Heugsamgwi (1983)

... aka: 邪撞邪

... aka: 黑三鬼

... aka: 흑삼귀

... aka: Evil Hits Evil

... aka: Hei san gui

... aka: Three Dark Spirits

... aka: Xie zhuang xie

Directed by:

Wei-Hsiang Lai

Gi-nam Nam

Hot-headed, unmarried young man Lee Yao (Alan Liu Te-Kai) is employed as a wood chopper for wealthy Master Ta-Wei Hung ("special guest" Sing Chan); slaving away for very little money that he desperately needs to help care for his old parents while, at the same time, getting zero respect or acknowledgment for his hard work. When he starts to vent his frustrations, groundskeeper Old Ting (Ching-Feng Chiang) warns him not only that it's unwise to bite the hand that feeds but also that he should never inquire about the beautiful lute music he hears on the Hung estate grounds. After all, a young man named Chen Fu ("Kwon Yung Moon" / Yeong-mun Kwon), as well as his entire family, had previously been murdered by Hung's thugs for getting a little too nosy. And they weren't the only ones.

When he isn't getting his jollies shooting arrows through any crow that lands in his courtyard (a bad omen), Master Hung and his henchmen - including the muscular Hsiung Yang (wearing a silly-looking fake beard, Mohawk and bushy eyebrows) and a ridiculous, queeny "transvestite" (Yun-Pao Lu) - get their kicks kidnapping and torturing people in the master's secret torture chamber. Hung has a quiet, sweet, lonely daughter ("Lung June Erh" / Doris Lung Chen-Erh) he keeps locked away inside and it's strongly suggested he has amassed his fortune through murder and thievery.

Just like Chen Fu, Lee Yao has fallen in love with Hung's daughter just from hearing her lovely music, which makes him the ideal host body for Chen Fu to possess. The disgruntled entity then sets Lee Yao on course for revenge against the entire Hung clan. After having a bunch of seizures accompanied by a stretched picture and the camera tilting left and right and then spinning in a circle, Lee Yao goes to a brothel and kills two of Hung's six men. Afterward, he knocks off three others, resurrects their corpses and sends them after the final thug, who gets beaten up and impaled against a wall with a long bamboo pole. And then it's time to pay the Hung family a visit, starting with possessing Hung's younger wife, Fei Yu, who develops hairy patches on her face and smoldering hair.

Robert Tai co-stars as a Taoist brought in to help. He gives Lee Yao a holy shroud to wear to keep the spirit from inhabiting his body but it falls off and bursts into flames. Spell papers and a magic sword are also used and other rituals are conducted but none of it seems to do any good. After Tai and his two assistants are killed, a great, acrobatic female exorcist clad in white (Jong-suk Choe) shows up out of nowhere willing to do battle with the evil spirit. She instructs Master Hung to erect a shrine. Instead, he and some of his men go and slaughter Lee Yao and his parents and then return home for a feast while the daughter gets raped by an invisible spirit in her bedroom. The final climactic duel between Chen Fu and the lady exorcist features her levitating while doing a split, flying around and trying to finally lay Chen Fu to rest permanently using skull spears, fireballs, kung fu and tightening rings.

While there are some entertaining, crazy and fun moments sprinkled throughout, I found this much too disjointed, aggravating and sloppy to fully get behind. The plot seldom makes sense. Too many under-developed characters come and go with little explanation as to who they are or why they're even there. Several awful comic subplots featuring irritating characters get shoehorned in and each has little to do with the primary story and knock the pacing and tone of this otherwise serious film completely off balance. One involves a night patrolmen (Dai-Wai Woo) who has several run-ins with the spirit, including having his urine stream u-turned so that he pisses in his own face. Another features a pair of nitwit con artists with a pug dog who get their asses kicked when they try to hassle a matchmaker traveling through the area who has two much larger dogs. The same guys then pretend to be a replacement Taoist and his monk assistant after the others are killed. Most of these people merely exit stage left after providing their "comedy."

