Directed by Alex Cheung, this features Eden (James Yi Lui), a private eye, and Li Tien Zhen (Cherie Chung) meeting when they both decide to jump in front of a train. He’s depressed at where life has taken him, and she’s been kidnapped by a UFO and lost her virginity, which ruins her marriage to Mr. Kwok (David Lo). And then, it becomes a series of sketches, including car crashes and a scene that is totally Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch.

Wuxia and martial arts weren’t selling, so Shaw Brothers was looking for something to replace those types of movies, so they were co-producing movies like Inseminoid and Blade Runner. This is a bunch of things thrown in a pot: a werewolf, a food fight, Close Encounters, music videos, some aliens, romance, a Star Wars parody, comedy and martial arts. 

It doesn’t all work, but when the hero pulls his shirt open to reveal the Shaw Brothers logo, I laughed.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, features a high-definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has commentary by martial arts cinema expert Frank Djeng, an interview with director/co-writer Alex Cheung and a newly filmed appreciation by film scholar Victor Fan. You can get this set from MVD.

I think I’ve seen all the Shaw Brothers non-supernatural films, and the HK Database says that this is a drama, so…let’s just agree that it may have demons and magic, but it’s kind of its own thing.

Long Fei (Jason Piao Pai) left behind the world of martial arts fisticuffs and now lives in a secluded mountain studio, where he and his assistant, Fatty (Wong Chun), have spent five years carving a woman out of crystal. Long Fei wishes that his woman had a soul, so he adds some blood because, you know, nothing bad would happen, and of course, everything bad in this movie happens as the crystal woman (Yu-Po Liu) starts killing people.

Masked Poison Yama (Wei Hao Ting) and his son (Yu Hsiao) want to kill Long Fei, so they spend much of the movie inside a treehouse lab where they mix plants, snake venom — yes, the film shows us it being extracted, it’s a Shaw Brothers movie — and animals to make a poison that blows people up from inside their stomach. Yes, they show it. You know you want it.

Yet the son is soon killed by the crystal female, and Yama declares revenge on everyone, first using poison gas to kill everyone in the family of former fighter Prince Tian Di (Jung Wang). As this is all going on, he sends his men, White Judge and Black Judge, after Long Fei and Fatty, who are hiding out in an inn where the owner decapitates people and serves their flesh.

This movie is, well, absolutely wild. There are battles in a graveyard, a school of masked female assassins, wire-assisted swordplay and every character coming together for one final battle. I just realized that Hus Shan also directed Inframan, Kung Fu Zombie and Dynamo. Yeah, that makes sense even if this movie doesn’t — like, how is the crystal woman related to the assassin academy? — but who cares? It looks good, it moves fast, and it’s super weird.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.

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.”

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has commentary by critic James Mudge. You can get this set from MVD.

The first film by Lung Yi-sheng, this is the tale of Yuan Fei, the Flying Monkey (Chin Siu-ho), who takes on the challenge of finding a weapon that can defeat the Demon Lute, a weapon made from dinosaur muscles. In his journey, he meets swordswoman Feng Ling, the Rainbow Sword (Kara Wai), the drunken Old Naughty and his scissors, the Woodcutter and his son Doraemon, called that because he carries around a Doraemon doll.

They will battle  The Long Limb Evil, a demon who has an arm that can keep growing; the One Eyed Dragon, who has a crazy spider eyepatch; Red-Haired Devil, who can attack with his afro and the demonic lute itself, which becomes a transparent hand with six fingers that keeps grabbing for our heroes before they use the only weapon can stop it, a bow that was jammed into the stone wall of a cave.

There’s a dog-pulled chariot, a rainbow sword, gigantic axes, and wirework fights made for kids, all set to 80s guitar-driven music. There are some people online who have given this poor reviews, and what kind of heartless creep do you have to be to watch something so perfect and judge it that way?

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has commentary by martial arts cinema expert Frank Djeng. You can get this set from MVD.

Made two years before Ghostbusters, this early Lau Kar-Wing supernatural comedy (one of two he did for Shaw Brothers) has Bao Tuo (Hsiao Ho) and his cousin Zhou Peng (Cheung Chin-Pang) scamming people as fake ghostbusters. As you can imagine, they end up fighting real apparitions. A screwed up exorcism leads to the death of a client and her haunting them…and that’s just the beginning.

