Shining is about hotel maintenance.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah yeah, what if they had called The Shining like
the Hotel Manager.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
But I like the way in which this movie is
about magic. You know, It's like there's a healthy balance
of treating magic as on one hand, of course just
an object of absolutely insane spectacle and exploitation, but then
also as an object of what feels like genuine respect.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Yeah, the magic systems in this film are fascinating. Like,
this movie takes its magic seriously. We've all seen movies
where evil wizards like dabble and necromancy, and I was
thinking about this too. We were a lot of people
I think played dungeons and dragons and you know, there's
spell components in there, and your spell, your character is
supposed to their arms and say certain things. But we

(07:02):
often just skip over all that and say you cast
a fireball. And that's the way movies sometimes do as well.
This movie does not. There's almost a really like a hypnotic,
ritualistic way that especially the dark magic spells are presented,
and in general, like the light and dark of these
different magical schools is just oh man, it's just so

(07:23):
well executed.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Here.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
It's almost more focused on the rituals that evoke the
magic than on the magic effects themselves.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah yeah, And and the way that the spells are
generated to tell you a lot about it about the practitioners.
So the Buddhist magic is the pure expression of noble virtue,
while the black magic is the exact opposite. It's just
pure degeneration, madness, and self destruction. So in the same

(07:52):
way that the Abbot is on the verge of achieving
enlightenment and immortality through righteousness and equanimity, the wizards in
the picture seem to be doing everything they can to
just kind of like bottom out, as if they're not
only you know, plunging into the hells, but doing everything
they can to accelerate their descent so they can like
blast through the floor and come out the other side
in a kind of perverse counter enlightenment.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah. Yeah, in more than one way. I noticed this.
The bad wizards in this movie practice magic and do
their rituals not with the kind of scary solemnity we're
used to seeing Satanists do their stuff in the movies
where it's like oh, you know, no, no, in furnace
and being very serious while they're lowering the dagger like

(08:36):
in what was it Which Empire of the Dark. It's
not like that at all. It is a They basically
have two modes of ritual. They have depraved, chaotic frenzy
and then they also have impatient annoyance. That I made
the comparison I was going to talk about this later,
but there's one part where we see the first main

(08:57):
evil wizard doing a bunch of rituals when he's like
trying to get a bat to revive after it has
been destroyed, and he's talking at the ritual like somebody
talks at their car when they can't get it to start.
You know, it's just this familiar impatient annoyance, not somber
satanism with chanting, and.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
At times there's also a detached defilement to what they're doing.
You know, it's like they're doing like really gross and
debased things, but it is it is also just kind
of like what they do, and you know, it takes
hours to pull this off, but it's in these are
necessary steps in order to achieve their sorceress goals.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah, that's more in the chaotic frenzy era, because they're
just frantically kind of I don't know, picking up guts
and chewing them and cutting things off of animals and
chewing them and spitting them out and cutting things open,
and it seems half the time like they're barely paying
attention to what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, Now, the magic systems that are depicted in the film,
they seem to have many connections to magical traditions and
Thailand and East Asia, real or attributed. And to be clear,
in the case of black magic, as we've discussed before,
we're certainly not always talking about practices that were ever
necessarily practiced, even by a thin minority of people. But

(10:14):
you know, you end up with these tales about these
the sorts of things. These are the sorts of spells
that the dark wizards and witches engage in.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Right, a lot of times, what we might mean by
calling something authentic culturally authentic evil sorcery does not mean
it's what people, what like sorcerers of that culture actually did.
It's what people of that culture actually thought sorcerers.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
Did, Right, And then you have levels of like what
did outsiders and foreigners think about the things that they
heard about about magical practices, real or imagined? And then
in this exercise, how is all that amplified through the
lens of exploitation cinema, because this is exploitation cinema, to
be clear.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
That's right. I feel like with this one, maybe we
should start with the plots at the top, because in
the plot section we're probably just going to talk a
lot about these wizard battle scenes and the rituals, so
the plot is basically takes this form. A Hong Kong
criminal named Chan Hung is drawn into a quest for

(11:18):
revenge against a cruel Thai kickboxer who paralyzed Chan Hung's
brother with an illegal strike during a match, actually after
a match was over, and then at the same time
he is drawn by dreams and visions to a Buddhist
monastery in Thailand, where he discovers that he has a

(11:38):
spiritual connection to the recently deceased abbot of that temple.
The abbot was a powerful and holy Buddhist monk who
died in the middle of a feud with a clan
of evil sorcerers. Chan Hung discovers that in order to
both avenge his worldly brother and protect the immortality of

(11:59):
his spirit brother through the abbot, and then finally also
to protect himself because we learn that his fate is
linked to the fate of the abbot, he must renounce
his hedonistic life of crime, shave his head, and become
a monk, and this practice of piety and self discipline
and self denial will allow him to gain supernatural strength

(12:21):
to fight his enemies both physical and magical, and then
from this ensues a massive series of wizard battles and
escalations of wicked enchantment. Along the way, chan hung faces doubt, weakness, temptation,
and setbacks, though actually those are kind of limited in scale,
like we get those concentrated in very specific moments in

(12:44):
the film. But it ends with a sorcerer showdown in
a Buddhist temple in Nepal, so stupendous that I think
many viewers will probably not even notice that the movie forgets,
as we said earlier, to tie up the kickboxing revenge plot.
As you speculated, Rob, I mean, you almost wonder if
the Shaw brothers, you know, we're like, we need a

(13:04):
kickboxing film, and that was just the price of admission
to get this film financed. But once the wizard re begins,
like why settle for anything less? Do we really want
to end this film with a kickboxing conflict? Is the
final confrontation when we could have a demoness giving birth
to plastic bags full of eyeballs that turn into putty

(13:26):
mummies that cut themselves open and cut their own fingers
off to bleed on each other and turn into eyeball
dinosaurs exactly.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, I don't think anybody's left wondering exactly how the
kickboxing resolved itself. All right, Well, like we said, this
one is a film that certainly has a reputation. It's
been a very popular midnight movie for quite a while.
So he almost can't provide an elevator pitch for it.
It is the Boxer's Omen and it casts a long shadow.

(13:56):
But I would say, you know, one man is about
to be sucked into a world of black magic, convengeance,
and then that's really all you need to know. The
rest is more of a it's more about sensation. Yeah,
let's listen to just a little bit of the trailer audio.
Though this is one we're just gonna dip in and
out of it because the trailer is mostly sound effects.
But maybe you'll get just a little bit of a
sonic vibe here. All right. Well, if you would like

(14:51):
to go and watch The Boxers Omen before proceeding with
the rest of this episode, it is available. I watched
it on the Image Entertainment DVD, which I believe came
out in two thousand and seven, and I rented that
from Video Drome here in Atlanta. It was also released
on Blu Ray in the shaw Scope Volume two box set,
which actually seems like it might be the best presentation

(15:12):
of the film with extras, but you have to buy
the entire ten disc set to get your hands on it.
There's even a commentary track by the late critic Travis
Crawford on there.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
Though.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
I believe JJ was telling us that you can also
stream this from Arrow via Arrow's online streaming presence.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
And to be clear, the box set you're talking about
there is the Volume two Shaw Brothers collection from Errow Video.
Because there are also some Shout Factory Shaw Brothers box
sets and I was looking at their Volume two. That's
not the same thing.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah, yeah, make sure you get the right one. I mean,
even if you make a mistake, you can end up
with a whole bunch of Shaw Brothers pictures which, you know.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Probably a good time.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
It's pretty good time.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, But yes, I believe it's Volume two that has
the boxer zoning on it.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
It is.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
All right, Well, let's talk a little bit about the
people behind this picture and in this picture. All right,
let's start at the top with Kuochi Hung, the director,
also the story credit and he did the special effects.
He lived nineteen thirty seven through nineteen ninety nine. Hong
Kong movie director active from sixty one through nineteen eighty four,

(16:29):
So Boxers omen is his penultimate film and his final
horror movie. He directed just one more film with the
same screenwriter as this picture, an action comedy titled Misfire,
before he apparently immigrated or reimmigrated to the United States.
I was more on that in just a minute here.

