Yuan Zhen-Xia yu Wei Si-Li (1986)

... aka: 原振俠與衛斯理
... aka: Dr. Yuen and Wisely
... aka: Jyun zan haap jyu wai si lei
... aka: La 7ème malédiction
... aka: Seventh Curse, The

Directed by:
Ngai Choi Lam

Some bad guys have seized control of a warehouse and taken hostages. After a shoot-out with the police, one of the baddies is injured and they demand a doctor be sent or else they'll start offing the hostages. The police captain (Yasuaki Kurata) brings in Dr. Yuan Chen (Siu-Ho Chin), a well-traveled adventurer known for his smarts and his bravery, to try to deescalate the situation. He's able to do just that and police are able to get a handle on the situation. Not helping matters any is obnoxious Western Daily reporter Tsai-Hung Tung (Maggie Cheung), who goes so far as to knock out a policewoman and pose as Yuan's nurse to gain access to the building after police refuse to give her information. She almost gets them killed in the process. Tsai-Hung wants to do an exclusive article on Dr. Yuan, complete with nude photos (!) and follows him to a party, follows him in her car and basically makes a nuisance of herself.

After shaking Tsai-Hung, Dr. Yuan returns to his pad only to find a naked woman waiting there for him. Such is the life of a debonair playboy. But another man soon shows up to ruin all his fun. After the two get into a fight and break nearly half of Yuan's furniture in the process, the guy, Heh Lung (Dick Wei), informs our hero that he has unfinished business left to attend to. He mentions a blood spell, a ghost spell and tells him he has three days to meet him in Thailand or else. He also tells Yuan to steer clear of sex or else he'll relapse. We soon find out just what that means when Yuan tries and fails to have sex with his female friend, which results in a painful complication.

Yuan goes to visit his best friend and mentor Wei (Chow Yun-Fat - who's not the star despite prominent billing) and relates a long flashback to a previous trip he'd made to Thailand a year earlier. While accompanying a medical team searching for herbs to treat AIDS, Yuan met a lovely girl named Betsy (Sau-Lai Tsui). Unfortunately, Betsy belonged to the witchcraft-practicing "worm tribe" called the Yunnan. The Yunnan have been taken over by an evil sorcerer named Aquala (Elvis Tsui), who periodically conducts human sacrifices and has a little, flesh-burying, snake-tailed pet Muppet he uses to kill off any dissenter. Since Betsy had rejected his romantic advances, Aquala decided it was time to leave her as an offering to an old skeletal ancestor, who wakes up long enough to feast on blood and sometimes turns into a big, drooling monster.

Overhearing their plans, Yuan broke into the tomb, fought the ancestor off, rescued Betsy and made it back to camp. But the torch-carrying tribe followed and there was so much chaos that Yuan lost track of Betsy. Everyone ended up getting slaughtered aside from Yuan and an old professor (Ken Boyle), who instead found themselves tied up in the tomb. As punishment, Aquala covered the Professor with some goo that made his body explode with maggots and inflicted Yuan with a different curse that makes his veins start to explode. Yuan managed to untie himself and run off into the jungle, where Betsy found him, extracted a "charm" from her breast and fed it to him. But there's a catch: The charm only works for one year.

With that year now up, Yuan finds himself yet again having random blood ruptures. They occur once every 24 hours and, as per the curse, the seventh vessel to pop is going to be the heart. Wei sends him to Thailand and tells him he'll meet him there soon. When he arrives, that awful budding reporter Tsai-Hung is there waiting for him. She turns out to be Wei's spoiled cousin and the daughter of a rich tycoon with an unlimited gold card so she can basically do as she pleases. Tsai-Hung, Yuan and Heh Lung, later also joined by Wei and his assistant Su (Sibelle Hu), then team up to both try to reverse Yuan's curse and put a stop to Aquala, whose latest scheme involves kidnapping a hundred children from a neighboring farming village and feeding them through a stone trash compactor to crush their bodies to a pulp so he has enough blood for a certain spell!

