Oh man, this movie is a weird one. And that’s why we often visit the East, to see movies that we would never dream of.

The Shaw Brothers aren’t just all fighting movies. No, sometimes they produced movies in which blood frogs and all manner of strange demons decimate and assault families.

The House of Shi was once a wealthy family, but after the tragic murder of thirteen of their number — and them being thrown down a well — they’re been cursed. The kind of curse that awakens a demon who kills the survivors one by one in various gory ways when it’s not attacking every woman in the cast.

The craziest thing of all was that this movie was exclusively released to something called the ZiiEagle, which was packed with Shaw Brothers movies.

This was directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who also made Corpse Mania and The Boxer’s Omen. So if you’ve seen those movies, you should know to not expect anything in the realm of our senses. Where does one find frogs with steel teeth, anyway? Or a gigantic worm that doesn’t just devour people, but leaves behind most of their bodies covered in pink ooze?

A black magic sorcerer is just trying to dig up some bones for his latest spell when he’s chased by a group of angry citizens, right into the cab of our hero, Chau. He lives through getting hit by the car, but tells the cab driver that he’s about. to go through some bad luck.

And just like that, Chau’s wife starts sleeping with a gambler who really doesn’t care about her, even leaving her in a bad part of town where she’s assaulted and killed, falling out a window to her death, her spirit calling to Chau via his CB radio.

That’s when Chau decides that it’s time to find that black magic dude and get some horrible, horrible revenge.

The spell that ensues is so powerful, it blows the lid off Chau’s wife Irene’s coffin. There’s also corpse sex and a monster baby sent to destroy the two villains who dared to ruin Chau’s life. And he also learns that the more magic he uses, the more his body pays the price.

Look, a ghost has sex with a reanimated corpse over a black magic altar, a tentacled demon baby runs around and a toilet blows up real good. It’s not the best movie you’ve ever seen, but it may be the goopiest, the kind of film that tells The Thing, “Oh yeah? Hold my San Miguel.”

We just bought a new house and let me tell you, if Becca had gone through what Cheng Lai-sheung goes through in this movie, she would have killed numerous folks too.

She has promised her parents — who were forced to move from their homes to make way for luxury real estate when she was a child — that she would get them a home some day. She’s already missed the opportunity to give her mother this gift, as she has died, but as her father is on his death bed, she has the goal of purchasing the Victoria Bay No. 1 high-rise.

The bank will only give her 70% of the money she needs and her father’s medical bills cost so much that she must take a second job, as those costs cut into her savings. Even her married lover refuses to help, so Lai-sheng allows her father to die one night so that the dream can come true.

Despite finally qualifying for the home, the owners raise the price again, at which point our heroine kills eleven people in a frenzy before cooly returning to work and demanding that the price be cut, as after all, who would want to live in a place where so many have died?

Josie Ho, who is Lai-sheung in this, decided that she wanted to make something as wild as Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki while director and writer Pang Ho-cheung wanted something a bit more in the realm of reality. The outcome? Someone fainted and two people threw up during its Italian premiere, which is pretty much a standing ovation in my mind.

Screenwriter, cinematographer, producer, and director James Szalapski may be best known for the Alien teaser trailer, but this nearly lost country music documentary should be what people remember him for.

Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, David Allan Coe, Rodney Crowell, Gamble Rogers, Steve Young and The Charlie Daniels Band are the subjects of this piece, young men who looked to the past of country rather than what was popular at the time.

This film takes a sprawling narrative flow, basically following them as they record, drink, play shows and party some more. There are tons of astounding performances, but perhaps none better than Van Zandt singing “Waitin’ Around to Die” in his kitchen.

Kino Lorber has been releasing so many blu rays this year that are must owns. Consider this one of them. You can get it directly from them.

Lian Nichang, the main character of this film, comes from Liang Yusheng’s novel Baifa Monü Zhuan, which also served as source material for Wolf Devil Woman. However, director Ronny Yu saw this film as more of a romance than a fighting movie, believing that the central story was truly about the struggled against fate and the need to fulfill heroic duty.

Zhuo Yihang (Leslie Cheung) is a swordsman raised in the world of chivalry, charged with leading the eight major martial arts schools against an evil cult led by cojoined twins named Ji Wushuang. Those very same twins have raised Lian Nichang (Brigette Lin), a wolf-girl orphaned as an infant, making her one of the strongest martial artists of all time.