(16:50):
But he apparently ran a pizza restaurant in California for
the remainder of his life. I have so many questions
about this pizza restaurant. Yeah, I wasn't able to find
out much about it. I was even looking up interviews
with his son, Ming Beaverque, who is an American film producer.
In fact, he was an associate producer on the Meg movies,

(17:12):
the recent Giant Shark movies.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Oh, the Owens was Jason Steithem the.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Very ones, But he didn't really get into it much.
But I mentioned reimmigrated because apparently Ming's grandfather attended Cornell
and he says graduated in nineteen twenty two, worked in
Detroit in the nineteen thirties, and then went back to China.
During the Second World War, So I don't know, I

(17:38):
found that interesting.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
So from what I understand, Quo Chi Hung was not
originally best known for making like horror or supernatural films, right,
I mean, this was some of his later work, but
early on he made a lot of like crime dramas and.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, he did a lot of different stuff, but he's
probably best known internationally for this late career period when
he did a lot of black magic films, mostly in
the nineteen eighties, playing off a tradition that was kind
of popularized in the nineteen seventies by the likes of
Oily Maniac director Hominghua, who we discussed. We've discussed this

(18:15):
film previously on Weird House Cinema. This is a film
from nineteen seventy six, but Kuo Chi Hunk takes things
to just New Dizzeying Heights obviously, so in addition to
the Boxer Zoemen, these black magic films include nineteen eighties Hex,
nineteen eighties Hex Versus Witchcraft, eighty one's Corps Mania, eighty
one's Bewitched, to which this film I've seen sometimes described

(18:37):
as kind of a sequel, eighty two's Curse of Evil
and eighty two's Hex after Hex. Obviously, these are all
you know, English titles, and one can generally assume that
the actual Chinese titles were maybe a little less silly sounding.
He also directed some horror films in the nineteen seventies
seventy three's The Bamboo House of Dolls, seventy four's Ghost Eyes,

(18:58):
seventy four's The Killers, seventy five's Fearful Interlude, and seventy
six is Spirit of the Rape. But he also directed
several action films, including nineteen eighties Killer Constable, generally considered
his only Wushav film, and he also directed the nineteen
seventy four serious crime drama The Tea House and nineteen

(19:19):
seventy six is The Bod Squad, which is a Kung
fu sex comedy. Nice so a popular and obviously daring
visual Shaw Brothers director here, But it's easy to focus
on the crazy visuals in a film like this. But
he also valued great locations, which is something we see
in The Boxer z Omen as well as our lead
character travels to Thailand and Nepal, and often he would

(19:43):
have subtle nods to the actual lives of common people,
which we see here as well, again almost giving it
a kind of documentary vibe in its real world moments,
and I'm to understand. In his other films he also
tackled two varying degrees the subject of corruption, police, corruption,
and so forth. And yeah, but before he died, he

(20:06):
apparently immigrated to the United States and ran a pizza parlor.
So again, I wish I could find out more about
that pizza parlor, but it remains a mystery, all right.
Moving on to the screenplay. The screenplay is credited to
Own Setso, who lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty twenty one.
His other writings include Killer Constable, Corps Mania, Bewitched, eighty

(20:28):
two's Buddha's Palm, and also Curse of Evil. Obviously these
two worked together quite a lot, but Setso was in
general just a very prolific writer. On the Hong Kong
movie database, he has something like two hundred and fifty
nine writing credits. Wow, that's a lot, all right. Getting
into the cast here again, our main protagonist is Chang

(20:50):
Hung played by Philip Coe. Philip Co lived nineteen forty
nine through twenty seventeen. Hong Kong actor, stuntman and director,
Active from nineteen six seventy through two thousand and six.
He has an uncredited guard role in nineteen seventy three's
Enter the Dragon, which this is not surprising. I think
it's often the case when you look at Shaw Brothers pictures,

(21:12):
like everybody has some connection to Enter the Dragon. Even
though Enter the Dragon was not a Shaw Brother's motion picture.
I believe that was a Golden Harvest picture, but anyway.
Philip co His other acting credits include eighty four's The
Eight Diagram Poll Fighter, eighty seven's Eastern Condors, and eighty
eight Dragons Forever. He was also in eighty three Seating

(21:34):
of a Ghost, eighty six is Magic Crystal, and eighty
five's Ninja Terminator starring Richard Harris and we just talked about.
Played the lead cultist in Empire of the Dark. Philip
Co worked with such Hong Kong greats as Bruce Lee,
Jackie Chan, Samo Hung. His directing credits include nineteen eighties
Killer Romance and ninety two's Hard to Kill, starring a

(21:57):
young Robin Sho of Mortal Kombat fame.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Oh yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
He often played villains and was married at one point
to Japanese actress Yukari Oshima, who appeared in a number
of Hong Kong and Filipino pictures, including nineteen ninety one's
Ricky Oh, The Story of Ricky, in which she plays
one of the Gang of four.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
May come back to that movie someday.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, the connection from one notoriously bloody picture to another. Okay,
so Chanhung is helping out the abbot. I think we've
established that the abbot in question here, the one that
he is connected to, that they are like reincarnations another
twins in her previous life. Yeah, we'll find out. This

(22:39):
abbot is played by Elvis su Kam Kong born nineteen
sixty one, Hong Kong actor whose other films include eighty
three's Shaolin and Wu Tang. This is indeed the picture
that's one of Rizza's favorite films. Nineteen eighty six is
The Seventh Curse, eighty nine's The Iceman Cometh. I've seen
that one. I believe that one has a lot of

(23:00):
sword play in it. Nineteen ninety six is Viva Erotica,
and twenty thirteen's The Grand Master. Now we have multiple
dark wizards in this picture, and I had a hard
time nailing down exactly which character was which, and who
played each character. I was working off of the Internet
movie database as well as the Hong Kong movie database,
but for this movie in particular, we don't necessarily have

(23:22):
the names of the characters or even a character description
entailed as well.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
I think most of the characters we never learned their name.
Movie I never says.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
This is not that sort of movie where you get
to know each and every dark wizard. I was really
intrigued as well by a character that pops up pretty
late in the picture, a sorceress or demoness that is
summoned or resurrected. And I believe I really had to

(23:53):
hunt around for this one, but I believe she's played
by someone named Shao Yen Lynn. But this is a
case where we don't have no idea like what her
when she was born, no biographical data about her, and
I think this was her only credit but still very
memorable sexy demonis role, as we'll describe later on in
our plot summary.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Is this. This is the character who the parental guide
on IMDb warns us that she is underdressed for entering
a temple.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yes, yes, among all the other blasphemous and awful things
she's involved in.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
She is underdressed. All right.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Now we are going to get to someone who is
instantly recognizable though, and I think easily the most internationally
recognizable actor in this whole picture. It is Bolo Jung
playing Boobo the tie boxer, getting to the boxing subplot
that is pushed to the forefront by the English title
for this picture. Born in nineteen forty six. You've all

(24:54):
seen this guy before. I think he is also known
as Chinese Hercules.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
He is a mountain. This guy. This guy is a
muscle man.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Yeah, yeah, he is a beast.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
And he's like he's kicking like he's fast, super muscular,
kicking with these legs look like tree trunks. I mean,
he's just intimidating and also has this just natural heel
charisma just oozing off of him. You can see why
this guy was so successful.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
In fact, in the kickboxing scene where the movie opens,
I am, by no means a kickboxing expert. I don't
really know anything about it, but even my amateur eyes
were looking at this and I'm like, wait, these two
guys are in the same weight class. Doesn't look like
they would be.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Yeah, Bola is just intimidating, and if you have ever
seen nineteen seventy three's Enter the Dragon, Bolo is the
guy who fights John Saxon's character, and you may have
had similar thoughts in that matchup. You know, like John Saxon,
you know you're super cool, but there's no way you
would have any realistic chance against this month's of a man.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well, that would make more sense of wasn't it originally
in the script that John Sackson's character dies, and then
they had to change it because he didn't like that.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
I don't remember, Yeah, may be misremembering, but it's been
a long time since I've seen it, and I don't
know much about it, you know, behind the scenes stuff,
But yeah, Bolo was definitely in Entered the Dragon. His
Hong Kong film credits go back to nineteen seventy and
include the nineteen seventy three film Chinese Hercules, in which

(26:29):
he is not the star, but it was clearly promoted
at least internationally with this title. To capitalize on his
screen presence, I included a poster here for you, Joe.
You may have if you're out there listening, you should
look this up as well. It says Chinese Hercules, the
first and only muscle mad monster of the martial Arts,
the superhuman Beast of the East. And then he's there's

(26:52):
an illustration of him, like, let's see, he's got like
two guys in headlocks. And then there's a lady biting
his leg as he with his elbows like busts down
the pillars of some sort of a temple.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Oh yeah, like Samson, it's pushing the pillars out. Is
the lady biting his leg because she likes him or
because she doesn't like him?

