The final of the three movies that adapt Louis Cha’s The Legend of the Condor Heroes, this starts with Guo Jing (Alexander Fu Sheng) and Huang Rong (Niu-niu) following Yang Kang (Yu Tai-ping) to the home of the Iron Palm Sect. Huang Rong is critically injured and a swamp woman named Yinggu (Ching Li) tells Guo JIng that only a monk named Duan Zhixing (Ti Lung) can save her.

After defeating the bodyguards of Duan Zhixing, they learn that Yinggu was once his lover. She told them to find him because to save Huang Rong, Duan’s healing powers may cost him his life. That’s because he ignored her to become a master fighter and she had an affair with Zhou Botong, which led to her having his child. When the baby was born, a masked man attacked it and Yinggu begged Duan to save its life. Now, her revenge will be having him die.

Qiu Qianren (Lo Mang), one of the best fighters in the Iron Palm Sect, was the masked man and this brings Zhou and Yinggu back together. Zhou Botong appears and explains the weakness in Qiu’s martial arts and he is finally defeated.

How crazy is it that it took the third movie to finally explain who Duan Zhixing was? Meanwhile, the characters in this movie aren’t even the titular hero, so what’s going on here? Ah, Chang Cheh, you always surprise me. Also: a baby death? That’s how you prove that someone is the bad guy. Speaking of bad guys, when is Guo Jing going to get that revenge that this series of movies is supposed to be about?

On their wedding day, Ting Tzu-chu (Helen Poon Bing-Seung) explains to her husband — detective and martial artist Long Fei (Derek Yee) — the ritual that Xiao Lik (Yueh Hua) is leading the villagers in. They are making a peace offering to the Black Lizard, a centuries old demon that comes back every three years to take one life.

It’s a good thing she told him about this, because a few days later, Long Fei meets someone by the name of Visitor from Hell (Goo Goon-Chung), who tells him that if he doesn’t come home and stops taking a prisoner to jail, his wife will die. This is followed by meeting a man in red (Yuen Wah) and a woman in white (Chan Man-Na) who ends up being the dead wife of Xiao Lik. They are carrying a coffin with a woman in it that looks a lot like our hero’s wife. If that doesn’t weird you out, it turns out that Xiao Lik has already killed the Black Lizard once before and was cursed as it came back as his son Ruo Yu (Ng Yuen-Jun), who grew up to kill his mother and now isn’t waiting for three years to keep murdering.

Working with Chief Constable Tieh Hu (Hua Yueh), Long Fei must learn how to prevent the death of his wife while the world around him looks less like the Shaw Brothers sets and more like the world of Mario Bava, as colored gels make reality a comic book, cobwebs cover everything and talking wooden people are here to further screw with your brain. Imagine if Scooby-Doo had more fog than you though was possible, as well as sword fights and heroic fighters.

Chor Yuen also made Bat Without Wings and this has plenty of the mood from that film. I have a weakness for Shaw Brothers films that blend horror with their traditional wuxia elements. This movie glows in the dark.

Not all slashers are domestic, as we again test the “Is it giallo or is it slasher?” game with the Shaw Brothers-produced 1981 film Corpse Mania. It’s directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who would go on to create the strange Curse of Evil and the “I don’t have a word good enough to properly convent the level of strange” film The Boxer’s Omen.

Inspector Chang is beginning to figure out that all of the dead bodies in his area all were visitors to the brothel of one Madam Lan and all fingers point to Mr. Li, a man who has already been jailed for defiling corpses, which really doesn’t seem like the kind of crime you get out of jail for due to good behavior.

Sure, you might know who the killer is from the moment the movie starts, but give this points for his bandaged get-up, inventive stalking scenes and not shying away from the gore, including a scene where the killer gets a corpse ready for, well, love and then admires it the more it draws maggots.

From real maggots crawling all over its actresses and astounding blasts of blood to a dummy thrown off a roof that’s so fake that Lucio Fulci would stand up and laugh out loud, this movie has it all. It’s fog and mood suggest a Hong Kong Blood and Black Lace if  Bava decided to take a break from all the sexualized violence to deliver a kung fu sequence.

The bloody parrot of this film’s title is a legend of a bird that was born on the devil king’s birthday when all of the lesser demons gave him their blood so that it may grant three wishes to whomever discovers it. Those wishes, however, have a tendency 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) an constable Tieh Han (Tony Liu) start hunting for the truth, which ends up with Tieh 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 just 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?

Detective Wong King Sun is investigating the horrific and violent death of a little girl at the hands of her father, who claims that he was under the influence of a wizard. This takes the detective all the way to Thailand to learn more and, as happens in films such as this, to be cursed by a powerful magician named Magusu, who was supposedly played by an infamous Malay sorcerer. That’s what the credits say and who are we to deny the words of Shaw Brothers or any exploitation studio when you get right down to it?

Wong King Sun decides to fight black magic, he needs a white magic monk. What follows is an entire movie of one-upmanship battles over whose magic is strongest, including a gut-churning moment when the evil magician grabs that pause that refreshes. Except that we’re not talking about Coca-Cola. This dude likes to sip from a big urn filled with unborn children and blood.