Can two enemies find love despite being raised to hate one another? And when forced to turn upon one another, can anyone survive?

This is a gorgeous film that demands to be watched. It’s like a moving painting, a film that’s just as much a romance as one devoted to wire work and swordplay. And for people like me who demand those types of things, there is stil plenty of fight scenes.

You could say that this movie looks like a dream, but I’ve never had one quite so vivid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Anyone familiar with Hong Kong action cinema will surely be acquainted with the cop/triad subgenre. Tropes include:

1.   A sharply dressed, greedy Triad leader who takes great pleasure in killing his enemies in various creative ways.

2.   Said Triad almost always has a slew of equally violent men and a bevy of beautiful women working for him.

3.   There’s always a dedicated hard-ass cop who’ll do anything to catch said Triad.

The difference between Organized Crime and Triad Bureau and other films of its ilk is the depth of the characters. Triad Tung (Anthony Wong) is not simply a greedy killer. He is a criminal, yes. But he is also a man who lives by a code of honor. He loves his son. He’s also deeply in love with his number one mistress, Cindy whom he rescues from a rapist in a well-placed flashback early in the film. Rarely do we see women given an arc this juicy. Cindy (played by Cecilia Yip) feels betrayed by Tung because of his womanizing but she chooses to stay with him. The emotional debt she feels for saving her life overlaps just enough with her overall lack of self-confidence to justify her continued loyalty. 

Danny Lee’s Inspector Lee is not simply a dedicated cop, but an obsessed one who crosses the line frequently by breaking the law to uphold it. Not a new concept by any means, but it is extremely well-executed in this fast-paced actioner. Lee’s motivations for catching Tung are not clear. Perhaps he is so obsessed because the other police officers pick on him for having no life outside work. Maybe he feels the need to prove himself. The movie doesn’t concern itself so much with the “whys” but lets the actions of the characters do the explaining. 

This movie resists the clichés right up to the very end. Yes, there is a shootout. But there are no straightforward answers (or easy outs) for any of the characters. A lesser actor than Anthony Wong would not have done triad leader Tung justice. Few actors play complex anti-heroes as well as Wong. When asked about this performance in an interview, he said he felt it was only “tolerably good.” A man with superior standards indeed. He need not be so humble. I watched this expecting a plain cop/bad guy flick, but Organized Crime and Triad pleasantly surprised me. In a subgenre with such a predictable template, it is a standout.

If American audiences know director Lau Kar-leung and star Gordon Liu for anything, it would be this movie. A lot of credit for that goes to the Wu-Tang Clan, who referenced it in an album title and have as many alternate names for one another as audiences do for this movie (The Master Killer, Shaolin Master Killer and Shao Lin San Shi Liu Fang).

Liu Yude (Liu) has been radicalized into the rebellion against the Manchu government, which ends when General Tien Ta destroys his school and then kills not just the students, but their friends and family as well. On the run, he goes to the Shaolin temple in the hopes of learning the fighting skills he’ll need for revenge.

As an outsider, he is turned away until the chief abbott has mercy on him. Yet a year later, Yude is now San Te and begins working his way through the 35 training chambers that each monk must complete. The top chamber is too much for our hero, where he must recite Buddhist philosophy from memory, so he begins on the bottom, amazing everyone at becoming the master of 35 of the chambers in just six years.

After numerous battles, he finally defeats one of the elders and announces that his goal is to create the new 36th chamber, one in which ordinary people will be given the skills to defend themselves. The temple officially banishes him but only does so to allow him to go back into the ordinary world and continue the revolution and stopping Tien Ta.

“The wall may be low, but the Buddha is high.” With dialogue like this, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin shows that the journey to master oneself through fighting skill is not even about the actual fighting. It is mastering emotion and going inward to better oneself. The war is often with ourselves.

Chang Ling/Pearl Cheong wrote, directed and starred in this martial arts opus that tells the story of a young girl who taken from her parents and raised by the legendary White Wolf of a Thousand Years. Growing up in the unforgiving permafrost of Cold Ice Peak, she learns how to use her animal, monster and kung-fu skills to find and destroy the man who killed her parents, who is known as Red Devil.