Speaker 2 (27:13):
I cannot determine, And I'm not sure that actually watching
the film would answer the question. But yeah, yeah, this
guy's the real deal. He was a student of Bruce Lees,
and you know, obviously appeared alongside him and Enter the
Dragon was in a ton of these Hong Kong action films.
But then in nineteen eighty eight he scored the main
antagonist role in a little movie called blood Sport. This

(27:36):
is where I think most people are familiar with him
from this, of course, starred Jean Claude Van Dam, Donald Gibb,
and Forrest Whitaker. And yeah, Bolo is the intimidating kickboxer
that I believe, if I remember correctly, like brutally murders
or injures Donald Gibbs's character, and then Jean Claude Vandam
has to seek revenge against him.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Looking at this made me think about the possibility that
some at some point in time people have rented and
popped in Boxer z Omen because they were a fan
of Jean Claude Van Dam movies, and they're like, oh,
another kickboxing movie.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah, well, there's like maybe five minutes of it in
the picture, and it's impressive. There's some cool kickboxing as
well as discuss But at any rate, he'd work getting
back to Bolo here. He'd work with Van Dam again
in nineteen ninety one's Double Impact, and then apparently slowly
retired from acting after a bit there, with his last

(28:31):
film credit as of this recording in twenty fifteen. Of note,
he also directed and starred in a film titled Bolo,
playing the character Bolo. This is nineteen seventy nine. I
don't think it's autobiographical. I think it all just happens
to come together that way.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Well, I believe Bolow is not his birth name, right,
I think that's like a nickname. Am I wrong about that.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Yeah, I believe so.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
A lot of these Hong Kong actors, as you may
have noticed listeners, you know, they have like an American
Eyes Show name on top of their actual Chinese name.
Both those Other major films include seventy two's Five Fingers
of Death and the nineteen ninety three action film titled
TC two thousand, which also features Billy Blanks and Matthias

(29:18):
Hughes from I Come In Peace. So there's a lot
of muscle in that picture.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Really, that's the tay Bo guy.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
Yeah, yeah, wow.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
All right, Let's see one more actor to mention here,
because she is specifically specifically called out in the movie databases.
We have y co Man playing Chan Hung's girl. That's
his girlfriend. She doesn't really have a name as far
as we can tell beyond that, uh like the Wizards.
Yeah yeah, and she is his often naked lady friend

(29:47):
back in Hong Kong. Her other credits include eighty three's
Seating of a Ghost, eighty five's Devil Cat, eighty five's
Ghost Festival, and ninety three's Sexy Flower. All right, getting
behind the scenes a little bit, there's some interesting names here.
Horace Ma is credited with either art director or scenery
depending on which database you're looking at, and he was

(30:08):
active from eighty three through I believe twenty twenty two,
and I think this was his first film. He'd go
on to win numerous awards for twenty nineteen Shadow and
also worked on Rizza's twenty twelve passion project The Man
with the Iron Fists. Now we have two credited composers here.
There's Chin Jung Shing and then there's also Chin House Sue.

(30:32):
Let's see. Shing was active from eighty one through ninety four,
and his credits include The Seventh Curse, Eight Diagram, Poll Fighter,
and Dragons Forever. His work was also used in Kill Bill.
Kill Bill of course samples some various scores from different
Hong Kong action films, and as for Sue, he also

(30:52):
worked on some of the same films, but also worked
on Human Lanterns, Seating of Ghost, and Bewitched. In general,
I'd say the music here is really fun. There are
a lot of like cool yeah, electronic effects, some of
which were lifted. There's one particular sound that a number
of you will remember from nineteen eighties Flash Gordon that's

(31:12):
sort of like wow sound that is lifted and used
in this picture. And I've also read that there are
some sound effects from Alien that are utilized here as well.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Oh okay, I did not catch that, but I can
believe it. But yeah, there's a lot of fun It's
a playful musical score, Like there's some wailing guitars at
some funny parts. All right, you ready to talk about

(31:44):
the plot.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
Let's get into the plot.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
So we already laid out a brief sketch of the
plot earlier, but at the beginning of the story, our
protagonist Chin Hung is a mid level Hong Kong gangster,
and when the story begins, he seemingly has everything a
guy like him could want. He's got money, power, a
beautiful girlfriend, a nice house, luxuries, and it seems like

(32:08):
respect in the criminal underworld. He's a respected criminal.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
M Yeah, has some cool sunglasses.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
Chen Hung also has a brother. Now about the name
of the brother, I was like some online synopsies, like
the Wikipedia page for this movie calls his brother Chen Wing.
Though when I was just rewatching it, I noticed I
think the only time somebody said his full name in
the movie, it was a boxing announcer who called him
chen Why so I'm not sure which is more right there.

(32:39):
But his brother is also quite successful in his own domain,
which is kickboxing. And they never talk about this from
what I recall, but it is implied later in the
film that Chen Hung himself has previously had a career
as a kickboxer.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah, I mean he seems competent getting into the ring
to kickbox himself later in the picture.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yeah. So the film opens on a kickboxing match in
Hong Kong with two fighters for the heavyweight championship, and
the fighters are Chan Hung's brother Chen Wing or Chen Wy,
and on the other side of the ring a tie
boxer named Bubo. That's the guy played by Bolo Young.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, and again just an obvious physical mismatch here. You
can tell a murder is about to take place in
the ring.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah. So they're fighting, and I might be a little
bit confused about the rules of kickboxing because in this fight,
the tie boxer kicks Chan Wing in the back of
the head between rounds while his back is turned. I
was like, wait, how is that not instant disqualification? I
think the ref says something like if you keep that up,
I'm going to disqualify you. It seems like one time

(33:48):
would be instant, wouldn't it.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, I guess, as with Buddhism, we should be reluctant
to learn too much about kickboxing from this movie.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, it seemed more like pro wrestling rules than something
with line a fair competition. But yeah, anyway, through this
and through so because he's like, you know, kicking him
in the back of the head while his back's turned,
and because he's just smugly grinning a lot, we get
the idea that Boobo the tie boxer is a bad
sportsman and a bad dude. He's vicious, he doesn't fight fair,

(34:20):
and he has no sense of honor or shame. Now,
there is no magic in this scene, which is an
interesting choice that the movie does not begin with like
a supernatural prologue or any indication of how weird it's
going to get. From the opening scene, you could easily
assume that this is just going to be a hard hitting,
terrestrial kickboxer movie. And you know, I think it works

(34:43):
pretty well in that vein Like this is a good
fight scene with strong choreography and most importantly, I think
good sound effects. It has that great frequency spanning slap
with every punch and kick that connects. This is characteristic.
I think of a lot of the best Hong Kong
action movies as they have really great fight sound effects,
and that core connection sound is like a combination of

(35:08):
a bass drum kick, a rim shot, and then a
strip of wet briskets slapping on parchment paper all at
once happening. Love those percussive fight scenes.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, we have really solid sound effects throughout this picture,
whether it's kicks and slaps or dripping in trails and
demon slime.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Anyway, the fight is quite brutal. At different times, both
Bubo and Chen Wing landed just disgusting hits. At one point,
Boubo has a bunch of floppy pink gore tinsel hanging
off the side of his head. He gets kicked in
the head and it's just like wuh, It's like his
wires are coming out. It looks like so Chanhung's brother

(35:49):
wins the fight, but after he has declared the winner,
the tie boxer becomes furious. He runs up, He sucker
punches him in the back of the head again, and
then when he falls down, he stomps on his body
until his neck is broken.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Brittle brittle.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
Once again you'd think like, okay, that's not just disqualified,
like you'd be arrested, but instead it just kind of
like now you're not supposed to do that. Later after
the fight, we see Chan Hung in his element. He
swaggers into this cool Hong Kong club that's flooded with
red light. He's wearing a sleek gray suit with a
pocket square and a black shirt open about four buttons

(36:28):
down from the neck. Also sunglasses at night indoors, so
that he is a cool cat. And so he comes
into the crimed in and he's addressed as brother Hung.
Chan Hung is called in for a meeting with the boss,
Uncle Chi, and the boss tells him that he has
to go to a one am meeting with the representatives
of a gang from the mainland. Hung agrees, and he

(36:50):
makes plans to have back up with weapons waiting outside
the meeting place in case anything goes wrong. Well something
does go wrong. In fact, it is a track the meeting.
It takes place at some kind of construction site, and
as soon as Chan Hun comes in and sees the
leader of the Mainlanders, he's obviously like this is not

(37:11):
gonna be a happy meeting. He takes off his sunglasses.
There's a guitar whale on the soundtrack, and Hung says,
you're very cocky. You just arrived and already you're fighting
for territory. And I do love. By the way, the
outfit of the mainlander, he's got like this cool hat
cock to the side, and he's smoking a cigarette and he,
I don't know, something looks kind of like nineteen twenties

(37:32):
gangster about him.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a real vicious air to him.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah. So the gangster says, you know, it's bold of
you to come here alone, and Hung says, I've been
in Hong Kong a long time. I've seen it all.
But then the mainlander guys like, bet you haven't seen this,
And then from somewhere up above, he drops a burlap
sack full of chopped up human body with bloody arms
poking out of it, and whoops. Inside the sack is

(38:00):
Uncle Chi Hung's boss. And then the other gang reveals
that they also killed all of Hung's back up and
now they're about to kill him as well, so they
tie him up, hang him upside down by his feet,
and plunge his head into a bucket of water. So
it's brutal.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah, So suddenly we've gone from sports movie to violent
crime movie, and it seems like that movie's about to
end here rather quickly.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
But now we're about six minutes into the film, we're
about to get the first sudden intervention of magic. There
is a divine interruption of this gangland execution when an
otherworldly wind and an emanation of white light burst into
the scene, frightening and confusing the gangsters. And then we

(38:45):
cut away to see the source of this power. In
the doorway to the warehouse, there is a bald monk
naked at the shoulder but wrapped in gold robes, with
a gold band around his head, from which dangle these
two large spheres are dish on either side, down below
his jaw, and then in the dark all around we
can see jets of white radiant energy squirting off of him.

