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 In Hong Kong, a "mysterious warlock" is after a girl and her boyfriend because
of an incident the boyfriend and his friends had with the warlock's sister in
Thailand. The warlock's sister ended up dead and now he is "eliminating the
friends one-by-one." The warlock then "zeroes in on the
girlfriend as the object of his supernatural lust in order to avenge his
sister's murder." 1995, 99 minutes, Widescreen, VCD
This is one of those semi-cartoonish horror movies from Hong Kong that mixes
gore, sex, and some pretty broad humor into a stew of fast-paced scenes
designed for ADHD people like myself. That doesn't mean that it's particularly
good, it just means that I didn't get so bored that I took out my utility knife
and started slicing up the cardboard boxes that litter my trailer (don't even
ask). This is one of those movies from southeast Asia where everyone takes the
idea of witches, wizards, hexes, and enchantments as a matter of everyday life,
kind of like how we take psychic hotlines, The Weekly World News, and medium John Edward. The movie begins with a confusing prologue that I
guess was supposed to explain the concept of ghosts and people being possessed
or something. I never understood what this was all about, except that somehow
they advised you to never take a pale-faced child to the restroom at the movie
theatre, because he most likely is some type of bloodthirsty ghost. I don't
know what their culture is like (my favorite Chinese restaurant mysteriously
closed down a few months back, so I'm now completely cut off from that part of
the world), but I know in this country that if you ever tried to take some
pale-faced kid to the toilet at a movie theatre, you'd be looking at five to
fifteen years in the Big House. Once the prologue was over (and never referred
to again) we get introduced to Nam. Nam is a dude that unfortunately has just
lost his parents somehow. Unfortunately, they turn up at his door, even though
they are dead. This really upsets Nam and he takes a meat cleaver to them.
This seems a bit extreme, but I suppose if your parents are dead they should
stay dead. The "whoopser" part of this occurs when it is realized that those
weren't really his dead parents he shredded but his wife and child (who were
very much alive, before Nam whipped out the Ginsu on them). He's a bit tore up
by all this (but probably not as much as his late family) when there is a knock
on the door. The neighbors or his friends or somebody has heard all the
commotion and are trying to see what's going on. Nam answers the door and sees
not his pals, but his parents again. I don't think I gots to tell you how this
encounter turned out. Then Nam goes out the window of his apartment and lands
on a bunch of florescent lights. He would reappear sporadically throughout the
film to harass people impaled with these lights that were still lit Kind of
the same deal
like how you can use a potato to make a light bulb work, I guess.  Bon and May, a couple of friends that Nam somehow missed hacking up to pieces
show up and become our main characters for this foray into the wild and wooly
world of Hong Kong fantasy-sex movies. May works at the local hairdresser and
all the women there are intent on giving her sexual advice on how to keep Bon
happy. This involves a lot of giggling, visual demonstrations, and references
to his "chestnuts." This is one reason why I never go to a salon or a
stylist.
I go to this guy named Larry that has a barber shop on the town square. Larry
has these real big mutton chops and is pretty surly, but I don't ever have to
worry about him telling me what to do to keep my old lady happy in the sack.
The most I get out of Larry is some vague talk about the current weather and
even vaguer talk about tomorrow's weather ("more of the same, I hear."). All
this for seven bucks? Geez, Larry, how can you afford to give away these
bowl-shaped haircuts for that pittance? In any event, May has a customer named
Mei, who is from Thailand and insists that all her hair be collected and given
back to her whenever it is cut. This is because she doesn't want any of her
tresses floating around where an evil wizard could get a hold of it and put a
really bad hex or enchantment on her (and trust me, after seeing this movie, I
can tell you there are some fairly nasty hexes you would not want slapped onto
your fat arse). Now, later at night May and Bon are at home chilling and
decide that even though they aren't married they should fornicate (What kind of
culture is that? Sounds like they need former L.A. Laker and professional
virgin A.C. Greene to come to Hong Kong and give an inspirational speech on the
goodness that is abstinence.). Luckily for strong Christians everywhere, Bon
is unable to perform. This is in spite of a fairly inspirational striptease
involving a sheer white teddy (um, that was worn by May, not Bon, sickos!).
