Mo jie (1982)

... aka: Hell Has No Boundary

Directed by:
Yang Chuan (Richard Yeung Kuen)

Cute young policewoman Wong Lai Fun (Leanne Lau Suet-Wah), or just May for short, is having a birthday. To celebrate, her boyfriend Cheung (Derek Yee Tung-Sing) takes her out to a small, uninhabited island to camp out. She hears a disembodied echo voice calling out her name, seems to know where things are even though she's never been there before and is startled out of her sleep that night by visions of some ugly green-faced ghoul. Upon leaving the tent to investigate, she's startled by a green flashing lights that chase after her, throw her to the ground and then knock her out. When she comes to, she's not quite the same girl she used to be. The following morning, when Cheung gives a few kids who stumble upon their camp sodas (I think Coke and Sprite must have co-sponsored this thing considering the amount of times the cans appear onscreen), May attacks one of them with a fork (!) and attempts to drown him in the ocean. After being shaken out of her trance, she can't remember anything she's just done. She does however finally master a Rubik's Cube in record time on the drive back home.

May returns to work at the Criminal Investigation Department, where her boss Inspector Wong (Hua Yueh) is up in arms about a serial rapist / killer on the loose in the city who's already claimed four victims. Conveniently, they get a call that the psycho is holding a woman and her kids hostage in a slum apartment building and then rush to the scene. There, May manages to shoot the killer but it requires her bullet to make a 90 degree turn to hit him. Reporter / photographer Koo (Ken Tong) from the Tin Tin Daily News catches sight of her miraculous shot from the balcony, becomes convinced she has “super powers” and starts to investigate her. Back at work, May's reckless behavior gets her in hot water with her superiors (who were about the promote her) and the sex maniac case is handed over to her colleagues Lady Killer (Chui Gai-Heung) and Dumb Sis (Si Ming). The two ladies don't have too much time to celebrate though when they're both killed in a bizarre accident falling down a shaft after the elevator floor falls out.

Whatever has possessed May has given her something of a “death glare” in that anyone who rubs her wrong ends up dead afterward. A visit to see blind priest Ban Xian (Wong Ching-Ho), who specializes in telling fortunes by feeling bones, ends with his pet bird dead, his vision restored, his face erupting in boils and him falling down the stairs to his death. When Inspector Wong tries to deny her promotion, she traps him a room with a rabid dog and a cobra, but he manages to survive. Now marked with an omen (an ever-growing black mark on his back), Wong's “seventh sister” Madam Chi (Teresa Ha Ping) attempts an exorcism. May regains her powers by drinking her own vomit out of a toilet (!) and then throws a match at Madam Chi that turns into a knife mid-air and sticks into her throat. After altering papers to get her promotion, May then decides to get back at horny police chief Peter Ho (Lo Yuen). She accompanies him to dinner and the disco then invites back to her apartment where he's castrated by a crab (!!) in the bathtub and wrapped up mummy-style with toilet paper.

Madam Chi's ghost returns to warn Cheung and to explain while all of this is going on. It involves a vengeful ghost who opts for revenge over reincarnation because she suffered a horrible death in a past life. That horrible death (shown in a flashback) occurred during the war with Japan where her impoverish mother sold her to a psycho who gets off smothering kids with pillows and then ripping out their guts (!) After her body was dumped in a field, another guy stumbled across it, dismembered it with a cleaver and then sold it as “fresh goat meat” to unsuspecting guests to his restaurant. Madam Chi gives Cheung a “Pluto Stick” that's used to subjugate evil spirits and then sends him on his way. He, the reporter and the inspector then all get into crazy confrontations with the evil spirit.

There's spiked fireballs, cannibal stew with a chopped off nose and eyeballs, a decapitation, blood drinking, maggot eating, doppelgangers, surreal hallucinations, a suicide, a guy taken out of commission by a toppled air conditioner, a blood drenched car, lots of erupting fire, a real snake and chicken killed, a fist fight, a nude nurse strangled to death in the shower, a human torch, hazy soft focus shots, spell papers, exorcisms, blue, red and (especially) green lighting everywhere and much, much more in this typically busy, fast-paced and colorful Shaw Brothers production. Unfortunately, it's also a bit much to take in and the director (who made the much more popular Seeding of a Ghost the following year) doesn't know when to quit. The amount of times this builds to a climax only to keep on going becomes tiresome by the time the last scene finally does arrive.

One thing that's perhaps most interesting of all is that a very popular later movie ripped off one aspect of this and hasn't been called on it. As it turns out, Shutter (2004) did not actually invent the ghost-riding-on-shoulders-captured-by-a-photograph bit because it was done here 20+ years earlier. The DVD from Celestial Pictures offers English subtitles.

★★1/2

Tentacoli (1977)

... aka: Der Polyp - Die Bestie mit den Todesarmen (The Polyp – The Beast with Death Arms)
... aka: Dödens tentakler (Death Tentacles)
... aka: Kæmpeblæksprutten (Giant Octopus)
... aka: Tentacles

Directed by:
"Oliver Hellman" (Ovidio G. Assonitis)

In the small coastal town of Solana Beach, California, the annual junior "yacht race" (actually a sailboat race) is just days away when something (read: a giant octopus) starts gobbling up the locals left and right. First on the menu is 10-month-old Baby Billy, who probably didn't stand much of a chance anyway considering his dumb-as-dishwater mother leaves him sitting alone by the water in a stroller while she runs off to gossip with a friend. Next up, a peg-legged fisherman disappears and his mangled corpse later turns up to stop an obese teenage girl from raping her disinterested date on a dock. (I'm not joking.) And then two divers go down to check out the status of some underwater cables and don't come back. They and other corpses are quickly filling up the morgue and all are stripped down to the bone and with all the marrow sucked out. Sheriff Rolands (Claude Akins) is at a loss what to do but he's apparently never seen a monster movie before. One should always check to see what kind of unethical corporation is in the area and what they're up to first and then go from there. In this case, it's a company drilling through the ocean floor with experimental new equipment as they attempt to build an underground tunnel.