(39:09):
He almost literally looks like a lawn sprinkler of holiness.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
He does yes.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Suddenly Chan Hung is free of his bindings. The ropes
come undone. He looks around and he can stand up,
and all of the rival gangsters lie dead on the ground.
The apparition of the monk says, Chan Hung, you must
follow me. Chan Hung asks who are you? But he
doesn't have time to figure it out. Here's police sirens approaching,

(39:34):
so he has to flee the scene, and then he
goes back home to spend the night with his girlfriend.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, and a really steamy sex scene ensues. But it's
also important because it helps establish that our hero is
a lover. He is a lusty gentleman, which is going
to be important later on.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yes you will. I think you were supposed to think
back to the scene immediately when he later promises the
Buddha vow of sexual abstinence.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
So later that night, Chan Hung has another strange vision.
He has awakened from a dream to see a glowing
orange symbol floating in the air over his bed. It
sort of looks like a carrot symbol, or like a
capital letter A without a crossbar.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's intended to be
read this way, but the symbol sort of looks like
the character for wren, which means man or person.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Also, the symbol has its own soundtrack Q It's like
a hollow rhythm beating on a metal drum. And the
symbol leads chan Hung into the living room where the
TV is on. It's blasting static and filling the room
with blue light, and then the vision of the monk
in bodily form appears once again. He tells Hung that
there's something he needs to explain to him, but the

(40:45):
vision disappears when Hung's girlfriend walks into the room and
startles him. The next day, Chan Hung visits his brother
in the hospital. His brother is still in traction, covered
all over with bandages like a burn victim. I don't
understand why the bandage is. They're like all the way
around his head.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, it's like a cartoon level of bandaging here.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah. The doctor informs them that the brother's kickboxing career
is over. He's going to be paralyzed for the rest
of his life, and Chan Hung is shaken and the
brother whispers that Hung must take revenge for him. He
wants to see Hung get revenge on the tie boxer,
so we cut right to it. Next, we're in Thailand

(41:25):
and we see busy city streets filled with cars. You've
got rivers, canals with motor boats, beautiful Buddhist temples and
shrines all around. Chan Hung goes to an event where
a local promoter is presenting an award to Boobo the
tie boxer. The gist of the ceremonies kind of like, well,
they say Boobo showed the Hong Kong champion what boxing

(41:47):
is all about. And then they say that, you know,
the Hong Kong judges were biased against our guy. The
fight was rigged, so the judgment doesn't really count. So
we declare our fighter the winner.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
Yeah, it's a small gather, but it looks like the
local press was invited, and of course our hero has
shown up as well.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah. So the MC presents Bubo with a championship belt,
but before he can claim it, Chan Hung walks up
and he smacks it to the ground and he starts
cussing it at below Young here, and they yell at
each other for a bit, and then they finally agree
that in three months the two of them will fight
a grudge match in Hong Kong.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
And to your point earlier, it really does feel like
pro wrestling at this point. Here we have our obvious
heel and our obvious face here teasing the next big matchup,
the grudge match.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah. In my English subtitles, by the way, they were
calling each other Hong Kong Boy and thie.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Boy, Yes, the same for me. So okay, it seems
like the vengeance here is off to a great start.
You know, they have something on the books, so good enough.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Sure, but it's about to get more complicated because while
riding in a motor boat down the river canal after
the confrontation, Chan Hung suddenly sees a familiar shape at
the peak of a roof of a Buddhist temple. He
sees that glowing orange shape from his waking dream, so
it's like, what's this He has to go in and investigate.

(43:12):
When Chenhun approaches the entrance, a monk in orange robes
greets him and already knows him by name. He says,
they've been expecting him. Inside the temple, we're treated to
visions of altars and shrines blowing with gold and candle light,
and the dim interior and the monks all sing a
hypnotic repeating chant. We will hear this chant or something

(43:34):
like it many times in the film, and it has
a powerful effect the way it just kind of like
cycles on itself. I found it deeply hypnotic.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
And of course these these these temple locations that they're
using are also just so amazing here. We'll have some
sets later on, but at least a number of these
early interiors that we're encountering like these are I believe
actual Tie Temple interiors.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Well, the head Monk wastes no time getting into an
explanation for Chan Hung. He says, a year ago, our
abbot went to Hong Kong to take care of a
black magician, my Goosu. Okay, And so then we see
the sorcerer in question. He is getting out of a
taxi cab and going into the airport, and he's not
dressed like a wizard, by the way. He's in fact,

(44:25):
he to show that he practices black magic. He's dressed
all in black. He's wearing a black shirt, black shoes,
black pants, black belt, and has elvis hair. Yes, So
this guy's walking into the airport, and then suddenly, from
behind him appears the abbot, dressed in his orange robes,
illuminating illuminated from behind, so he shimmers with this pious light,

(44:47):
and his head is also surrounded by a halo. There's
a circular pattern of rainbow colored prismatic feathers, and the
abbot calls out to my Goosu, who turns and looks
at him like, oh no, I've and caught. And then
the abbot holds up in his hand a tear shaped
shard of mirror and then throws it at the Wizard.

(45:09):
It attaches to the Wizard's forehead and immediately starts to
like sap his black magic and destroy his body. So
the Magician starts screaming in pain, and then he starts
clutching at his face, which begins to melt and turns
into white, goopy paste. Green light floods the scene, and
then the Wizard starts exploding, not in one big explosion,

(45:32):
but lots of little explosions, beginning with balloons that inflate
underneath his sloppy skin, and they're all over his arms
and his neck and face, kind of like an infestation
of boils, but they are full on skin balloons which
each blow up and pop.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
There are a number of subgenres that can be applied
to the Boxer's omen. We should mention that one of
them is body harp. There's a lot of body heart
in this movie. So if that's not your thing, if
you're not open to it, then I would maybe pass
on this one.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, So the Wizard collapses to the floor while he's
popping all over popping off. He collapses to the floor
of the airport terminal. He melts some more and screams
on the floor, and then he pulls himself up over
the top of a bunch of orange plastic chairs, at
which point he has morphed into a different form, that
of a withered old wizard with long white spiderweb hair

(46:25):
and pale skin and a big black spot on his
forehead with like long pointy bugle fingernails. I guess this
means that this is my Goosu's true form, and the
Elvis Wizard the guy in black was sort of his
glamour spell.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
Yeah, yeah, that was my interpretation as well.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
The abbot, now sitting cross legged on the airport a
lobby floor, is preying with hands folded, and this keeps
exerting magical suffering on the Wizard, and then the Wizard
collapses on the ground, seemingly dead with dry plaster skin,
and then out of his mouth something begins to wiggle.
It is a bat. It is a bat crawling out
of his mouth, a bat that lived inside the Wizard's mouth,

(47:07):
And it's so cute and it squeaks and flies away.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
But if you think that's the end of it, it
is not. One thing you'll quickly learn about this film
is most pictures would leave it at bat, but not
the Boxer Zone. It.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
No, no, we're just getting started. The abbot catches the
bat in his hand. He puts the wiggling bat in
his pocket and then goes back to his temple in Thailand.
So like did he get on an airplane with the
bat squeaking and writhing the whole way?

Speaker 2 (47:35):
And then it was a different, different world back then
when it came to flying around.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
Back at the temple, in front of a shrine with
a golden Buddha, he does a ritual to defeat the
black magic, involving a bunch of candles, a dagger, a bell,
a pink flowering tree branch. This might be a cherry
cherry blossom branch. I'm not sure, But here we begin
to see a symmetry. While the abbot is doing a

(48:08):
holy ritual in his holy place, we first get a
glimpse into the realm of the anti holy, some kind
of devil's temple somewhere else. There is a large room
filled with shelves containing clay jars, and at one end
of this big room full of jars, there is a
giant shrine to the demons and dealers of black magic.

(48:32):
So we have a roaring bonfire presided over by a
statue of a huge winged devil with glowing yellow eyes,
four horns around a bald head, and note that the
fire seems to be basically emanating from the demon's crotch.
And then in front of that four giant white statues
representing hands with curled, clutching fingers, and on each hand

(48:56):
a statue of some kind of nasty animal scorpions, bats, spiders,
and I think snakes or maybe caterpillars. All around there
are various other implements of evils strewn about the room.
You got skulls, daggers, and a tea kettle. I guess
for tea.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Well you gotta have tea either way.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
So, yeah, this is glorious looking, some great great use
of red and green gels. This looks like the most
amazing Halloween decorations you could imagine, very well done. And
I could be off on this, but I think maybe
each nasty animal corresponds to a different wizard. We're going
to see during the rest of the picture here, but

(49:37):
at any rate, we're about to touch base with a
related wizard to the wizard that was just murdered in
the airport. This is going to be our main wizard
for the picture, and then later on we'll deal with
some of his apprentices. Three of his apprentices, so four
wizards remaining in this movie.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Right. So back at the temple, we see the abbot
doing his own kind of magic. He's doing an exorcism
of the evil magic by hammering a gold dagger into
the heart of the demon bat that he holds captive.
And then we see the bat at the evil Shrine
and green goose starts to pour out of its heart,

(50:18):
and then the abbot pours holy water over the captive bat,
and at the evil Shrine, the bat statue dissolves and
melts away, leaving only a bat skeleton behind. Then it's
kind of like the moment where something has gotten the
attention of a higher up. In response, out of somewhere

(50:38):
in the Evil Shrine, a being awakens. We see it
first as a figure in black with glowing red eyes,
then revealed to be a man wearing a monstrous bat
mask with a big white wig. The figure flies across
the room, takes off the bat mask, revealing that he
is a man with a mustache, wearing a black headband,

(51:00):
red and gold mark on his forehead. And this will
be our main evil wizard for the film, or at
least the first half of the film. And he looks
down at the skeleton a little bit sad and says,
how dare he kill my bat? So let the counter
rituals begin? And I want to say it just by

(51:20):
describing it. It is hard to convey the ludicrous, frenetic
feeling of the scenes where the bad wizard carries out
his black magic invocations and recipes. Part of the effect,
I think is the cinematography. Something feels almost in fast
forward about it. Part of it is also the actor's performance.

(51:42):
The actor who plays the evil wizard has this uncontrollable, mischievous,
satanic spider monkey energy. He's so good. And then part
of it also is in the content of what he
is doing, which is so off the wall. So it's
like open a jar, grab a live rat out of
the jar, take a bite out of the rat, spit
blood all over the bat skeleton, and start screaming at it.

(52:04):
To revive, revive, And this is the part I was
talking about earlier when I was like, it's not the
kind of somber reverence for Satan that you expect out
of movies like The Devil's Rain or Empire of the Dark. Instead,
this is a guy in a hurry yelling at his
car when he's turning the key and it won't turn over.
I don't know, it's a delightful choice, I think. And

(52:28):
so the Wizard gets his bat skeleton up and walking
around and he's chasing it, clicking a bone at it
and trying to get it to move faster. And meanwhile
at the Abbot's temple, while he's doing that, the bat
skeleton at the Abbot's temple gets up and starts walking
around too. It's walking toward the door. So the Wizard
is remote controlling a distant bat skeleton with his own

(52:51):
bat skeleton covered in rat blood that he spit on it.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
In both cases, it's moving with kind of a wind
up toy yes energy to it. And this is a
I mean, all the scenes in this movie are pretty weird.
This one is weird early on because I'm like, am
I rooting for the bat skeleton. The tension we're building here,
I think I want the bat skeleton to escape. The
abbot and our dark wizard is like saying things like

(53:18):
get out of there, Get out of there, there's nothing
else to see. You got to get out of there,
and I'm kind of like, yeah, go, bad go.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
He's so annoyed, though. The Wizard is just like, get out.
There's nothing to say yet He's trying to get it
to hurry up. Fortunately, I guess from the Abbot's point
of view, the Abbot catches the bat skeleton in mid escape,
and then he gets out a giant Looney Tunes size hammer,
like a huge mallet, and smashes it just.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Over and over again too, just smash smash, smash, smash, smash.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
And the.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Wizard does not like this. He says, he broke my
magic again, damn. So the magic continues. The Wizard starts
frantically playing a reed pipe instrument like a snake charm.
He still has blood on his mouth from biting the rat.
By the way, serpents come out of several clay jars.
Their tongues are flicking. They slither on the floor. The

(54:09):
Wizard grabs them and milks the snakes for venom, which
is kind of green sour apple juice that drains into
a flask. And then he opens another clay jar and
pulls a head out, a defleshed skull covered in jelly
like spam with eyeballs and brain intact.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Oh, it's so gross. It's so gross, but it just
perfectly executed. It just this is pure Halloween right here.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
He pulls a bunch of worms off the head, breaks
open the skull, revealing fresh brain like, full fleshy fresh brain,
pours the snake venom that he just milked into the brain, stirs,
scrambles it, pours the venom slash brain combo into a
clay pot and cooks it. Pours out the green juice

(54:59):
on the resulting green juice on this like white board.
Then gets out a sack and releases from it three tarantulas,
which crawl out and drink the juice through straws. And
the tarantulas, much like the bat, are sort of felt
textured and look very cute adorable.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Yes, yeah again, very much a wind up toy sort
of vibe going on here with these little creatures, and.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
The wizard is screaming, grant me infinite power Lord of
the Dark. And then later we see the wizard sneaking
into the Abbot's temple assassin's creed style. There's some fence
climbing in light parkour. He's a very agile wizard and
he obviously hates it in here, all these buddhas and
this holy stuff. He's repulsed. But the wizard finds the

(55:46):
room where the abbot is sleeping. He crawls up the
wall like a spider. I guess he has sticky hands.
Then he crawls on the ceiling, then releases his magic tarantulas,
which descend on threads to the abbot's bed, climb on
the ap its face, and pierce his eyeballs with magic
golden needles.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Yeah, and again, this is all a flashbacks, all providing
a little backstory here, but it's also just a nice
snapshot at where the film's going from here. So I
want to add just a general note here that part
of the movie's real charm is the way amid glorious
set design and lighting will go from some really grizzly

(56:26):
prop use and things that might be entrails from a
local butcher shop to some really cool looking animated effects,
and then the use of puppetry and wind up toy
effects for things like bats, spider skulls and little demons.
And on one level, yeah, there's kind of a wide
drift here in the quality of the effects. That's one

(56:46):
way of looking at it. But there's also kind of
a house esque other worldliness to it that can almost
be hard to explain, like just a real madness to
the whole affair that the wind up toy effects kind
of punctuy you know.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Yeah, yeah, Like the variability of the effects textures almost
emphasize the unpredictability of the story and the things that
are happening.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Yeah, and just like you know, he goes to all
these grotesque extremes, committing multiple atrocities to create some sort
of magic potion that then this like obvious wind up
toy creature drinks, and then we move on to the
next level of the spell slash vengeance plan that's in effect.
But again, I think the other way to interpret all

(57:31):
this is that dark wizards are as crazy as they
are vile, Like you just have to be completely shamelessly
unhinged in order to practice these dark hearts. But don't
fret they're going to be more spells, and they're going
to be more spell components.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Yeah. The other thing I wanted to say about the
Dark Wizard is it almost feels I mean, they're productive,
They're on this constant improvisational grind. These guys feel like,
you know, get up at six and get to the
dark magic immediately.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Yeah. Yeah, those atrocities aren't gonna commit themselves.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Anyway, finally we're sort of getting caught up. So back
in the present, the monk finishes explaining this backstory to Chanhung.
He explains that the abbot, again whose name was ching Jo,
was about to achieve immortality.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
Or as a different translation might put it, maybe like
enlightenment or liberation.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
But because of the poison injected into his eyes by
the cursed spiders, he can no longer attain that goal
unless somebody breaks the magic spell, and the abbot prophesied
that three months earlier, a man named Chanhung would come
to the temple and he would be the one who
could break the curse. Chanhung does not believe it, but

(58:50):
there will be proof. The abbot's body was placed inside
a giant urn upon his death, and if there is
any decomposition of the abbot's body, they will know that
it was nonsense. But if the body is perfectly preserved,
then they'll know it was all true. So they go
to check out the urn. Some monks shatter it with
big mallets, and the abbot is not rotten at all.

