"The Boxer's Omen": the definition of batshit crazy or how I learned the secret badass nature of Buddhist monks

Mo aka The Boxer's Omen (1983) is the penultimate film from director Kuei Chih-Hung, perhaps the boldest filmmaker to work in Hong Kong at the time, and this film is nothing if not bold.  It belongs to the Chinese Black Magic genre, which had it's hey day in the 1970s and 80s, a genre I was totally ignorant of until watching this, but undoubtedly one I plan to explore in the future.

We open on a kickboxing match between a Hong Kong fighter and a Thai fighter (played by Bolo Yeung, who you may recognize as the villian from the Jean-Claude Van Damme films Bloodsport (1988) and Double Impact (1991)).  The Hong Kong fighter wins the match, but before they can officially announce the winner, the Thai fighter blindsides him and since there's no rules in kickboxing apparently, the Thai fighter wins the championship.  How's that for sportsmanship?  The Hong Kong fighter is left crippled and his gangster brother, Chan Hung (Phillip Ko) vows revenge.

In the following scene, Chan goes to meet some gangland buddies of his for a deal of some sort, but it's an ambush and he finds himself on the wrong end of a beating.  Then suddenly everything goes dark and a strange spirit appears dispatching the thugs and saving Chan.  Not knowing what to make of this, Chan hauls ass out of there and goes back to his apartment.  Leading us to an odd sex scene where he rails his topless girlfriend up against a window, but hey boobs are boobs, who's complaining?  Not me.  Anyways, afterwards Chan wakes in the middle of the night and that spirit from earlier returns, showing him visions of a temple.  He takes this as a sign that he should embark for Thailand to kick the shit out of Bolo Yeung.

In Thailand, Bolo Yeung that Thai prick enjoys a hero's welcome, flashing his championship belt in front of a crowd like he's Muhammad Ali.  Chan crashes the party and challenges him to a fight, the Thai fighter accepts of course, and it's on.  They don't fight right there, that would be too dangerous.  No, they're going to settle the score at a later date, in a sanctioned kickboxing match, which we've seen is tantamount to a street fight.  Good idea, guys.  So far, this seems like your run of the mill kickboxing revenge flick, right?  Wrong, here's where things take a turn for the weird.  As Chan rides a boat upriver he passes a Buddhist temple, recognizing it from his vision he goes inside to check it out.  Much to his surprise the monks there say they've been expecting him, turns out Chan is the spiritual twin of a great monk who was on the verge of reaching immortality, before a black sorcerer poisoned him.  The great monk will die soon, along with Chan, that's what happens when you're spiritually connected according to the monks.  Unless, Chan trains with the monks, learning their badass ways, and kicks that black sorcerer's ass.  Then maybe he can save the great monk and himself.  He sets out to do exactly that, in a classic training montage of the monk variety.

Now I'll dispense with the plot and talk about all the crazy shit going on in this movie, because it is full of crazy shit.  The black sorcerer uses all kinds of creepy crawlies to do his bidding, at one point cutting himself to bleed on a bat skeleton and resurrect it, regurgitating his lunch in order to create other creatures, and raiding a room full of skulls in jars, with brains still intact.  There's also that scene when Ko gagged in the bathroom till he vomited a live eel.  Read that last sentence again.  Another scene features an orgy of regurgitation like nothing I've ever seen before.  Three of the black sorcerer's disciples perform a sickening ritual to reanimate a dark sorceress.  They stick a corpse in the belly of a giant alligator, cut themselves and bleed on it, then chew up various foods, throwing them back up and passing them onto the next guy for him to eat and spit back up, then retching this mush on the corpse, leaving it to marinate for a while, before it ripens and the dark sorceress regenerates.  Need I say more?

If you're looking to take the road less traveled by, look no further.   Mixing horror, kung fu, and some gratuitous sex, The Boxer's Omen exists on some plain beyond good and bad.

My Rating:
So good it's bad, so bad it's interesting, so crazy you've got to see it.

Notes on the filmmaker:

Kuei Chih-Hung

Kuei Chih-Hung (1937-1999) was a Chinese writer and director who worked his way up through the ranks of Shaw Brothers Studios, well known for their kung fu films, though they dabbled in many different genres.  Kuei had such a passion for filmmaking that as kid he made films with discarded film stock and built his own projector out of a shoe box.  After studying filmmaking and stage production at university, he worked as an assistant director for several years before getting the chance to helm his first feature film in 1970.  The studio was pleased with the result and his career was off and running.  Kuei was one of the first filmmakers in China to shoot on location, capturing the gritty realities of Hong Kong's underclass, unheard in the Chinese film industry at the time.  He also pushed the boundaries of sex and violence, making mostly genre fare with an exploitative, yet insightful style.  He's been called the 'Hong Kong Cult Film Meister' and for good reason, directing such titles as The Killer Snakes (1974), Killer Constable (1980), Hex (1980) and Corpse Mania (1981).

I'll be writing about more of his stuff down the road, for sure, he's piqued my interest.  Can't wait to work my way through his filmography.  Corpse Mania is next in my netflix queue.

Where can you watch it?
- DVD: there's a bare bones edition on amazon for $11.99
- Also available on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj9KNEF471U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Bi0ClWm7k
(Heads up: English subtitles are embedded in the video, but there's also two dialogue tracks playing simultaneously, one in Cantonese and the other in Mandarin, I assume, which is extremely distracting.  I had to watch it with my headphones on, putting only one headphone in, to make it through the film)

Check out the trailer, it'll give you a pretty good idea of this film's brand of batshit: