Spell, The (1977) (TV)

... aka: Control mental (Mental Control)
... aka: Den onda gåvan (The Evil Gift)
... aka: Kirous (Curse)

Directed by:
Lee Philips

CARRIE was not only a huge box office success in its day, helping to skyrocket the careers of star Sissy Spacek (who received a rare Oscar nomination for starring in a horror film), director Brian De Palma and novelist Stephen King in the process, but now stands as one of the most beloved horror movies of the entire decade. To date, there has been an official sequel (the somewhat underrated The Rage: Carrie 2) in 1999, a schizo and overlong TV movie version in 2002, a pointless 2013 big screen remake, an ill-fated Broadway stage musical, many non-musical stage versions and endless parodies. And then there were the numerous inferior films that either blatantly ripped it off or were clearly strongly inspired by it. That's where The Spell fits in. Carrie was released in November 1976 and was still playing in theaters when this NBC TV movie was released in February 1977.

The Spell begins exactly as Carrie began, in a high school gymnasium, as the only slightly chubby 15-year-old Rita Matchett (Susan Myers) is being teased and tormented by her classmates. They say things like "I heard she was really slim until she started eating everything in sight!," make the observation she wears big dresses and sweatsuits "to hide all that lard" and call her "tubbo" and "Moby Dick." However, where Carrie was so shy and introverted she endured much of her abuse in silence (well, until the end, at least!), Rita has a lot more fight in her right out of the gate. She warns blonde ringleader Jackie (Doney Oatman) to stop. When she doesn't, there's a tragic "accident" where Jackie falls off a rope and dies after breaking her neck. Isn't that convenient? Strangely, gym teacher Jo Standish (Lelia Goldoni) seems curiously unconcerned about the death.

Rita also has a miserable home life just like Carrie, though in an entirely different way. While Carrie came from a poor home and was the only daughter of a religious fanatic single mom, Rita lives in a San Francisco mansion with her well-to-do parents Marian (Lee Grant) and Glenn (James Olson) and younger, skinnier sister Kristina (Helen Hunt). The abuse here isn't near the level of physical and psychological torment Carrie endured at home either, but a mix of neglect, preferential treatment of one sibling over the other and cruel, more subtle comments made under the guise of "helping" the suffering child.

Glenn always seems to be out of town on business but whenever he is home, he's amazingly insensitive to his eldest daughter and makes constant comments about her weight gain. Daddy's favorite Kristina, who can do no wrong in Glenn's eyes, is possibly even worse when she gets mad, really knows where to hit Rita where it hurts and is embarrassed to be seen with her at school. With Rita making no bones about hating both her dad and younger sister ("She's a simpering little toad!"), Marian tries desperately to get through to her daughter while encouraging Glenn and Kristina to be a little more patient and sensitive. That tactic fails miserably as Glenn continues being cold and Kristina starts spying on and ratting out her big sis.

Naturally, there's something more going on than just an ostracized and ridiculed teen acting out. Instead of being blessed with natural telekinesis, Rita has been drawn over to the dark arts of witchcraft and spellcasting by Miss Standish. Her behavior worsens, she starts lying, sneaking out late at night dressed in a red cloak and seems to be stealing dad's sports car to go somewhere. More people soon start dying (or almost dying) in ways that can usually be written off as either accidents or natural deaths.

Glenn is temporarily entranced and wanders out into the street, where his inebriated lawyer friend Stan Reston (James Greene) tries to run him over. However, Stan remembers nothing about the event, only that he blacked out. And then Marian goes to visit her friend Kathleen, only for Kathleen to suddenly turn lobster red, start smoking and then burn to death before her very eyes in the front yard after crashing through a window. Kathleen's husband Rian (Wright King), who went into shock witnessing the event, dies soon after from a heart attack. After Kristina is pulled under and almost drowned during a swim meet, Marian starts popping Valium and is forced to seek advice from parapsychologist Dale Boyce (Jack Colvin).

Scripted by Brian Taggert, this is brought down by lack of originality, minimal plot complication, several pointless dead end subplots and TV movie limitations but mostly doomed by amazingly unlikable characters. Olson is in contention for "The Worst Film Father of 1977" award for playing a jerk who insults his daughter, refuses to try to bond with her and then plots to ship her off to some boarding school in England because he's too selfish to invest any time into her and too much of a stubborn jackass to even throw out an occasional kind gesture. Hunt's character is basically just a one-dimensional spoiled girl while our should-be-sympathetic outcast teen Rita proves to be little more than a big brat herself by the finale. More of the central focus is actually put on the mother character and her quest to help her daughter, something that's seriously undercut by a silly finale that makes little sense seeing how oblivious Marian acts throughout the entire film. Myers and Grant both deliver good performances under the circumstances. One just wishes they were in service of a better overall film.

Veteran actress Kathleen Hughes (IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE) is briefly seen during a “Save the Otter” (?) charity event. Director Philips began his career as an actor and was seen mostly on TV, though he did have a starring role in the proto slasher Psychomania aka Violent Midnight in 1963. His only other genre film credit was directing the ROSEMARY'S BABY-inspired The Stranger Within (1974) starring Barbara Eden. There were VHS releases in the U.S. (most notably on the WorldVision label) as well as Swedish, Finnish and Spanish video releases. In 2017, Shout Factory once again unearthed this for a Blu-ray and DVD release. That release comes with a brief interview with Taggert.