(59:11):
Uh oh, chen Hung is now implicated. He's got to help.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Yeah, fabulous scene. I love the shattering of the greater
urn and inside yet the uncorrupted corpse of the Abbot,
playing on very real traditions in both the East and
the West of holy men whose bodies do not fully decompose,
you know, also getting into traditions of self mummification.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
Also, right after this, the monks lock chen Hung inside
the room with the Abbot's body. Is trying to get out,
but they lock him in there, and the body starts
talking to him. It says, you must be curious as
to why I've summoned you here. It's because we were
twins in our past lives. That's why your fate is
similar to mine in this life. So whatever happens to

(59:52):
me will happen to you. Uh oh. So because of
the golden needles in his eyes, if there were normal people,
the Abbot's body would already have decomposed, and Chanhung would
already be dead because the same thing would happen to
him that happens to the abbot, But the body is
not decomposed and Chanhung is still alive, and the abbot

(01:00:13):
explains this is because of his practice of Buddhism. He says,
I almost achieved immortality, but because I was hit with
the poison spell, I couldn't succeed. But by the time
my body decomposes, it will be your time of death.
You can't avoid it. So that's the setup. These two
are magically linked as twins from a past life. The

(01:00:33):
abbot can no longer fight this battle because he is dead,
and only Chanhung can save them both. If Chanhun can
defeat the evil magic, his life will be saved and
the Abbot will be able to achieve immortality. Otherwise it's
curtains for them both.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Yeah Yeah, and don't really worry about the kickboxing revenge anymore.
It's less important at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Yeah. Chenhung doesn't want to hear this, of course. He
cusses out the monk and he leaves that night. In
the hotel room, he has some eel vomiting issues. He
vomits up a live eel in the sink. Doesn't like that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Ye great sequence would be the most memorable scene in
many other movies. Here it can become a little lost
in the shuffle.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Yeah yeah. So next day he's like, Okay, I don't
want to do that again. So he goes back to
the temple and he says, I will help you fight.
But then the next shoe drops. In order to have
the magical abilities he's going to need in order to
fight this battle, he has to become a monk, and
that means shaving his head, giving up his life of crime,
giving up sin and earthly pleasures. Oh no, but he

(01:01:38):
does it, and we see a ceremony where he is
led into the temple complex riding on the back of
an elephant with dancers marching all around. He makes an
offering and he bows before the Buddha and he begins
his practice. And this part of the movie is kind
of like a long Buddhist monk magic warrior training montage.
He goes through the rituals, he humble himself and even

(01:02:01):
receives a new name that the monks at the temple
call him, Kaidi Baluo. The training has several different things.
One is enduring leeches in a river. He has to
like get in a river where he gets covered in
leeches and the is you know, his master is like
you stay there. This is played for laughs, by the way, Yes, hilarious.
And then there's also a scene which was so strange,

(01:02:24):
but I wonder if this is based on anything real
where he gets inside of a giant clay pot that
starts to glow. The pot is covered with sacred writing,
and then chan Hung is on the inside and his
hands are wrapped in ropes and the ropes go out
of the pot and are held by monks all around
him who are chanting. And then he is absorbed in

(01:02:47):
a scripture tornado where the sacred writing on the pot
spins all around him and like becomes a funnel, and
then the lines of scripture flow down his arms and
into his blood.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
It's yeah, it's pretty great animate use of animation here,
and I really think it's a it's a great element
of the film here that yeah, with the black magic
is consistently like gross and over the top and just
completely mind rending, but also the good guy magic is
also so visually impressive here.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Yeah, that's right, and and there is a strong I mean,
even esthetically, the two different schools of magic really emphasize
themes of like order versus chaos, Like the sorcerers are
doing chaos magic. And there is something that feels very
traditional and ordered and structured about the magic practiced by

(01:03:39):
the monks here.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
Yeah, and it's centered around language, you know. I mean,
it's it's.

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
It's so orderly.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
I think this is a great point.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Another thing that comes is the vows, So this is
an important plot point. In order to maintain purity, he
must keep his vows as a monk, so he swears
to follow the Buddha and do a bunch of stuff.
He has to abstain from prohibited activities such as gambling, murder, sex,
and drinking alcohol.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
But he's up for it. He's like, let's do it, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
And then the head monk after that says, so you've succeeded.
You are now ready to defeat evil. It feels like
it comes on so fast. Yeah, but they're wasting no
time at all. We cut straight to an amazing wizard battle.
I'm not going to narrate this one with as much
detail as the last one. Well, the last one in

(01:04:37):
a battle, I guess, but the last ritual scene. But
I do want to mention at least some of the
incredible sites and developments throughout. First of all, do you
know Rob where this takes place. Is it in another
plane of existence? It feels like it's kind of in
the middle of a void world.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
Yeah, a place becomes less important here, doesn't it, because
it's just like two magical forces doing battle with each other.
It could be like, basically the way it's presented here
visually is one practitioner seated on one end and the
other practitioners seated on the other, and magical effects are
kind of going to war between the two of them.
So you could certainly interpret this as happening like within

(01:05:16):
like the astral plane, or within the mental realm that
exists between their shared minds, or yeah, did they go
to some sort of like neutral zone where it's like, okay,
we have to go to the battle chamber where the
wizards do get out. I guess I lean more towards
the idea that it's in some sort of a zone

(01:05:36):
in their head, But I don't know. You go each
direction here.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
So it begins when the evil Wizard flies in Through
the Night in his batmsk costume, and then he says,
show me what you got, yes, And then by the way,
the Evil Wizard has Ultimate Warrior face paint on. It's
awesome and like purple satin suit. He's surrounded by an
army of crocodile skulls which are animated by chicken blood.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
He throws, kick and clack and crawl around and eventually
chased a chase after a chicken carcass.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
Oh and warning two people. In this scene, there is
what appears to me to be probably an unsimulated beheading
of a chicken. I'm not positive about that, but it
looks to me like it's real. So I don't know,
you get that with some of these older movies.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Yeah, there are most of the animal violence in this picture.
It does appear to be quite simulated.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):
All of the other stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
Yeah, but if this chicken and maybe another chicken scene
are a little questionable, well, to be clear, the other
chicken is definitely dead. Yeah, but also very gross. So yeah,
this is a gross movie, just to drive that home
once more.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
So anyway, you've got blooming, blooming red eyes out of
these crocodile skulls, you've got bats in the eye holes.
And then the wizard is saying, get up, attack the monk,
and then the monks of the bats fly at him,
but he kind of surrounds himself with a magical force
field that becomes a glowing hot glue trap for bats.

(01:07:08):
They get stuck to it and then it incinerates them.
And then we get the evil rice. The wizard starts
throwing out handfuls of rice over the crocodile heads and saying,
dark Lord, grant ultimate power to this rice. And then
chan Hung is attacked by a sworn, a swarm of
animated crocodile skulls which are chomping like wind up teeth.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Yeah, and he dispatches these by like throwing little Buddhist
ambulance into all their mouths.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
So yeah, basically like each wizard is a general commanding
these different magical effects against each other.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
That's right. So the bad Wizard he starts eating rotten
guts and vomiting them and eating them and saying, I'm
full of power now. And then there's pink vomit from
a giant pot that's bubbling and becoming a green martian
head with this giant cranium and pointy ears and this
like rises up out of the pot. Where does this

(01:08:03):
green Martian come from?

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
Words cannot describe how bizarre this point and an already
just completely crazy sequence is Like, this is such an
ultimate WTF moment in this film. Just my jaw literally
drops at this point in the movie. And then it
just keeps happening.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
Yeah, and then it becomes scanners because the monk uses
his scanner's powers to make the green Martian head explode.
The Wizard then pokes himself in the neck with needles
and then severs his own head and his severed head
flies away from his body with arteries dangling out of
the ragged neck, and then attacks the monk by strangling
him with the arteries. And then the monk fights back

(01:08:44):
and makes the Wizard's head melt with the power of
a red son.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
Yeah, and then this is the finish to the match.
This Wizard is now for real dead.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
That's right, that part is over. So Chan Hung is
like after the battle, he's talking to the head monk
who tells him Evil is defeated. The abbot can achieve
immortality and you can go back to Hong Kong. So again,
it's pretty It's like, wow, that was sudden. But as
soon as he gets home to Hong Kong Chan Hung,
he like comes in through the door, he sees his

(01:09:15):
girlfriend in the shower, and he has overcome with lust.
And at this point I think he was wondering, wait,
do I still have to keep all those vows I
made to the Buddha? Unclear? Don't know if I'm still
bound by that.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
I think yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
I mean it's my understanding, especially in Thai Buddhism, like
you know, you can enter the priesthood and become a
monk for a certain period of time, such as like
before you become married and so forth, or perhaps later
on if you're changing something up in your life, that
sort of thing. So we can't really apply some of

(01:09:50):
the same thinking that we would apply to say, Western
Christian monastic traditions. So my understanding here is it's kind
of like he's in the clear. Rights he did the Yeah,
he fought evil, he defeated evil. They told him he
could go home. He is totally in the clear here
to get naked with his already naked girlfriend.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
Yeah, so lust wins out. He gets in the shower
with her, and also there's some funny dialogue in the scene,
but she's basically like, did you cheat on me a
lot in Thailand? And he says, I was a monk
for three months, and as she goes, it's about time.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
In the end, right, they live happily over half?