Perhaps even worse, things conclude on an extremely anticlimactic and unsatisfying note. The major villain of the piece receives a bland and forgettable demise. In fact, I couldn't even really tell what happened aside from him getting hit by a flying table. And then they add insult to injury by not even bothering to come up with a proper ending. Unless I saw a cut version, this ends mid-fight between the female exorcist (who is cool but would have been much cooler had they actually developed this character somewhat) and the spirit, who's left holding his own disembodied head and hissing "I shall return! I shall return!" before it cuts to black. Needless to say, he did not return.

Not that this would have necessarily been any better with them, but this is also quite low on exploitative elements. Visual fx are nearly nonexistent and there's very little blood or gore. However, some bizarre / frenetic camerawork, a few good fight scenes and excellent stunts and wire work compensate for that somewhat. The score has been stolen from various other films, including DAWN OF THE DEAD.

A South Korean / Taiwanese co-production, this was released theatrically in the former as Heugsamgwi ("Three Dark Spirits" ) and the latter as Xie zhuang xie ("Evil Hits Evil"). Listed release dates on various websites fluctuate from 1983 to 1985. The only official home video releases I'm aware of occurred in Asia, though this has at least been the recipient of fan-made English subtitles. This same low-quality subtitled version is also the print used for every DVD-R currently being hawked online. The Korean-language print is 2 minutes shorter than the Taiwanese one because the rape scene (which is fairly tame and features no nudity) and a few other bits have been trimmed out.

★★

Cui hua du jiang tou (1975)

... aka: 摧花毒降頭

... aka: 人蛇 女巫

... aka: 인사여무

... aka: Au pays de la magie noire (In the Land of Black Magic)

... aka: Human Affairs Are Nothing

... aka: Human Snake Witch

... aka: Insa yeomu

... aka: Magic Curse, The

Directed by:

Yeong-sun Kwon (uncredited)

"Tommy Loo-Chun" (Chun-Ku Lu)

To Man Po

Wen-Ying Lin (Jason Pai Piao) is busy wowing the ladies at a bowling alley when he receives an urgent phone call from his attorney Vivencio P. Angeles (Vic Silayan), who informs him that his uncle's private plane is ten hours late arriving and is assumed crashed in Borneo. Seeing how the plane was also carrying a bunch of valuable jewels, this certainly needs looking into. Wen-Ying immediately books a flight to Borneo and hires a handful of native guides, who basically run off and leave him at the first sign of trouble! And seeing how that first sign of trouble is a tribe of cannibal-zombie lepers, you can't really blame 'em. The lepers scatter after Wen-Ying guns a few of them down. One injured tribesmen reverse time-lapses back to looking human and thanks him for releasing him from the "magic curse" he's been placed under. He also names a culprit for his affliction: Abdullah.

Abdullah is an evil, power-mad high priest / black magician and leader of another tribe who decapitate topless virgins with a huge axe as an offering to their snake god. When he is not overseeing sacrifices, he's busy taking advantage of his position and offering to "help" deflower unsullied young ladies so they won't be the next to lose their head. Quite a scam he's got going on there! One of those girls, Sofia, refuses his kind offer and attempts to run off with another young villager named Shou Ming, but Abdullah casts a spell that possesses her and makes her grow fangs, which she then uses to bite Shou Ming's dick off! She then stabs herself in the stomach with a knife. Wen-Ying stumbles upon the bloody scene long enough to hear Sofia utter "Abdullah" with her last dying breath.

Wen-Ying ends up running into some of Abdullah's thugs and, although he puts up a valiant fight, he's outnumbered, gets shot in the back with an arrow and is left for dead. Some naked female bathers having a giggly slow-motion splash-fest near a waterfall (the jungle equivalent of the slow-mo topless pillow fight most of us have undoubtedly seen a time or two) stumble upon Wen-Ying's injured body. Filona (Pinky De Leon), a pretty high-ranking priestess in the tribe, takes him back to her hut, nurses him back to health and falls in love with him. However, when Abdullah finds out she's harboring an outsider (which is against tribe rules... not that he typically follows those himself), a power struggle erupts. As snake priestess, Filona is technically a higher-ranking tribe member but she and the others are no match for Abdullah's powerful sorcery.