The only thing that really separates this poorly-made, by-the-numbers and rather dull killer animal flick from others of its type is its surprisingly upscale cast. John Huston (two-time Oscar winner for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) receives top billing playing former “big city journalist” Ned Turner, who's recently retired to the small, quiet community to work at the local paper and live with his sister, Tillie. Though Huston is rightfully better known as a filmmaker he also wasn't a bad actor, which he proves here by managing to get through the proceeding without embarrassing himself. The same cannot be said for most of his co-stars. His sister Tillie is played by another two-time Oscar winner - Shelley Winters - and while she does kind of embarrass herself (the ten gallon sombrero doesn't help matters) it's in that great Shelley Winters kinda way. She deserves some credit for at least bringing some kind of energy / entertainment value here as she camps it up as an over-the-hill barfly and nagging, overbearing single mom who starts each morning with a Bloody Mary and spends every evening trying to pick up a random stud from the local bar... Or so we hear, we never actually get to see that last part, unfortunately.

The other big name this picture was sold on the back of was Henry Fonda. It's hard to imagine watching Fonda here (he's awful!) that he'd go on to win his own pair of Oscars a few years down the line, but that's exactly what happened. His character, Mr. Whitehead, is the president of Trojan Tunnels Inc.; the company responsible for unleashing the giant octopus in the first place by using high radio frequencies “well beyond the legal limit.” Fonda has minimal screen time in this one because he was still in the process of recovering from a major heart surgery. Supposedly his three brief scenes were all filmed in a single day, which probably explains why they let a flubbed line slide through. Fonda also isn't really the main bad guy as he's oblivious to what's going on with his own company while his second-in-command, John Corey (Cesare Danova) is overseeing the entire project. Danova comes off even worse than Fonda here thanks to being the lucky recipient of a horribly wooden over-dub.

After several corpses are found, Huston's character runs off and recruits Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins), the best “marine expert” in the area. Will's clingy wife Vicky (Delia Boccardo) unsuccessfully tries to talk him out of getting involved but then expresses no opposition to her own sister Judy (Sherry Buchanan) going into dangerous waters on a snorkeling pleasure cruise with two of her male friends, including rotund Italian comedian Franco Diogene. When Judy doesn't come back, Vicky charters a ship (late at night, of course) to look for her and is killed along with the crew when the octopus crashes into and sinks their ship. After the carnivorous calamari turns a children's boat race into an all-you-can-eat buffet, Will and his colleague Mike (Alan Boyd) take two killer whales out to some caves where the monster lurks in hopes of killing it.

Mostly awful acting, terrible dialogue, a bland / entirely rehashed sub-Jaws plot, not nearly enough octopus action, poorly-directed and suspense-free attack scenes and no notable special effects to speak of sink this lame creature feature pretty quickly. The only things bringing it to occasional life are some interesting directorial flourishes, including a long unbroken crane shot that's surprisingly well executed, plus some decent underwater photography. The poorly-edited attack sequence on the kids, which features an astoundingly awkward use of freeze frames, is also memorable... though I'm not sure for the right reasons. Stelvio Cipriani contributed a bizarre score to the proceedings (which was released as a soundtrack album) and the big finale, consisting of two plastic whale dolls ripping apart a (real) dead octopus while our heroes float around and watch, is one of the least exciting endings I've ever seen to one of these films.

I beg to differ!

I bet they made a ton off of this stupid thing! Usually when I'm looking for posters for a particular film I'll find three or four different ones. For this one, I found posters from fifteen different countries and I didn't have to look hard to find them. Most places just used a derivation of the original title Tentacoli, though a few European countries said fuck it and just called it what it really is: Giant Octopus. Someone has submitted some seriously conflicting information for this one over on IMDb so I'd take what they say with a grain of salt. In the budget section for the film, they claim this cost 750 thousand and 5 million dollars (!?) to make. How a film can have two different budgets is beyond me. The trivia section adds: “The production spent nearly $1 million on a life-sized replica of a giant octopus which promptly sank when they put it in the water.” For starters, there is no way in hell this clearly low budget film with barely any real fx spent a million on an octopus model. Second, if they spent a million on a giant octopus the budget certainly couldn't have been 750K. The five million figure doesn't ring true either considering the same year's much more polished and clearly much higher budgeted (yet still kind of crappy) ORCA cost 6 million to make. So either the 750K is true but the part about the octopus model is a lie or the film cost 5 million and 4 million disappeared into the director's bank account.

The PG-rated Tentacles was released theatrically here in the U.S. by AIP and went on to gross three million dollars in America alone. After debuting on NBC TV in 1979, it became a staple late night filler movie on cable throughout the 80s and 90s. It was then well-circulated on VHS by companies like Vestron and Orion. All of the above prints of the film were cut by about 10 minutes but it was almost entirely dialogue scenes that were removed. The first full, uncut and still PG-rated version made its DVD debut courtesy of MGM's Midnite Movies line in 2005, where it was double billed with EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977). Finally (one can hope!), there's a Blu-ray / DVD combo from Shout! / Scream Factory, who've paired it with the Danish monster movie Reptilicus (1961). This is truly one of those titles that you couldn't avoid even if you tried to but probably wish you had after sitting through it.

★1/2