This may be wackier than some like, and the script is totally all over the place, but hiding ghosts inside umbrellas, possessed gamblers using that supernatural event to cheat and win money, and supernatural spectral battles should keep you on board. Sure, Golden Harvest did these sorts of movies better — Mr. Vampire, Encounter of the Spooky Kind — but this should at the very least keep you interested.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, features a high-definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.

The bloody parrot of this film’s title is a legend of a bird born on the devil king’s birthday, when all the lesser demons gave him their blood so that it might grant three wishes to whoever discovered it. Those wishes, however, tend to go poorly. One example is Guo Fan, a government worker who has lost a treasure and begs the bird for their return. The prize does come back at the cost of his son’s life. He then monkey’s paw wishes for the son back, so his wife kills him and commits suicide.

The treasure disappears again, and that’s when fighters from around the world learn that if they find the parrot, they will become rich. Swordsman Yeh Ting Feng (Pai Piao) and constable Tieh Han (Tony Liu) start hunting for the truth, which ends with Tieh being killed and Yeh carrying his coffin like some Shaw Brothers Django. There’s also a Parrot Brothel where Pei-yu (Jenny Liang) works. There’s a whole hall of mirrors for her to show off her curves in.

If you liked the gross-out side of Shaw Brothers — Hex, Black Magic, Human Lanterns — then this is what you’re looking for. It also has plenty of sleaze and Wuxia moments to make one strange cocktail. Director Hua Shan has so many cards to deal you, from nudity to martial arts battles, sword fights, maggot eating, autopsies and demonic possession, to name a few. Who are we to deny the man who made Infra-Man?

I mean, this is a movie where a woman sews a man’s face onto a Frisbee and uses it as a weapon.

If that doesn’t make you watch this, is there any hope?

As a warning, this movie makes no sense whatsoever, and I’m not advising you to engage in mind-altering substances — you may not even need them — but if you can’t get high and watch a movie that combines Bava colors with kung fu and obscene levels of puking, then what are you living for?

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has a commentary by critic Samm Deighan. You can get this set from MVD.

The Bat looks like Gene Simmons, and that’s precisely why I chose to watch this. He’s some kind of martial arts supervillain who assaults and murders women and then sends back their body parts one at a time to their husbands. He’s also so strong that he kills twenty-six martial artists before he gets stopped. However, five years later, the killings begin again, despite the original Bat being chained up in a cave, surrounded by the dead bodies of his victims, kind of like a Far East Frank Zito.

Oh yeah, and the bad guy can fly and his real name is Red Baron. He also has a cave lair filled with traps, like exploding boxes and a pond filled with poison.

Look, this isn’t the best movie you’ve ever seen, but it does have a KISS-looking evil wizard martial artist in an insane cape that can leap hundreds of feet in the air, sucking the blood from women and killing men in combat.

If you can’t find a reason to enjoy that, there really is no hope for you.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. It has a commentary by critic Samm Deighan. You can get this set from MVD.

There are three Hex movies, but they aren’t all that connected, other than the fact that the protagonist of this film, Ma Su (Lo Meng), is the neighbor of the main character in Hex vs. Witchcraft. He finds the same bag of gold that was behind all of the supernatural moments of that film, including the tablet of Liu Ah Cui, whose spirit possesses Yeung Suk Yi (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) and has her seduce Ma Su.

Kuei Chi-Hung has created a movie in which Yoda randomly shows up, and then Darth Vader appears with a lightsaber that removes clothing. There’s also a real estate developer who hires Ma Su and plans to complete his development by June 30, 1997, which is when Hong Kong became part of China again. In fact, this evil landowner even gets branded with what was supposed to say ‘1997,’ but Shaw Brothers replaced it with their logo.

Eventually, Ma Su fades into the background, and Yeung Suk Yi goes on the offensive to get back at the developer for kicking everyone out of their apartment. By the end, Ma Su has fallen for the ghost and invokes a monkey god to battle an animated statue of Thomas Jefferson because, well, why not at this point? What if it also turns into a slot machine and makes everyone rich with the gold it spews out? Let’s do that too.

They could have made twenty of these movies, and I would watch every one.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.