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
Oh you would think so. No, they live happily for
a bit, but then there is more wickedness to come.
So we get a funeral for a bad wizard. I
think this is supposed to be the evil Wizard's body
burning on a big funeral pyre head. Yeah, who's burning it?

Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
Oh? We see three more wizards of the Black Magic
School looking on. Are they are they supposed to be
colleagues or apprentices of the main wizard, maybe like underlings.

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
Or they could have even been in in these but hey,
once a holy monk takes out one of your own, like,
that's that's that's a uniting principle. They are clearly hell
bent now on seeking vengeance against those who took out
this dark wizard.

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
And then they're gonna ratchet up the craziness. So these
three they go to a spooky house in the woods
with owls hooting outside, and then from under the house
they retrieve a mummy, you know, from the mummy storage cellar.
It's a wet mummy, by the way, wrapped in vines.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
It's like a bog mummy, swamp mummy, nasty swamp corpse.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Yeah, I don't know. Can do you describe what happens
from here?

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
Like? All right?

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
So yeah, they they really get to cooking basically, so
they don't do a lot of describing, so we just
have to sort of follow along. But what they're going
to try and do apparently is either create a body
for an evil spirit to inhabit, or they're gonna resurrect
an old or powerful sorceress. And so what they're gonna

(01:11:58):
need would for this, which whichever route we're taking here,
is they have to get that dead body from the swamp,
and then they need to steal or acquire a crocodile,
and then they are going to get that crocodile corpse.
They're going to put the dead human body inside the
crocodile corpse, sew it up, and then all.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
Men crocodile Wellington, yes.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
Yes, and then all manner of depravities have to be
committed in order to complete the spell. Like I mean,
there are a flayed human heads just hanging around watching on. Meanwhile,
I guess the body is kind of like cooking inside
of the dead crocodile while the three wizards conduct foul
rituals and prepare quote unquote food for the soon to

(01:12:44):
be revived body of the demon Sorceress.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
Which involves a lot of chewing up and eating disgusting,
gross stuff and then either spitting or vomiting it out,
and then maybe another one of them eating it and chewing.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
It up again, Yeah, in the same shot. So you
can't suspec disbelief on that. So it's like, yeah, they're
chewing up pieces of chicken entrails, Durian fruit, I'm assuming
like rotten durian fruit, because Durian fruit in and of
itself is perfectly tasty, if not a little fragrant. But
so for these guys, normal Durian fruit clearly is not

(01:13:18):
going to work. This is probably something that's rotted a
little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
So yeah, just madness, gross, madness. Amazing. And then we
see the effects of their evil work in two different
intercut scenes. First of all, we've got the monks at
the abbey or at the temple. They are preparing the
Abbot's body for immortality. They're like covering it with gold
and chanting all around it. I meanwhile, Chan Hung is

(01:13:43):
remember the kickboxing grudge match. Oh, yeah, happening. Now it's happening.
He's fighting the tie boxer for revenge. So while these
things are happening, the demones awakes and they give her
Freddy Krueger fingers by the way, and she wakes up
and they guide her over to I guess it's supposed
to be a statue of the abbot, and she pokes

(01:14:03):
the eyes of the statue with her claws and then,
oh no, that inflicts simultaneous curses. First of all, the
gold falls from the Abbot's corpse and seems to signal, oh,
he's not incorruptible anymore. He's going to decompose. And then
in the middle of his kickboxing match, Chan Hung loses
his sight and not only loses his sight, but acquires

(01:14:25):
maggot vision.

Speaker 2 (01:14:26):
This is so glorious because yes, suddenly he goes blind
during the match. You know, he's having the blind punch
and kick while Bolo pummels him, and you might wonder
that it's viewer, Well what does he see? And yeah,
we get the POV shot of it, and it's just maggots.
It's like a visor shape on the screen and it's
just maggots rolling around there. And then later on he's

(01:14:48):
going to get a backstage like mirror vision where he
sees maggots just falling out of his eye sockets. So, yeah,
there are a lot of gross worms in this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
Yeah. So chan Hung is beaten badly.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
But he pulls out the victory though.

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
Oh he does, he does.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
Yeah, he somehow kicks Bolo over the top rope. Bolo
goes through a table.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
And okay, okay, and then our.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
Hero runs backstage with his maggot eyes and then we
you know, he looks in the mirror and he sees
maggots falling out.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
I totally missed that he actually beat Bolo.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Okay, So I guess maybe maybe that is the conclusion
of Vengeance is Acquired here.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
I could be Okay, Now I feel bad. I feel
like I was totally wrong about the fact that it
doesn't tie up the kickboxing thing because I was under
the misimpression that he lost in this match because of
what happened to his eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Well, he doesn't get to savor the victory, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:15:41):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I was paying attention. I thought,
I guess his victory is short enough that I looked
away and looked back, and yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
It's It's easy to lose sight of the mundane plot
at this point because the crazy magic plot is just
growing in size.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
Anyway, he goes back to the temple to find out
what went wrong, and the monk there is like, you
didn't break any of your vows, did you.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
He's like, no, no, of course not. Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
He doesn't admit to it immediately, but they will eventually
figure it out with the help of a supernatural fire
based lie detector test. But anyway, first the monks they
think he has still been faithful, and the head monk says,
don't worry, I'll arrange another duel for you. But first
they're going to do a power up scene.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
That's right, that's right, They're going to need some sort
of extra power, and so they go out to search
for the thousand year old Ganoderma. So again, it's easy
to get caught up in all the hideous rituals of
the dark Wizards, and so caught up in it that
we can forget the sublime wonder and weirdness of the

(01:16:51):
Buddhist magic scenes. So that's exactly what we have here
with the quest for the thousand year old ganoderma that
is presumably racie mushroom. It is in the genus Ganoderma,
So the Rachi mushroom, if you're not familiar with it,
it holds an important place in traditional Chinese medicine, various
other Asian folk medicine traditions, and also in general in

(01:17:13):
the world of like alternative medicine and supplements and so forth.
A few years back, my wife and I prepared a
tea from some racie mushrooms that we foraged. Oh nice,
how was that very bitter?

Speaker 3 (01:17:24):
Very better?

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
But it enhanced my chi, ease my spirit, and you know,
probably promoted longevity. So these are some of the ideas
that are held concerning the rachi and you know, it's
still consumed all over the world. Paul Stainments is a
big fan of the Racie mushroom. But anyway, this is
our magical take on it. You know, this is a

(01:17:45):
thousand year old mushroom they're seeking out, so our hero
in the current habit, they find this ancient mushroom in
a chasm of a great Buddha's eye in an underground temple.
And I have to say, this is just a fantastic set,
and this is not a real temple location, but just
an incredible set. It has this like magic flaming tree

(01:18:08):
growing out of the eye socket as well, and so
they kind of like rope down to it, and then
they draw the magic out of the mushroom by applying
honey to it. And this allows the magic goo to
then clear goo to drip down from the mushroom into
this little amulet container. That way, our hero can use
it later on when he's fighting evil.

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
By apply by doing self surgery on himself.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
Yes, yeah, he's gonna have to terminate or his arm
in a really gross scene. So even the good magic
practitioners here do get into a little bit of body
are for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:18:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
But also by the way, before the duel can be arranged,
the monks figure out the chan Hung broke his vows.
So that's really bad.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
That's yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
They're like, you lie to the Buddha. Some serious business
it is.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
They take it seriously and they're like, no, there's nothing
you can do now, You're you're just yeah, too bad.
But chan Hung doesn't accept it, so he goes to
the abbot, to the abbot's body, and he's like, is
there anything that can be done? At first he doesn't
get an answer, and then he's like, I'll trash your
temple and he starts like smashing everything up, and finally

(01:19:14):
the abbots like stop throwing a tantrum, and he tells
him there is one way that can be saved.

