The Seventh Curse (1986)

 

Director: Lam Ngai Kai

Screenplay: Wong Jing and Yuen Gai-chi

Based on the Dr. Yuen novel series of Ni Kuang

Cast: Chow Yun-fat as Wisely; Chin Siu-ho as Dr. Yuen Chen-hsieh; Dick Wei as Black Dragon; Maggie Cheung as Tsui Hung; Sibelle Hu as Su; Chui Sau-lai as Betsy; Elvis Tsui as Sorcrer Aquala

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Picture a Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat film directed by the man who made 1991 live action adaptation of Riki-Oh. That is The Seventh Curse, told in an opening bookend over wine and colourful chatter such as aliens chopping off human toes.  It shows the fascinating world of Hong Kong cinema of the time. You can be in this film and than a few years later a Wong Kar-Wai or John Woo production. All are good, and this one is as unpredictable as you can get as, for what is a horror action work, it begins as a serious action movie where our lead Dr. Yuen Chen-hsieh (Chin Siu-ho) is introduced, brought into a hostage situation to help a person in dire straits, but with Maggie Cheung's reporter Tsui Hung compromising the situation by taking the role of a nurse to get a story on Yuen.

This is all before we get to an abrupt martial arts fight - it will be that unpredictable - where the combatant against Yuen is just a messenger telling him the blood curse he has had for a year since his trip to Thailand is about to burst. This is, in respect to the film despite its laissez faire attitude to some things, very bad as even making love can set it off, with blood vessels swelling and bursting, the seventh at Yuen's heart and fatal. It forces him to take the advice of Chow Yung Fat's Dr. Wisely, an occult specialise, and go back to Thailand to deal with an evil wizard who is so bad he sets a big headed demon creature onto people, called a "Ghost Child", with chest busting crimson showers ensuring. The source for all this is the work of Ni Kuang, a prolific figure who here is having his series of Dr. Yuen novels adapted, but is also a work which crosses over multiple characters of his as, whilst a side figure here, Yung Fat's Dr. Wisely is the protagonist of a series of novels by Kuang started in the sixties and reaching the millennium.  If there is any sense this has been exaggerated from the source, I look to director Lam Ngai Kai who has his own clear obsessions and delirious attitudes. He is however someone who can be incredible faithful to the source - the Riki Oh adaptation is insanely faithful to by Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari's source work, but it barely covers a work even weirder and unable to be adapted on a sensible budget - so I would not be surprised a bit of this is the source texts transposed as much as possible. Considering this has the back-story, in the blood curse, of Yuen saving a female sacrifice to an old ancestor - a skeleton corpse prop who still gets a fight scene, glowing blue eyes and to ripe a man's head off - we are in a moment of Hong Kong cinema sadly no longer with us but magnificent in how you can never expected the obvious to transpire. The term "this goes up to eleven' is appropriate here.

Like The Boxer's Omen (1983), an infamous Shaw Brothers supernatural tale, this has its own logic with the arcane, like worms who reproduce so fast that, on contact, you rip your own stomach open to death as they pour out, or the blood curse induced by being forced fed bullets from slain people, or the antidote (least for a year) being a magic pellet cut from a maiden's bared breast. All is over the top - even the melodrama - as a rope trap splits a man in two like a wishbone rather than just throws them to their death, and in vast contrast, you have Maggie Cheung playing her perky reporter like a comedy protagonist in an entirely different film, which is awesome to see as, in the logic of this film, she can just acquire enough armaments from her dad's gold credit card to mow people down, or has extensive knowledge of traps from Vietnam War research to avoid that scene's pitfalls and take photos of all the newly acquired corpses. You can see how this is a film, with its eighties gel coloured lighting and absolute enforcement of using practical effects, that in any other context like today will blow people's minds, but it is surprising to know this would be a one-off in Hong Kong cinema at the time, just a vein of creativity and delirium that creators and collaborators, in the midst of the vast connective web of its film industry, worked within.

And it is crafted with care even with the monster costumes, in how a random piece of the arcane, the grotesque Ghost Child, is an elaborate puppet prop here even if in context it is more gruesome;  that it is created from the blood of a hundred crushed children, which is not shied away from in the slightest. Melding action cinema, with enough extras relying on wires when hit with shotgun blasts, and martial arts cinema, and horror, it is a maddening eighty plus minutes to experience for a very simplistic story, and it was crafted to make all the scenes stand out.  And it manages to never peter out either, which makes this even more compelling. When Cheung is possessed, it is not enough to have her cured by regular means, but by being stuck into a bath of seven types of black animal blood, whilst the finale includes a Ghost Child vs. Old Ancestor battle which is as gory as it is ridiculous seeing to puppetry effects thrown at each other. The cast never feels like they are coasting through this either, as whilst Cheung is full of chirpy imagery, Chow Yun-fat as Mr. Wisely gets to be a badass just by knowing how to break cursed like a living textbook, and occasionally having a rocket launcher without context when that does not work.

Ni Kuang himself is an insanely prolific writer, prolific in also wuxia and science fiction storytelling, his work adapted to multiple formats over the decades. The Wisely series itself, prolific in number and not even the main novel series here being sourced from, was adapted into the director's last film The Cat (1992), and between comics, radio dramas, television and films, this series captured an audience back in the day which won many over. When there are over 145 in the series from the early sixties, this alone with Ni Kuang is someone whose mark is likely left on more titles, and thus makes The Seventh Curse even in its madness more compelling to consider in context as a result.