Che wan (1983)

... aka: Accident, The
... aka: Blood of the Black Dog
... aka: Car Spirit
... aka: Che hun

Directed by:
Pao-Lun Lu

Man-Tik Chow (Eddie Chan), the rich asshole owner of a toy manufacturing company, could care less about anything other than the bottom line. One of his employees stays up all night working on a  new Rolls Royce car toy, but Man-Tik disapproves of the design and chucks it out the window of his high rise office. On the street below, 8-year-old Siu-Ching (Bo-Ming Ma) is walking home from school and is saved from the falling toy by chubby factory worker Fatty Cheng (Kent Cheng). Fatty accompanies the girl home only to find she's living in a shack in poverty. Siu-Ching's father had been killed in a car accident and her mother is deathly ill, suffers from terrible migraines and is always moaning for her “headache pills.” The widow is just barely managing to scrape by, so Fatty befriends them, becomes a fixture in the home, brings them food, gives them money and eventually agrees to become the girl's godfather in case something happens to the sickly mother.

After spending the evening at a nightclub drinking and watching nude strippers while entertaining an American client, Man-Tik, accompanied by his wife Ying (Chiu-hua Wei), his assistant Mr. Mak (Fong Chow) and factory manager Mr. Lam (Siao San-Yan), who was seen earlier chewing out a worker even after he crushes him hand in a machine, head back home on a dark and stormy night. Siu-Ching, in a hurry to get her mom some medicine, steps out in front of them and is mowed over... and on the night before her 9th birthday, no less. Since Man-Tik was driving drunk, he and the others decide to just take off and leave the dead girl behind on the side of the road. This will naturally end up coming back to haunt each of them when they're cursed and face the wrath of a vengeful ghost who won't stop until they're all dead.

Ying starts suffering from crazy hallucinations and nightmares, including having her eyeball gouged out with a straight razor. Rumors quickly spread around town that the Siu-Ching's ghost has been spotted walking around town at night still looking for medicine. Starting to get concerned, the four there on the night of her death then go to a temple to get a blessing and discover they've all been marked with a death omen. Both a dog and Man-Tik's car, which starts driving around town all by itself, become possessed. Handyman Chan (Gam Biu) is the first to die (via a bottle of booze turned into acid) because he helped to hide the crime by washing the blood off the car. And then Man-Tik's two underlings die; one after becoming locked in his office and burning to death after being pummeled by animated toys and the other by impalement after envisioning himself being attacked by a group of deranged surgeons who first cut the stomach out of a naked woman (!) Ying is eventually driven to seek spiritual help in an effort to save both herself and her husband.

The above takes up about an hour... and I wasn't impressed with it at all. While some of the individual scenes were enjoyably strange, the whole thing just wasn't holding together that well. The messy blending of trite “revenge-from-beyond-the-grave” plotting, annoyingly over-the-top melodrama, unlikable characters, misplaced comedy elements and a general lack of focus (Fatty is treated as the lead character and then almost completely forgotten) just wasn't doing it for me. But then something amazing happened in the final 20 minutes: It suddenly became awesome!

Old lady exorcist Sister Ling Sin (Fong Ping) and her young (and naked!) assistant finally show up in a last ditch effort to save Ying and Man-Tik and the film improves significantly from there. Since Man-Tik is slated to meet his end on the "Night of the Dog," Ling Sin immediately gets to work on various black magic spells to counteract the evil. She hangs a black dog upside down, slashes its throat, collects its blood in a bowl and then sends Ying to the mortuary to sprinkle the blood over Siu-Ching's corpse. While Ying is away, Sister Sin and her assistant manage to destroy the car and then have to face off against Man-Tik, who becomes possessed by the devil! There's a body painting sequence (complete with music clearly in reference to ROSEMARY'S BABY), huge fireballs, zombies, a nude woman having spell paper attached to her tits and vag blow up before being beaten up and then thrown through a window, a field of fiery crosses, blood being spit directly in a face and even a gory crucifixion. It's all pretty crazy and entertaining.

This is a very hard-to-come-by film that currently doesn't even have five votes on IMDb. It has never been officially released in America or any other country outside of Asia to my knowledge. What I viewed was an extremely substandard VHS rip. While it has burnt-in English subtitles, these are very difficult to read at times because they're often cut off and are white and often drowned out by glaring light. To make matters much worse, there's also a “Distributed by: Eternity” watermark in huge white letters that's on the screen much of the time and right on top of the subs! The movie was shot pretty colorfully (green lighting is used a LOT) but it's hard to appreciate any style with this crappy print. Still, Weird Asia fans are gonna want to check this out. The director also made the rare vampire movie Gui huo aka The Gate of Hell (1981).