May is a bit of hussy so she's very torqued off that Bon can't perform and is
as useless as tits on a boar (Man, I do love that one!). She kicks his
impotent butt out of her apartment and Bon is in the hallway trying to figure
out why his soldier didn't salute in the presence of a superior officer. I had
to giggle (well, first because this has never happened to me) because during
all of his romantic woes, the movie kept switching back to this wizard that had
made up some kind of voodoo doll of Bon and put a little teeny-tiny padlock on
the doll's schlong! Classic! That wizard's name wasn't A.C. Greene was it?
Once Bon was outside in the hall, the wizard kind of reversed the hex and made
things really work well. So now we got Bon, tent-poling his pants, pounding on
May's door to let him in since things are in working order, but when she
answers and checks him out, the little padlock must be put back on, because
he's having "trouble" again and she pushes him out the door and he goes home
wondering what the dang hell is going on.  May is obviously in a surly mood when she goes into work the next day. Her
client Mei (how many times a week does she need her hair cut?) is there and
takes some hairspray and a lighter and uses it like a blowtorch to roast the
area behind May. She says that May has a nasty ghost following her and she
was just getting rid of it (uh, yeah, thanks, I guess). They have some chit
chat and it turns out that Mei is a good witch from Thailand or something. She
asks if Bon has been to southeast Asia recently and if anything unusual had
happened on that trip. It turns out that he had been to Thailand and that he
went with Nam, and two of his other buddies Kent, and Kong (May's brother).
Later, he
and Kong are with May and Bon isn't wanting to tell want happened, but since Bon
has a girlfriend and she wants to know, guess what? He spills his guts anyway.
It's
a fantastic tale of hookers and love potions (gee, I can't imagine why you
wouldn't want your girlfriend to know all this). Okay, these four guys go on a
little vacation to Thailand and three of them (but not Bon, of course!) want to
stop at one of the whorehouses that Thailand features so prominently in all
their travel brochures. They stop and go in and somehow have some kind of
trouble where the pimp wants to charge them for looking, but they don't want to
pay. So they run out of there with the pimp and bodyguards in hot pursuit. At
this point, I'm thinking that I've somehow stumbled onto the Hong Kong version
of Porky's. They run away into the woods and stumble upon this house which they hide in.
It turns out to be the house of this wizard. He seems to be a pretty good
guy, but takes offense when Kong doubts his powers (I think the word "dickhead"
was thrown around.) The wizard turns Kong's head into the head of penis,
complete with opening at the top. This was actually a pretty good trick and
his head really did look like, well, you know. The wizard, it turns out is in
the middle of a heated magical battle with two other enchanters. Their gimmick
is that they do all kinds sexual positions while flying through the air to
throw down their mating hex. The wizard does battle with these two for a
little bit, then gets some help from his four guests in defeating those two.