When Abdullah gets even nastier (using voodoo dolls and threatening to kill Filona's kid brother), Wen-Ying is forced to leave the village. But before heading back to civilization, he confesses his feelings to Filona and the two make love in front of a fire. Wen-Ying promises he'll return one day but, just to be on the safe side, she bites his lip and releases another curse. Not content being another hump-n-dump, pounce-n-bounce or nail-n-bail to the city dweller, Filona now has ownership over him. If he touches another woman while he's away, the curse will kick in and said other woman will die a horrible death. Also, he's to come back in one year's time to marry her or else he'll also be the recipient of a nasty demise.

Wen-Ying returns to Manila, inherits some money from his late uncle's estate and tries to resume life as normal which, for a swinging bachelor like himself, includes going to discos in a leisure suit and flares, drinking too much and picking up chicks. One night out, he hits it off with a lady named Suzie ("Woung Eune Hi" / Angela Wang En-Chi) and inadvertently infuriates a group of hooligans in the process. Outside the club, a shitfaced Wen-Ying gets viciously beaten and chain-whipped by the gang but, thanks to the "magic curse," a snake emerges to scare them off and he's no worse for wear at the end of it. The same cannot be said for Suzie a few hours later when she's killed in the shower by snakes immediately after having sex with Wen-Ying. A police inspector ("Choi Mu Ung" / Mu-ung Choe) shows up and the death is written off as a heart attack.

During a party at his attorney's home, Wen-Ying meets Daisy Chen ("Nam Soon Joung" / Su-jung Nam), who at first seems bashful but then proves to be no shrinking violet. The two skip out on the party and go for a ride, which quickly leads to a different kind of ride back at her parent's home. Afterward, Wen-Ying takes his usual post-coital customary nap which enables more snakes to sneak in. Daisy is killed after getting knocked down the stairs. The inspector returns but this time he's certainly not convinced of Wen-Ying's innocence. That is, until Wen-Ying drags him back to Borneo so he can see what's actually going on with his own two eyes.

This is reasonably fun assembly line mash-up of schlock jungle adventure and black magic horror, with adequate pacing, decent atmosphere and plenty of exploitative content to keep things humming along. Still, one can't get too caught up in the little details... like how hilariously misogynistic this whole thing is! I mean, why does a fidelity curse placed upon our male protagonist end up punishing oblivious women who have no clue there's even another woman in the picture, and not him? One would think there'd be some kind of "Make his dick fall off if he touches another woman" or equivalent spell instead of this "Killing innocent women just because a guy can't keep his dick in his pants" spell. And since both Wen-Ying and Filona are both basically terrible people, their happy reunion at the very end doesn't possess much in the way of charm.

There's a decent (albeit dark and dingy) English-language widescreen print of this one out now, which is derived from the French release Au pays de la magie noire ("In the Land of Black Magic"). As for its country of origin, well...

IMDb lists this twice and under two different titles (once as a Hong Kong / Filipino co-production and another time as a Korean production), the Korean Movie Database lists it as an entirely Korean production, the Hong Kong Movie Database lists it as a Taiwanese production and Hong Kong Cinemagic lists it as a Hong Kong production. Who's correct? Who knows! Maybe all of them. What we do know is that it was filmed entirely on location in the Philippines and the cast is widely varied and contains fairly well-known actors from all four of the countries in question. The credited director changes depending on which print you view (Korean director Yeong-sun Kwon was not listed on the print I watched) as does much of the crew, so it's difficult to even tell.

The given release year also fluctuates depending on the source, though this may have received a release in South Korea a year or two before it was ever released in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Again, I'm not entirely sure due to lack of consistent information. The cast includes Hok-Nin Lau and Peter Chan Lau (who also receives credit as production manager and action director) as tribesmen, though the actor I was the most interested in - the guy playing "Abdullah" - I wasn't able to find the identity of.

There were VHS releases in a number of countries including the UK (an English-dubbed version, released by Hokushin in 1981) and France (dubbed in French and from Socai Films in 1986), though no official U. S. release that I'm aware of. (Note: A number of bootleg outlets offer the English version but you may as well just save your money and watch it for free on Youtube).

★★1/2