If you really want to experience the cream of the crop when it comes to the stranger end of the spectrum of cinema, you could a darn sight worse than casting an eye over the type of demented shit that was coming out of Asia during the 80s. A prime suggestion would be the bewildering surrealism that is Kuei Chih-Hung’s headache inducing The Boxer’s Omen, a movie that audaciously is part Encounters Of The Spooky Kind, part Rocky IV and part rambling travelogue and rarely pauses for breath to to anything as rudimentary as make an iota of sense.
So strap yourself in and prepare yourself to witness a gaudily coloured gore fest that features evil wizards, Thai boxing, veiny creatures and a surprising amount of Buddhism for a flick that sees a moment where a character casts a spell that cause his own head to detatch and attack an enemy with the fleshy strips that’s dangling out of his neck stump.
After witnessing his boxer brother get paralysed in the ring by the hulking, cheating Thai boxer, Bo Bu, Chan Hung vows to get revenge for his shattered sibling and temporary puts aside his gangster life in order to head over to Thailand and try to get revenge in the ring. However, getting in his way of getting laid and getting revenge us the rather disconcerting visions he keeps having of a ghostly Buddhist Monk who keeps asking Hung for his help with something, but what help could a dead monk possibly need?
We, I’m glad you asked, because upon visiting a temple to try and straighten out his confusion visions, he soon finds out that his arrival has been foretold and he is vital to the attempts of head abbot, Quing Zhao to become immortal that’s hit a slight snag with the fact that he’s recently died while battling some evil magicians.
Before you know it Chan Hung has taken the name Baluo Kaidi, shaved his head and found himself in training to become a monk imbued with mystal abilities in order to lock horns with the magician who poisoned Quing Zhao in a ritual duel.
Emerging victorious, Hung celebrates by saving the abbot’s soul by returning back to Hong Kong and eagerly returning to least one of the vices he used to enjoy before renouncing them in the name of good. However, after getting a fair bit of sex and finally stepping into the ring with Bo Bu to deliver an ass whupping that doesn’t involve fucked up rituals involving chicken guts. However, the black magician he vanquished unfortunately has a trio of comrades who want a bit of payback and after they engage in a spot of messy rituals of their own, they create an undead warrior to even the score.
However, now that Hung has managed to get his end away, it now means that his access to his previous powers are suddenly gone – can he survive the unearthly ordeal that’s coming his way?
To be honest, I’m a little pissed with myself that I didn’t enjoy The Boxer’s Omen more than I did as the crazed imagination of Kuei Chih-Hung seems fairly adjacent to that of Lam Ngai Kai, the man who bestowed the glory of such absurdly violent wonders as The Story Of Ricky and The Seventh Curse. However, while The Boxer’s Omen matches those fellow freak fests punch for punch when it comes to delivering the gooey goods, it doesn’t quite have that feeling of sheer, dizzy momentum which made Kai’s movies such raucous, unpredictable fun. It’s also missing the playful nature of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977, gold standard of crazy, House, but then when you consider that Kuei Chih-Hung once directed a scene in a movie where a woman bound to a bed is eaten by carnivorous frogs while her friends are oblivious next door (1982’s Curse Of Evil, in case you were wondering), a sense of cartoonish fun probably wasn’t high on his agenda.
It’s certainly not because The Boxer’s Omen is devoid of imagination; in fact you could argue that it has too much as it hurls immortal Buddhist monks, living bat skeletons and flying severed heads at you with zero concern whether the audience is managing to keep up – spoiler: you won’t. In fact, what makes The Boxer’s Omen claim to be one of the most furiously unhinged fantasy horrors of the 80s is made all the more fascinating when you consider that it was made by Shaw Brothers, a studio that for most of their reign focused on period piece Kung Fu films. However, when turning their hand to a trippy, almost Lucio Fucli-esque parade of body horror, it tends to focus a little too much on the ins and outs of the various rituals of both the light and dark sides of the magic users that populate the film.
While plot is never a huge concern in movies as batshit as this, a lot of the run time is spent watching flamboyantly dressed evil doers doing various gross things for ages as they go through the diffrent steps to enact their spell. Ranging from cutting and eating pieces from live chickens (sorry animal lovers) to masticating banana peels into a paste along with a chaser of entrails, this drawn out dedication to the gross out more often than not slows down the pace of the film to a crawl and negates the momentum needed to keep all the more entertaining shit moving nice and fast.
It’s a shame, because usually this kind of confused, bezerker attitude is something I actively look for in a movie and by adding in an utterly superfluous boxing subplot alone (which includes none other than the legendary Bolo Yung) should have been enough to keep me giddy as fuck for the entire run time, wmbut when you add lashings of freakish body horror, bulbous-headed green demons and the sight of Kar-Man Wai’s hero forcing needles out from his eyes through his eyelids for reasons that are never truly explained, the fact I didn’t have more fun with it than I did is pretty disappointing.
But does the fault lie with The Boxer’s Omen or with me? Is the fact that so much of the film’s attention is locked on the minutiae of exactly how you raise an undead creature from the hollowed out husk of an alligator corpse the entire point of the film and I just missed it – or am I justified in wanting the film to be more of an Evil Dead style roller coaster ride rather than just an extended gross out with occasional and random breaks for martial arts? The right answer is: there ultimately is no right answer, not with a film as utterly mental as The Boxer’s Omen and if you’re more onto its wavelength then I was, then I salute you and envy you in equal measure.
Packed full of fucked up wonders that will bring nausea and unintentional giggles in equal measure (should the evil, killer spiders really look so adorable?), The Boxer’s Omen will no doubt confound, confuse and irritate casual viewers who tend to prefer more conventional contents. However, for those who have a taste for the strange and impenetrable, it maybe worth going a few rounds with Kuei Chih-Hung’s barmy but baffling opus.
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