At one point during the battle, Kong's pees out of the top of his penis-shaped
head, providing the obvious highlight of their entire movie. Kong is returned
to normal by the wizard later and things settle down and we meet the wizard's
sister.  The wizard's sister has been prophesied to die young if she goes outside into
the world or something so the wizard is keeping her in the house for the next
three years. She is lonely and wants Bon. So the wizard cooks up a love
potion so that Bon will want her. As you and I both know, the cooking up of a
love potion is almost always followed up by disastrous results. This situation
is no exception. A cake is delivered to the hotel room where these four guys
are staying. Bon is talking in the bathroom to his girlfriend back home. All
you guys in the crowd know exactly how that conversation goes: "No, honey, I
miss you more. I wish you were here. I don't even like these guys and I wish
I as at home because I miss you so much." The delivery guy says that Bon has
to sign for the cake personally so one of his friends pretends to be Bon and
signs for it. Bon's three friends open it up and are hit with this "love gas"
which makes them super-horny for the wizard's sister. When they see her next,
she and those three hook up in an orgiastic entanglement that you just know
A.C. Greene wouldn't approve of. The next morning, the participants often
realize that gang-bangs aren't all they're cracked up to be and the wizard's
sister goes bonkers when she realizes that she bonked three guys the night
before and not a one of them was Bon. She comes at them with some knives and
in the process of defending themselves, the wizard's sister ends up falling on
her own knife and dies. Everything else is academic. The guys run back to
Hong Kong swearing not to tell anyone, the wizard is outraged and swears
revenge and his sister's ghost eventually convinces him that he wants to rape
Bon's girlfriend. We switch back to the present and Kent is the next to go,
victimized by some kind of "hungry hex." He eats everything in sight,
including the understandably stunned patrons at the restaurant he was at. He
bloats up and croaks. Kong is next and he knows it, so he goes running to some
Taoist master he used to hang out with. There are some kind of funny scenes as
the master complains that Kong doesn't visit him very much, but he rigs up some
protection for him and then goes out to a movie! Meanwhile, the wizard is
being driven murderously insane by his sister's ghost. He goes out and screws
a hooker and kills her in an effort to get this May chick off his mind, but it
doesn't work, so it's off to see May herself. By now, Kong has turned into a creature with all these pins sticking out of
his head, and he wipes out the Taoist master and his followers, before Mei
appears and slices him in half. May seeks advice from Mei in an effort to
thwart this wizard and she tells her that she needs to "sacrifice herself" to
this guy and that turns out to mean that May has to let this guy rape her and
that once he hits orgasm, then he will be vulnerable. I must add, that in
addition to being a ridiculously titillating plan, that Mei was giving this
advice from a hospital bed while wearing a neck brace. She had already tried
to handle this wizard herself and that didn't quite work out. You can
practically see Mei saying to May, "go get'em kiddo, I know you've got it in
you (or at least you will have!)." The last scene is the infamous "invisible
rape" scene and goes on way too long. This is where the wizard uses his soul
to hook up with May, while his body is somewhere else. Once he's finished
doing his foul deed, this gold statue comes alive (I don't even have any idea
where this is taking place, by the way) grabs this super-secret sword that Mei
had brought from Thailand and kills the wizard or his soul or both. After all
this, May and Bon are checking out of the hospital and she gets the wonderful
news that she's preggers. It's like I always say, when you're going to be
raped by a wizard in an effort to save your boyfriend, make sure you're on the
pill, because you can't depend on the wizard for birth control or child
support. Once she hears this, she then hears the wizard's voice that he'll
always be with her or some such caddish remark. The big problem I had with
this movie was that it seemed to be aimed at junior high boys. I mean, the
idea that this woman had to do this wizard was iffy at best, but the fact that
the scene went on and on, kind of struck me as being a bit gratuitous. This
was in addition to the orgy scene the three guys and the woman had and the
hooker scene where the wizard ended up killing her, which was intercut with
scenes of the wizard pretending he was doing May. It's really all very
fascinating, but doesn't make a lot of sense. I never understood what powers
this wizard had or didn't have, I didn't really get why he suddenly turned from
a vengeful brother into a raping fiend and who the hell was that gold broad
with the sword at the end? All this confusion turned the ending from being
spectacular and/or erotic to just a cacophony of noise and fancy camera work.
The technical skills are there my friend, but the art is in the storytelling.
Now I ain't going to lie to any of you. The movie never really bored me, but
at the end I just kind sat there wondering if I cared about anything I had just
seen. I didn't. It tried to dominate by giving you the gore and sex scenes,
but there just wasn't anything about it all that stood out or seemed new (the
dude on the cover is just a ripoff of Hellraiser's Pinhead). Nothing in this one really knocks your socks off and makes you go
"wow." You just kind of go, "huh, that's mildly amusing" and "which friend was
he again?"
I suppose if your mom is gone and you've got the tv room to yourself, you
could watch this to fill your craving for some Asian sleeze, but I wouldn't
bust my hump seeking this out.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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