★★1/2

Borrower, The (1991) [copyright 1989]

... aka: Alien Killer
... aka: Alienkiller
... aka: Borrower
... aka: Depredador galáctico (Galactic Predator)
... aka: Il cacciatore di teste (The Headhunter)
... aka: Mutación Asesina (Mutation Killer)

Directed by:
John McNaughton

With his stock on the rise due to the slow-building success of the brilliant Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), someone gave McNaughton 2 million bucks to make a second genre feature. Filmed primarily in 1988, The Borrower ended up sitting on a shelf for several years until Henry finally received a proper and well-publicized (albeit limited) theatrical release in 1990. The delay was likely caused by two favors: 1. It went through several studios, starting with Atlantic Releasing Corporation (who went under before The Borrower was finished) and then Cannon Films (who were having their own financial problems at the time and would close their doors permanently in 1994), and 2. So it could piggyback off of Henry's excellent reviews and publicity. Long story short, it didn't work. The Borrower failed to come anywhere near the critical or commercial success of the director's first masterwork. Instead, it quickly faded from view after its initial VHS and laserdisc releases. Even now, the film is hardly ever discussed. Most interviewers just skip right over it when questioning McNaughton as if it doesn't even exist. One may assume all of that means this is a bad or forgettable movie, but that turns out not to be the case at all. If anything, the film is underrated and deserves much better treatment than it has received over the years.

Things open aboard a spaceship where an insectoid alien criminal receives the worst punishment an alien can receive: being "genetically devolved" into a human (ha!) The alien (Robert Dryer) is then banished to Earth, where he'll be forced to live out the rest of his days in the company of us primitive Earth scum. Oh yeah, there's one other tiny little problem. Because the aliens haven't quite mastered the de-evolution technique, the alien's head will occasionally explode and he'll be forced to acquire new ones every now and then. The banished alien is then dropped off and his head promptly bursts. Thankfully a redneck poacher (Henry co-star Tom Towles) is around to become the first donor. Alien Towles manages to get a ride from a bimbo teenager ("Geri Betzler" / Zoe Trilling) after she runs him over and eventually finds himself wandering the streets of downtown Chicago, where he's befriended by a homeless man (Antonio Fargas). Things start to escalate from there. Rae Dawn Chong and Don Gordon play a pair of detectives trying to uncover why decapitated bodies and disembodied heads up heads keep turning up all over the city.

What separates this film from numerous others of its type (aside from a very unusual premise) is McNaughton's ability to find quirky humor pretty much everywhere in the grimy urban setting. The seedy, scuzzy downtown Chicago of Henry is pretty much the exact same Chicago seen in The Borrower. Druggies, thugs, hookers and homeless people lurk in the alleyways. People urinate right in the street and drop rats into someone's dinner at a soup kitchen, gang members shoot up diners and - in addition to the alien killer - there's a sadistic serial rapist (Neil Giuntoli) on the loose. Hell, there's even rampant degeneracy in places you may not expect, like at a hospital where a doctor (Tony Amendola) is so busy screwing a nurse he doesn't seem to care that people are literally dying all around him. Even paying attention to minor details in the background, you'll notice things like chemical plants spewing pollution and posters for child abuse. Everything is consciously laid out to illustrate that this can be one ugly world we all live in which, amusingly, pretty much just confirms that the alien's punishment was an apt one. While this could have easily ended up being depressing, it's not at all because there's humor, satire and / or social commentary around every turn. Instead of slapping together a routine sci-fi action buddy cop pursuit film, McNaughton is aiming for something a bit different here. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, you're zipped right along to something else before you even have time to dwell on the not-so-great bits.

The Borrower also offers up many odd, hilarious and memorable scenes. My favorite was when a couple are lying in bed watching The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (!!) while their son's amateur rock band ("I like the part about killing your parents.") are downstairs being attacked by the alien, who's been reduced to wearing a dog's head! And then there are other bizarre scenes that, quite frankly, I have no idea what exactly they were shooting for, but all the set pieces are entertaining regardless.

This film frequently receives two criticisms and both are valid. The first involves the special effects. While Kevin Yagher's gore makeups are really good, there's no explanation behind why the alien's body size and skin color changes with each head swap. The second criticism involves the ending. Well actually, this film doesn't really have an ending. It more kind of just stops and the credits roll. I'm not sure if they ran out of money or time, but concluding things on such an anticlimactic, rushed note leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Regardless, flaws and all, this is conceptually a lot more sophisticated and clever than numerous other ordinary horror and sci-fi films from the 80s and 90s that get a lot more undeserved love and attention than this one does.

Many familiar faces pop up, including Larry Pennell, Pamela Gordon, Bentley Mitchum (son of Robert), Tamara Clatterbuck, Mädchen Amick (in her film debut), Emmy-nominated TV writer / producer Pamela Norris and Henry co-star Tracy Arnold in a small role as a nurse. It had to be cut and submitted to the MPAA a number of times in order to get an R rating and was was nominated for Best Film and won for Best Special Effects at the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival. With the fairly well-known cast and the director's pedigree (he went on to several high-profile, big budget films), I'm not exactly sure why this isn't on DVD.

★★★