If that last sentence made you wince, turn back now. Bewitched is a ride through absolute chaos. It’s gorgeous, it’s frenetic and it’s also unafraid to try and make you throw up throughout its running time. And if this one seems like it’s going to be too much, its sequel, The Boxer’s Omen, goes even further. Director Chih-Hung also made the equally blood and madness-filled Corpse Mania.

We all know that old Chinese chestnut of advice, right? Don’t take the virginity of village women, ghost them and then just move on or you’ll be covered in body hair, unable to get it up and eventually hammering a spike into your daughter’s head so that she stops being possessed and attempting to kill you.

“The moral of the story is to admonish people against casual sex and to be on guard against witchcraft.” That’s what the end says. As for me, I’m all about movies with neon colors, glittery bats that come to animated life and actual black magic rituals being used to entertain audiences.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dragonslayer was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1987.

After Popeye, this was the second joint production with Paramount of films that were more mature than the expected Disney offerings. That meant that Drahonslayer’s violence, themes and even brief nudity ended up being controversial, despite only being rated PG.

Set the film after the Roman departure from Britain, prior to the arrival of Christianity, the film shows a world of sorcery unlike many others in the genre. Co-writers Hal Barwood (who also wrote The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, MacArthur and Corvette Summer, as well as writing and directing Warning Sign and creating video games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and Matthew Robins (who wrote Crimson Peak and wrote and directed Batteries Not Included and I would be remiss not to mention that he also directed The Legend of Billie Jean) were inspired to make something new. Barwood said, “our film has no knights in shining armor, no pennants streaming in the breeze, no delicate ladies with diaphanous veils waving from turreted castles, no courtly love, no holy grail. Instead, we set out to create a very strange world with a lot of weird values and customs, steeped in superstition, where the clothes and manners of the people were rough, their homes and villages primitive and their countryside almost primeval, so that the idea of magic would be a natural part of their existence.”

Vermithrax is also one of the best dragons ever made, even forty years after the film’s release. More than 25% of the movie’s budget went to realizing the dragon. This was the first movie to use go-motion, which had parts of the mechanical dragon be programmed and filmed by computer. The forty-foot tall beast was brought to life by sixteen puppeteers. Its full name — Vermithrax Pejorative — means The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse.

As for the story, it’s all about Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol, who is embarrassed by this movie, perhaps because you can fully see his ween in it) saving Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) from being a virgin sacrifice to the dragon. She’s no damsel in distress, however, as she’d hid her gender identity to help create the sword that can destroy the beast.

But yeah. It’s worth watching for just the dragon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Excalibur was on the CBS Late Movie on June 6, 1986.

Shot entirely on location in Ireland, employing mostly Irish actors and crew, Excalibur was an important film for the Irish filmmaking industry and helped start the careers of Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.

It was also known as the Boorman Family Project, as several members of director Jonathan Boorman’s family appear, with his daughter Katrine Boorman playing Igrayne — Arthur’s mother — as well as his daughter Telsche as the Lady of the Lake and his son Charley acting in the role of Mordred as a boy. It was shot a mile from his home, so he was able to be at home for the entire making of the movie.

Boorman has been wanting to make the movie since 1969, yet the three-hour script was seen as too costly by United Artists and instead, he was offered The Lord of the Rings, which he did not make yet did develop. He ended up using some of the work that went into that adaption here, as well as potentially being inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

He’d worked with Rospo Pallenberg on that canceled film (as well as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Emerald Forest; Pallenberg would also direct Cutting Class), so he worked with him here to bring Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to theaters. Boorman said that his film was about “the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.”

I love Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he said that the film was both a wondrous vision and a mess, “a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures who are not heroes but simply giants run amok. Still, it’s wonderful to look at.”

It’s beyond gorgeous, actually, a movie that combines shocking gore with artistic flourishes, like the three ladies in white who attend Arthur to Avalon at the close. Boorman was also smart enough to cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana Le Fay, two actors who had had a conflict when they acted in Macbeth together. He felt that tension would be seen on screen and it certainly is. That said, Mirren claimed that the two become friends while making Excalibur.

It rained every single day of the shoot, which adds to the foggy look of the film. It had many issues, as the first fight scene had to be filmed three times. It was filmed at night and the exposure meter was broken, leading to two different scenes of underexposed film.

Boorman’s career is pretty great. Sure, there are the big movies like Deliverance, but I love that he shoots for the fences and makes off the wall stuff like Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here’s to less playing it safe for directors, even if the misses end up being spectacular losses. I don’t think that that can happen any longer in entertainment.

My initial exposure to this film came from Mad Magazine. Often as a kid, we wouldn’t see an R-rated movie until it was on HBO, so many of the films I’ve had to find as an adult were first seen through the eyes of Mad’s Usual Gang of Idiots. This time, Don Martin did the movie adaption. I’m happy to share a few panels with you thanks to Jesse Hamm on Twitter.