If you're looking for over-the-top and nearly non-stop gore, brainless action, stunts, martial arts, monsters and a surprise around every corner, you probably won't do much better than this. There's a possession, a play on the famous Indiana Jones boulder scene, people getting yanked all over the place with wires as they're kicked, shot, hacked, blown up with grenades, shot with arrows and smashed with a jeep, sword fighting, a head ripped off, a boiling blood bath, nudity, witchcraft, booby traps, spells requiring black dog blood and pregnant cow placenta, a face ripped off, a head stomped in, a full-body explosion caused by a rocket launcher, an Alien-inspired monster and a gigantic statue with a swastika on its forehead protected by spikes and kung fu fighting Buddhist monk ghosts. It's like they literally jammed everything they could possibly think of into this one film... and it's all pretty glorious to see!

This Paragon / Golden Harvest production was based on a popular series of Dr. Yuen adventure / fantasy novels by Ni Kuang, but also brought in the Wei character from another sci-fi series titled Wisely by the same author. The Wisely / Wei / Wesley character turned up in numerous other Hong Kong films and was the central character of a Singapore TV series. Ni also appears here briefly in the cute opening sequence as Dr. Yi, who's surrounded by Miss Asia beauty queens and asks our heroes to recount their story. There are a lot of cameos, including Kara Hui as a policewoman and Jing Wong and Yuen Chor during a pool party scene.

The director (aka Nai-Choi Lam or Simon Lam) started out as a cinematographer for Shaw Brothers before branching out to direct. I've only seen three of his films thus far - the other two being Her Vengeance (1988) and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1992) - and they're all really good.

Seventh Curse was very well-distributed internationally as far as HK films go and I found official home video releases for the UK, France, the US (through Tai Seng), Thailand, Japan, Germany and other countries. Depending on which of the versions you watch, you could get a different ending (there are apparently three).

★★★

This House Possessed (1981) (TV)

... aka: American Gothic
... aka: Das Haus der tausend Augen (The House of a Thousand Eyes)
... aka: Devil's House: Wenn Mauern töten (Devil's House: If Walls Kill)

Directed by:
William Wiard

Fresh off his success in The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew Mysteries TV series, a then 28-year-old Parker Stevenson formed his own production company (Parker Stevenson Productions Inc.) and made a two-picture deal with ABC TV. Part of the agreement was that he'd star in one of their films in exchange for him getting to produce the other through his company. This was the first of those and I assume the second was the 1983 action / comedy Shooting Stars, which stars the actor and was also made for ABC TV. However, I can find no evidence that Stevenson's company produced that film. In fact, I have no clue what Stevenson's company ever produced, if anything. I found a California registry for the company that states it was active from 1983 until 2010 when it was dissolved but that and a few newspaper articles are all the evidence I have that the company ever even existed. The company isn't listed anywhere in the credits of this film, and Stevenson isn't credited as the producer (writer David Levinson is).

Looking for a place to mess around, teenagers Donny (John Dukakis) and Holly ("Mandy" [Amanda] Wyss, just a few years before becoming Freddy's very first victim in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) hop a fence and go to an abandoned mansion. They're watched by security cameras and the haunted house itself seems to retaliate by sending a snake-like water hose through the grass to spray the trespassers with hot water until they run off. Elsewhere, popular "rock singer" Gary Straihorn (Stevenson) performs a few songs in a smoky nightclub and is being watched by a TV in the evil home. What's even stranger is that this isn't a televised performance and there are no cameras in the club, yet the performance is still showing up on the monitors there, as do several later events in Gary's life.

While singing the disco-ish "Sensitive You're Not" in a silk shirt unbuttoned all the way down to his waistline, Gary suddenly passes out and is taken to the hospital where a doctor (David Paymer) drills his agent, Arthur Keene (Slim Pickens), about his client's extracurricular activities. Arthur insists Gary lives a clean lifestyle and is drug and alcohol free. The diagnosis? Total physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. In other words, he's working too hard. The doctor recommends a long vacation to recuperate.

