Recommending Reader: masterofoneinchpunch
On the Post: MovieFrightFare: Pieces of Terror-ific Trivia (and reiterated in Five Foreign Film Favorites)
Years ago, at the Movies Unlimited store, a coworker asked me if I’d ever watched the concert tape of singer Tom Jones on The Ed Sullivan Show. I said no, I knew of Jones but hadn’t really seen much footage of him, so he immediately drew me towards the television behind the counter and said: Watch this, it’s going to change your life. He cued up “It’s Not Unusual,” where Jones performs that crazy, hip-dislocating gyration that drives the ladies so nuts they hurl their underwear at him.
This same person got me to watch Deep Cover, the excellent crime movie I’ve praised here before, and Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert’s wickedly oddball cult hit Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I’ve had many similar experiences with other friends, and I’ve had the pleasure of bringing people to the joys of classics and rarely-seen works beloved by me—including the Universal monster movies, Eraserhead (not everyone has been grateful), and the riotously sleazy Charles Bronson thriller Ten to Midnight. One of the great pleasures of discussing movies—not just here in print, but outside the blogosphere in person-to-person conversation—is that there are so very many of them that the chances are good you are going to get some great recommendations from other film fans. It might be simply the case that you Never Saw That Classic Movie, or it may be that the title is obscure…meaning, you’ve never heard of it.
That was the case for me when masterofoneinchpunch recommended The Boxer’s Omen.
In the 2003 Werner Herzog documentary Wheel of Time, we learn that the practice of Buddhism enables adherents in India to patiently create the mind-boggling Kalachakra, a large, complex artwork made from colored sand depicting over 700 separate deities. Labor that would be interminably meticulous to non-practitioners instead draws believers into a state of enlightenment, which presumably broadens yet further when, after completion and sufficient contemplation, they dust it away into nothingness.
Then there’s what we learn about the practice of Buddhism in The Boxer’s Omen. Master it, so the movie would have us believe, and you will be successful at defeating “all evil”—which comes occasionally in the form of hungry crocodile skulls, a floating head attempting to strangle you with blood-soaked, rope-like veins dangling from its neck stump, spiders launching razor spears into your eyes, monster bats, zombie babes with nasty fingernails, and enemies able to eat, vomit up, and re-feast on chicken guts.
These and other colorful travails are what await Chan Hung (Philip Ko) after his brother, a boxer, is vanquished in the ring by the muscular and villainous Ba Bo (Bolo Yeung). Eager for revenge, Hung discovers that his family is cursed, and he can only hope to obtain retribution by (briefly, all things considered) becoming a monk and immersing himself in the traditions of Buddhism.
Although, depending on how much you really want to trust the sort-of-undead abbot who claims that his ultimate destiny is linked to Hung’s own fate, you might think the poor sap is just being used as a tool to help the trapped-in-limbo holy man defeat the dark wizards trying to spoil his hope of immortality.
A religious leader tricking the emotionally vulnerable into working for his own advancement? A preposterous thought, I know. But I editorialize. We take the abbot, and this conceit, at face value.
Once Hung has shaved his head, the “story”—as those in the West might more readily think of one—gets put on hold, and Hung goes mano-a-mano with the malefactor whose black magic births a gooey green alien and animates those toothy croc skulls right after the power of Hung’s faith is successful in blasting away an onslaught of Muppet-like bats. Bathed in garish colored light reminiscent of Mario Bava flicks, these extended supernatural battles play out rather like a fusion of the perverse religious pageantry found in some Peter Greenaway pictures with the gross-outs of Evil Dead films.
Processions and rituals staged in ornately decorated (or, conversely, empty-stage black) chambers? Check. (Prospero’s Books, The Baby of Macon)
Goofy puppetry and stop-motion animation, plus maggots? Check! (Evil Dead I-III)
What becomes clearer in the picture’s later going is that the story is really less about the avenge-the-brother surface material and more a delving into surreal horror and the power that accrues to one adopting strict principles of faith. Not to mention the punishments awaiting those who stray—in matters of celibacy, for example.
I watched The Boxer’s Omen without first consulting the excellent liner notes provided by Stephen Gladwin in the Image DVD release; I had not much of an idea at all whether or not the many bizarro situations depicted in the film had any tenuous relation to Buddhism at all, or if the grotesque trials Hung endures relate to the Eastern religion in the same way that, say, Dracula relates to Christianity. Learning that many of the shocking scenes indeed have their roots in Asian mysticism does allow the viewer to appreciate the film on a secondary (if not entirely necessary) level.
The graphic female nudity is a treat for pretty base reasons while obviously quite gratuitous (and, apparently, not something the Shaws were that enthusiastic about). The one unwelcome element of the film that was familiar to me from some other martial arts movies was the inclusion of music plagiarized from Hollywood blockbusters. There are “shock” cues from Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score employed a few times, much to this fan’s distraction.
This 1983 Shaw Brothers picture fuses outrageous sequences of horror to religion, travelogue, martial arts, boxing, and sexploitation, not necessarily in that order of importance. The story’s been called “byzantine,” but I didn’t find it so distastefully complicated. I found the plentiful special effects to be a mix of the disturbing and charmingly retro—the obvious puppetry of the bats and spiders might lessen the fear factor (not a bad term to invoke considering some of the sickening bits involving eels and chickens), but it enjoyably heightens the overall weirdness of the film.
All in all, this was a terrific recommendation and a film I was pleased to add to my viewing history and personal library. If you dig the work of Sam Raimi, have a soft spot for the surreal cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky, or have just taken in the more “conventional” features of the Shaw Brothers filmography and are adventurous enough to think you have “seen it all,” you will want to heed director Chih-Hung Kuei’s The Boxer’s Omen.
My Related Recommendations: House (one of the strangest Japanese horrors ever, in an excellent release from the Criterion Collection); the films of Brazilian shock maestro José Mojica Marins, aka “Coffin Joe” (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, and the recent, quite extreme Embodiment of Evil).
More readers’ recommendations to come. Thanks in advance.