★1/2

Shi xiong zhuang gui (1990)

... aka: 師兄撞鬼
... aka: 귀경출사
... aka: Ghost Police
... aka: Look! Love! Pump!
... aka: Look Out, Officer!
... aka: Shaolin Idiot, The
... aka: Si hing jong gwai
... aka: Sư Huynh Trúng Tà 1990 (Wicked Brother Huynh 1990)

Directed by:
Sze Yu Lau

Officers Cheung Biu (Bill Tung), a gambling addict who's taken on massive debt betting on horse races, and Kam Li (Stanley Fung), a womanizer / pervert who dabbles in magic mostly to try to get laid, receive a call to check out a warehouse. Kam Li ends up leaving early and rushing home to be with his girlfriend while Cheung Biu sticks around long enough to discover a drug syndicate in operation. Instead of calling for back-up, he decides to take them on all by himself, which ends with him getting shot in the head and then thrown out a window. Due to owing a lot of high-interest debt, his murder is written off as a suicide in the papers. Cheung Biu ends up in the afterlife where he goes on trial. He pays off the judge (Ching-Ho Law) so he can return to Earth to solve his own murder and is given a little information beforehand. His "saviour" will have a six dotted plum blossom birthmark somewhere on their body, while a more elaborate image will spell his doom. The judge then gives him a satchel filled with spells and charms he may find useful and sends him on his way.

Cheung Biu's ghost arrives at a "Police Training School" where he meets recent graduate Sing (Stephen Chow) aka Officer 1997, who has the six dots on his ass; something he discovers while a horny male doctor attempts to violate him with his billy club (?!) during a physical. Coincidentally, Cheung Biu's former partner Kam Li is also Sing's new boss on the force. The young officer's first assignment involves posing as a customer at a massage parlor where two female undercover officers are already stationed. When they're exposed and about to get shot, Cheung Biu intervenes and makes the owner's gun flexible so he can bend the barrel and shoot all of his thugs instead.

Sing is given the slain officer's former apartment and the ghost soon makes himself known. Cheung Biu strikes up a deal with him. If he'll help avenge his death, he'll return the favor by helping him excel at his job and get the girl of his dreams. The latter happens to be Kam Li's beautiful daughter Ah Yuk (Vivian Chen), who's a model and commercial actress who's also fancied by scar-faced crime king Lee Yang Tang (Sunny Fang), who's also the same guy who killed Cheung Biu. How's that for some convenient plotting? Sing somehow manages to charm Ah Yuk after he comes to her rescue when Tang and his thugs get pushy with her. Of course, Kam Li doesn't like that one bit and does everything he can to get in between the two, even seeking help from his spiritual "Grandmaster," who gives him other powers like stretchy arms he uses to try to grope women with.

Among the ghost cop's magic bag is a "lewdness spell" that makes the target fall in love-lust with the spellcaster. It's first used to make busty chief inspector Amy Yip tear open her blouse and later backfires when Sing accidentally uses it on his self and then tries to seduce his future father-in-law. The bad guys turn out to be involved in a "black sect" and are in cahoots with an evil sorcerer / demon. The sorcerer gives Tang a magical ward (the same "doom" symbol Cheung Biu was shown in heaven) that helps him repel the good ghost's magic. Cheung Biu in eventually captured in a "coffin trap," which will dissipate his spirit is he stays there long enough, forcing our heroes to go concoct a special potion out of cat stool, virgin's urine and a "fairy fart." Don't ask.

This thing's loaded with puerile, crude and mostly unfunny gross-out gags that include falling face first into cat shit, stained underwear, piss, nudie magazines, smelling armpits, body odor, Epsom salt-generated diarrhea, piss, glass-shattering and goldfish-killing power farts, erections (a visual play on "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"), someone getting flushed down a toilet and piss. Did I mention piss? Yes, this has an almost fetishistic amount of it for some strange reason. Not helping matters any is the amount of racism and homophobia on display. None of the female characters have any personality whatsoever and are used solely as props and punchlines, there are tons of lame gay jokes and the inclusion of Vietnamese characters in tiny roles as criminal hookers and a suicide case threatening to jump off a building (who's then chastised as a government moocher and told to just jump by our "hero"!) is mean-spirited and diminishes the film's attempts to be lighthearted and charming.

On the plus side, production values are pretty solid, Chow and Tung are good and the climactic action scene with the sorcerer, which features lots of wire work, magic fx and fireballs, is fairly well done. However, there's nothing there fans of HK genre cinema haven't seen already and seen done better and it's capped off with a shoot-killer's-crotch-through-woman-hostage's-dress demise clearly stolen from Robocop.

The multi-talented Chow started out his show biz career as host of the TVB children's show 430 Space Shuttle before embarking on a critically acclaimed acting, writing and filmmaking career; usually in action / comedy films. He has won all kinds of awards for such hits as The God of Cookery (1996), Shaolin Soccer (2001), which became the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, and Kung Fu Hustle (2004), which managed to top Soccer's gross and held the record for highest-grossing HK movie until 2011. Many of his films have also had crossover success here in the U.S. The director made a number of other ghost comedies, including Ghost Busting (1989), Ghost Fever (1989) and My Neighours Are Phantoms! (1990).

A Shaw Brothers co-production, this was a minor box office hit and made 12 million in its home country. It's also one of the better-distributed HK genre titles from this time and is easy to find on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, clearly due to the presence of its star.

★★