Speaker 3 (01:19:20):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
It's the only way is by if chan Hung retrieves
a sacred Buddhist relic from a temple in Nepal. These
would be the abbot's ashes from one of his past
lives when he was a lama there. So let's go

(01:19:43):
to Nepal. Chan Hung travels by plane lands he gets
his bearings in Nepal and eventually he finds this temple
where the ashes are stored, but they apparently only show
up during a special magic time of day. I think
maybe it's a dawn.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
It's going to shine through into this underground temple and
it's going to illuminate the ashes. We learned this because
he goes on a tour, a tour of the of
the temple, and there's a tour guide that's informing him
as well as like there's a Western tourist lady there
as well, and we get the full rundown on this place.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
So he does the self surgery, He puts the amulet
inside his body, and he goes in during the off
hours to collect the ashes. But he is not alone there.
First of all, he deals with some magic, some magical
security measures where there is like a statue at this
big Buddhist shrine that starts yelling intruder alert, intruder alert, which.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
Is so good, yes, yes, And then like the statue,
a multi arm statue comes alive, so we have like
a Nepalese Buddhist automaton here that is going to do
battle with him, but he makes pretty short work of these.
I'm not sure how much of that is that, you know,
he's just far above them at this point, or maybe

(01:21:02):
they didn't like the way the effects came together, or
we just we were running along on time here and
we just needed to get to the final conflict, right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
And then the evil Wizard's demonus appears. I don't know, Rob,
do you want to describe this? I don't even know
how to begin.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
I mean, skimpy outfit, high heels like a crazy golden crown.
She has a long appears to have elongated arms at
first glance, and I guess does, but her arms terminate
in skeletal claw hands that are either extensions of her
arms or being used as weapons. Anyway, A very glamorous, sexy,

(01:21:43):
hellish entrance here for our final boss, equal parts alluring
and revolting, all at once, and of course illuminated in
all sorts of cool, green and red gels.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
Yeah, so I can't describe everything that happens in this conflict,
but among other things, she shoots detachable alligator armor hands
at our hero, and they grab Chan Hung's chest and
grip his pectoral muscles and cut them.

Speaker 3 (01:22:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:12):
Later on they're gonna crawl around on the ground and
then hold him in place.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Yes, she creates a giant crocodile that crawls on the
floor and attacks him. Yes, he escapes the giant crocodile,
but then she grabs his head with her legs and
then he is like pinned down on the ground by
the hands, and then, oh god, I forget what happens after. Oh,

(01:22:36):
she puts the caterpillars on him.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
Yeah, so she kind of she gives him like a
thigh squeeze and like kind of shimmys around, and then
she stands over him and she continues to shimmy and
kind of do a little sexy dance, but then makes
caterpillars rain down on him. Yeah, and they crawl over
his body and then they begin to crawl into his
nostrils and into his ears. Yes, so we get a

(01:22:58):
little wrath of Khan energy in this picture as well.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
But then there is a kind of intervention right from
the shrine itself because the light comes in and it uh,
it awakens the spirit of the Lama. Did you understand
it that way as well?

Speaker 3 (01:23:13):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):
And then the Lama kind of like rides down on
like a tramas like a laser palanquin and and interferes
like saves him from the demoness. And then the demons
battles the Lama uh, and they have this kind of
like super magical energy stand off. He wins and he

(01:23:36):
because she tries to like wrap him up in her
hair and then he just like pulls her hair and
her skin off, and that causes her to then flail skinless, uh, defleshed,
and fall back onto the floor where she begins to
writhe in agony. But oh, she looks like over yet.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
No, no, but there she looks like just one sniff
of that fog and your inside out.

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
Yeah, she does look like she looks like she's inside
out a little bit like slim good body too, full body,
slim good body, just writhing on the floor. And she
begins to leak purple slime everywhere, like the purple slime
falling out of her body.

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
And then gives birth to three plastic bags full of eyeballs,
which walk around on the floor and then expand and
turned into turn into putty mummies that are going and
then they turn into the three wizards. That's where they were, okay,
But then then they produce knives and stab themselves. One

(01:24:33):
of them cuts open his belly. The other two cut
off their own fingers and bleed on the guy's belly,
and then that turns his body into little eyeball brontosauruses
that attack on the floor.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
Yes, little pink demons that look kind of like bronosauruses.
I've also seen them described as poodle demons. And they
began to they begin to begin to crawl toward the Lama,
and I mean, at this point, we're just in such
crazy town it's almost senseless to try and make any
sense out of it. This is just like crazy wizard nonsense.

(01:25:08):
But my interpretation is that in this fact, this is
in this final transformation on the part of the Dark Wizards,
it's like a last ditch effort to assume a very
particular specialized range spell casting demon form, three of them,
one for each of them, that might allow them to
take out their enemy. So they begin blasting their eyeball
bolts at the Llama, and I don't know, maybe they've

(01:25:32):
got a chance, maybe they don't. But that's not how
it goes down, because the Lama then causes the statues
in the temple to fling their vadras, these little you know,
Buddhist thunderbolts artifacts at the Pink demons, which then cause
the Pink demons to explode, killing them.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
And that is our final victory over evil here.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
And to be clear, the Pink demons very much wind
up toys, getting into that wind up toy energy that
we keep experiencing throughout the picture.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
I don't want to because I have to be clear,
I'm not an expert in this in any way. So
I don't want to overseell the cultural authenticity of the
magic depicted here, but I am struck by how much
more specifically Buddhist in flavor the magic and the magical

(01:26:26):
conflict in this movie is when compared to the magic
you'd see in a lot of other movies. That is, often,
I don't know, a lot of the specific real world
religious imagery or connections feels de emphasized in favor of
a kind of generic appeal.

Speaker 3 (01:26:42):
You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:26:43):
Yeah, I know what you mean. This is something we
enjoyed to a lesser extent in the Indian horror movie
Perana Mandir, in which you know, they're using very like
Hindu iconography to overcome spirits of evil. So it is
it is nice to get supernatural horror outside of the

(01:27:05):
traditional Western Christian motifs that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:08):
Has some cultural specifics actually in it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
Yeah, yeah, like it, Like with these Vadra artifacts serving
as holy hand grenades to blow up the pink demons. Yes,
but with this I believe, and the movie seems to believe,
the evil Wizards are now completely defeated. Wizard number one,
Dead Wizard number two, Dead Wizards three, four and five

(01:27:32):
Dead demon s sorceress from beyond the Grave also return
to being full dead.

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
Yeah, and the abbot can at least attain immortality, in
which case, I don't know, maybe he could help again
if more wizards appear.

Speaker 3 (01:27:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):
Yeah, we see the eyes open on the Abbot's body,
and then the eyes of our hero are also cured
and he's able to We actually get a nice little
scene there at the end where the monks are coming
in to pray in front of the abbot's body and
he gets up and he walks out the door.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
Actually before that we see him, there's like happy music playing, like, oh,
we finally did it. As our hero is pulling needles
out of his eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
Very long needles, like oh yeah, supernatural needles being you know,
I don't think he's necessarily pulling them, He's coming like
magically excreting them straight through his eyelids.

Speaker 1 (01:28:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
So just a little last bit of holy body are.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
Made me think of those tear drinking moths we talked
about last week for their the poking their proboscess into
the eyeball. Okay, well that is the boxer z Omen.

Speaker 2 (01:28:44):
Absolutely yes, sights and sounds well beyond anything you've tested.
Highly recommend this one for anyone out there, though, if
you've listened to it all the way here, I think
at this point either you are pretty clear this is
not a film you want to see, or this is
a film you absolutely have to see, or I think
in many cases you have seen the film, you love it,
and you just wanted to hear our thoughts on all

(01:29:06):
of the just sheer insanity that occurs in this.

Speaker 1 (01:29:09):
Movie overflowing with ritual madness. I wonder if I would
like recommendations from listeners for movies that show not just
the use of magic, you know, like people casting spells
and power emanating from them, that show not just the
magical effects, but spend as much attention on the process

(01:29:32):
of acquiring magic power, or of like the recipes for
spells as this movie does.

Speaker 3 (01:29:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
Yeah, I'd be hard pressed to think of one. I mean,
I more readily think of examples of the opposite, where
wizards and witches just do things and you don't really
know much about the preparation that goes into them. There's
probably too much of that, whereas I mean, really this
gets down to the sort of the Shakespearean roots, right
where you know everything that's going in the Witch's cauldron.

Speaker 1 (01:30:01):
Yeah that's right. Actually, Yeah, Boxer's Omen in the tradition
of Macbeth.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Yeah, you could also think of this as a as
a black magic procedural, very obsessed with all the steps
that go into casting your dark, dank magics. So indeed,
if you have suggestions for other examples of this or
counterexamples right in, we would.

Speaker 3 (01:30:24):
Love to hear from you.

Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
We're going to close out this episode. Yeah, we'd love
to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts
on the boxers Omen, other films by this filmmaker, or
just other great recommendations from Hong Kong cinema in general.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
Right in.

Speaker 2 (01:30:39):
A reminder that Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. If you are on letterbox dot com, find us.
We are Weird House on letterbox and we have a
nice list there of all the movies we've covered over
the years, and sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming
up next. Again, you can always find Weird House Cinema

(01:31:01):
in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed but
we also have a playlist that is just Weird House Cinema,
so you can also look up Weird House Cinema wherever
you get your podcasts and follow us that way as well.

Speaker 1 (01:31:13):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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