This takes the same story as The Bride with White Hair and goes absolutely insane with the wire kung fu sequences and gives our heroine a hat that looks like it was made from a stuffed dog toy. You have no idea how happy that fact makes me. She also has nunchukus that look like claws and kills hundreds of enemies in what seems like seconds.

As little sense as much of this action makes, the fact that the dubbing is so bad — it makes Bob from The House by the Cemetery seem restrained by comparison — that it becomes wonderful. Who would think to have a villain that has killed everyone Wolf Devil Woman has ever loved should sound like a Southern gentleman at best and Foghorn Leghorn at worst?

An absolute must-see.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Screw the Snyder Cut. Whatever drugs the Shaw Brothers had access to, release them to the rest of the world.

After being crippled in the ring, boxer Zhen Wei asks for his brother Zhen Xiong to avenge him, which will take finding the key necessary to release their family from a horrible curse.

Simple start, right?

Buckle up, because this is the kind of movie that will make your brain bleed. Seriously and without hyperbole, The Boxer’s Omen is a phantasmagorical thrill ride into how much insanity one can pack into 105 minutes.

Sure, your movie may have a crocodile in it, but does it have a reanimated corpse that’s been sewn into the mummified body of a dead crocodile? I don’t think so.

Then, let’s add in spiders drinking from people, demon bats, flying heads, goo, gore, gristle, black magic wizards, maggots, a sexy zombie, spiritual monk training montages, caterpillars, eels coming out of peoples’ mouths, neon magic, vomit magic, intestines and more.

You know when people use silly terms like fever dream and madness to describe a movie? They are only dreaming of a movie like this, one that takes you on a life-changing journey and repeatedly makes you wonder exactly what the hell you’re watching and just how they captured all of this on celluloid.

After making movies like this, Corpse Mania and Hex, director Kuei Chih-Hung quit the business, moved to America and started a pizza restaurant. He’s sadly no longer with us, but I have no doubt that his pizza was a messy, greasy, gooey and delicious dish that was most definitely spiked with all manner of Taoist magic and the most potent LSD known to man and demon.

The world is a better place for this movie being in it.

Chang Cheh directed ninety movies from 1965 to 1993*, as well as all of the lyrics to the songs within his films. The majority of his most well-known movies in the west feature the Venom Mob of Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang (along with Wei Pai), a group of martial arts masters who appeared together and separately across numerous Shaw Brothers films.

Also known as Super Ninjas, Chinese Super Ninjas and Chinese Super Ninja, this movie seems as if the weirdest and most violence obsessed kid in your grade school class was suddenly given enough money to stop scribbling in his notebooks and instead allowed to make a movie that is pretty much non-stop ninjas horribly murdering one another.

This is quite frankly the highest praise that I can give to a movie.

I mean, let me sum up the first five minutes: Chief Hong (Chan Shen) has challenged his rival Yuan Zeng (Kwan Fung) for the title of martial arts master, which mostly entails sending each others’ students after one another in battles to the death. Hong has cheapened these wars of honor by inviting a foreign samurai to the contest. He kills one of Zeng’s students before being stopped by Liang Zhi Sheng (Lo Mang). Before he commits seppuku, he throws a spiked ring to Zeng, which poisons the master and keeps him from doing kung fu until he heals.

There’s no time to heal, as a new challenge arises from the Five-Element Ninjas. Zeng asks Sheng and Tian Hao (Cheng Tien Chi) to fortify the school while ten of his best men answer the challenge. What follows is a series of increasingly brighter colored ninjas basically showing you every Mortal Kombat fatality nearly a decade before the game came out. The ninjas also send Senji (Chen Pei-Hsi) to infiltrate the school. Yes, Hong and Mudou (Michael Chan, who didn’t just play triad gangster roles, but left the police to become one), the leader of the ninjas, are pretty much the winners before the fight even gets started.

Within a few weeks, she has mapped out the entire school and Mudou’s ninjas attack as she offers herself to Sheng. He refuses her, but allows her to play the flute for him. As she entertains him, everyone in the school except for Hao, who escapes and visits his old ninja master. Joined by four other fighters, he challenges the Five-Elements Ninjas and Mudou, who has killed Hong and taken the title of master.

This movie is quite frankly amazing. It blew my mind throughout and never lets up, like a children’s show that has wall-to-wall gore. As the first movie in our week of Hong Kong films, it has set a high bar which other films will really have to battle to scale and exceed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Five Venoms and Crippled Avengers to name a few.