While at the hospital, Gary meets compassionate young nurse Sheila Moore (Lisa Eilbacher), who waits by his bedside until he falls asleep after a nightmare, gives him back massages (!) and keeps him company. She also apparently enjoys making significantly less money than she could as she "used to be a physical therapist before I got into nursing." Seeing how PT school takes around 7 years to complete, the 24-year-old Eilbacher would have had to have started college at age 17 and not even had a chance to really work as a physical therapist before "switching" to nursing. But I'll let that one slide.

The important thing is there's a mutual attraction between the two, even though Gary is sort-of seeing pill-popping model Tanya (Shelley Smith) and Sheila is sort-of seeing some jerk who refuses to marry her. Sheila promptly tells her boyfriend she's done with him before agreeing to take on a two week assignment being Gary's live-in nurse / masseuse. She says, "I could use the money." I say, "You'd make way more working as a physical therapist than a nurse, ya dummy." Gary and Sheila promptly hop in a car and hit the road with no real destination in sight. The small town of Rancho Santa Fe seems like a nice enough place, so Gary goes to a real estate agent (Jan Shutan) to set him up with a rental. You'll never guess what home they end up at!

The haunted mansion has an air filtration system so you don't even have to dust and other provisions so cleaning is seldom necessary, windows made of unbreakable glass, a heated indoor swimming pool, security monitoring in every room as well as outside, automatic outside lights and sprinklers and other luxuries. Everything is (supposedly) powered by solar energy. The only real catch is that little is known about who actually built the house and why someone would build a beautiful mansion out in the middle of nowhere and then seemingly abandon it. Nevertheless, Gary likes the place so much he tells the realtor he doesn't want to rent it. He wants to buy it.

Hoping for some peace and quiet, Gary starts working on new music for an upcoming European tour. However, he's frequently struck down by sudden terrible headaches. Sheila, who can't remember the first seven years of her life and doesn't know who her real parents are, hears someone calling for a woman named Margaret late at night. During trips to town, she keeps running into a local eccentric known only as "The Rag Lady" (Joan Bennett) who insists Sheila's real name is Margaret and keeps spouting things like "You shouldn't have come!" and "You mustn't stay here!" as she pushes around a shopping cart full of garbage. Just how is Sheila connected to the house? And what does the house, which seemingly has a mind of its own, want?

With this TV movie you basically get a mild mystery with Omen-style death scenes and just as much, if not more, time dedicated to the blooming love between the two main characters. With the house essentially having a life of its own and controlling everything inside, plus all of the cameras, monitoring and surveillance, this probably seemed a lot more high tech back in 1981 than it does now. It's also pretty obvious the writer took quite a bit of inspiration from DEMON SEED (1977). Still, this is at least passable and features pretty good performances, decent chemistry between the leads and a few fun horror scenes. A woman is caught in a blood shower (a very bloody blood shower!) and there's also death by shards of glass from an exploding mirror, a car blowing up after being crushed in the gate and someone getting boiled alive when the house cranks up the heat in the pool.

 

This was shot under the title American Gothic and filmed in San Diego over a three week period at a 25 million dollar mansion sitting on 200+ acres of land. Former teen heartthrob Stevenson gets to poke fun at Donny and Marie Osmond's music (he was a guest star on their TV show in 1978) and then perform three cheesy songs of his own. The cast also includes K Callan as a librarian, Barry Corbin (in just one brief scene) as an asshole policeman and Phillip Baker Hall (in an even smaller part) as a clerk.

Among the rarer genre TV movies of the decade, this was never officially released on home video here in America nor, it appears, most other countries. The one exception may be Germany. The film is listed on numerous German databases under the titles Das Haus der tausend Augen ("The House of a Thousand Eyes") and Devil's House: Wenn Mauern töten ("Devil's House: If Walls Kill), which also claim this was released on VHS on the EuroVideo Medien label in 1988. However, I've been unable to find a video box scan from that particular release to verify it. It's now made it onto the bootleg circuit (and onto Youtube) thanks to a rare airing on Turner South Network back in November 2004 at 1am. It was given the TV-14 rating.

★★1/2