Human Lanterns (1982)

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Director: Chung Sun

Screenplay: Kuang Ni and Chung Sun

Cast: Tony Liu (as Lung Shu-Ai); Kuan Tai Chen (as Tan Fu); Lieh Lo (as Chao Chun-Fang); Ni Tien (as Lung's Wife); Linda Chu (as Yen Chu); Hsiu-Chun Lin (as Tan Mei-mei)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #77

After watching a couple of Shaw Brothers horror films over the last five months, tackling one of the martial arts films that they made a reputation on which delved into the horror genre feels immensely appropriate, seeing that as a later release of theirs, before they would eventually step out of the cinema market, they had made so many martial arts films that taking the tropes and narratives and splicing them with new tangents would've made perfect sense. Most of Human Lanterns follows in the tradition of the period martial arts films with their spiralling plots, of rivalries and revenge. Two men, Lung Shu-Ai (Tony Liu) and Tan Fu (Kuan Tai Chen) start off with a rivalry about the oncoming festival, Lung Shu a pompous and spoilt egotist who pays a craftsman Chao Chun-Fang (Lieh Lo) to build him the most spectacular lantern possible. However as the film progresses, Lung Shu and Tan Fu's rivalry escalates to violent hostility with the local police stuck in the middle having to keep guard of both, the rivals believing the other to have kidnapped a loved one each and even an assassin sent to kill one of them. Within the company's distinct set-bound period locations, of immensely beautiful decor and all shot with exquisite palette, the same sense of aesthetic quality like older Shaw Brothers films is to be found. At this point the studio had made so many films that it would've taken an exceptional failure to find bad production design, and the same applies for the martial arts in the film; within the context of more fantastical and exaggerated abilities for the participants, by wire-work and other effects, it's as solid as always for these films.

What differentiates Human Lanterns from other films is that the third figure involved Chao Chun-Fang is a sociopath hell bent on revenge against Lung Shu for a previous transgression, very soon into the film revealed to be the Machiavellian figure taking advantage of the lead characters' escalating rivalry whilst he is attempting to create the titular lantern, a gruesome concept made more horrible in how he intends to create it from the flesh of kidnapped women, loved ones of his enemies, flayed and preserved to make the appropriate construction material. The film's less extreme than other Hong Kong films, even other Shaw Brothers productions especially their line of black magic movies, but it doesn't take long, in fact from the first frame, to develop the same Asian gothic grotesqueness of the studio's horror films, partly evoking Italian horror with its use of heavily coloured lighting and using locations like the lantern creating facility against the film's own idiosyncratic personality to give it an ominous atmosphere. That it's a martial arts film helps give this side of the narrative more heft in how Lieh Lo is an incredibly physical actor even in a film full of martial artists, able to use it alongside regular acting both as his character when he's at his most maniacal and insane, and the skull faced, half gorilla alter ego who crosses a slasher film killer with an exceptionally agile and dangerous fighter who cackles like a madman constantly and spouts nihilistic views of the world and of heroes.

The horror works more as Human Lanterns becomes the darkest of all the Shaw Brothers films I've seen from their catalogue. With an egotistic, unlikable protagonist and even the more nobler side protagonist succumbing to evil actions, it becomes a morality tale of being blind to one's rages which leads to punishment for both through a tragic ending and a large toll of deaths. More subdued in content than other, more notorious films from Hong Kong, Human Lanterns is still a story about women being killed and skinned to make a human lantern, as repulsive as it sounds, those close to the lead characters involved. From rape to the pouring of liquid mercury into an exposed head wound, it's a gristly film that teeters perfectly between a more meaningful tone, without falling into the lurid grossness of schlocky films, and a grotesqueness, never nasty for the sake of nastiness in spite of its more uncomfortable moments and ultimately having more impact because of how bleak the ending turns out to be. Ignorance and ego, Lung Shu the central protagonist on screen the most, leads to innocent people dying and karma destroying lives whilst the villain strives to create his horrifying artistic masterpiece. Without spoilt the ending, it leads to sadness and the necessary goal for one character to clean their soul of sin through pilgrimage as a travelling vagabond. Even if it's still an exploitation martial arts and horror genre hybrid, this twist on expectations which leads to a bleak gut punch at the end was an immense surprise.

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Black Magic (1975)

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Director: Ho Meng-Hua

Screenplay: Kuang Ni

Cast: Lung Ti (as Xu Nuo); Lieh Lo (as Lang Jiajie); Ni Tien (as Luo Yin); Lily Li (as Quming); Feng Ku (as Shan Jianmi)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #73

The only real regret with this Shaw Brothers chiller is that it's a pretty basic morality tale with a very bland black and white morality behind it. Folklore and fairytales in general have a clear cut distinction between good and evil, which is something never to complain about, but it's always a nuisance whether it's a genre film from a country known for prolific amounts of horror cinema (Japan, the US, Spain etc.) and those which you dig up as you explore other country's film cultures (Indonesia, India, Hong Kong) that the leads, unlike those in fairytales who can by usually ciphers for the readers/listeners, are so bland you could put a mannequin in their place, where the villains and side characters are what make a film like Black Magic utterly entertaining nonetheless alongside its depiction of the titular arts. Aside from this Black Magic was an utter hoot, another Hong Kong horror film that's been recently released in the United Kingdom which opens up the stranger tastes of Hong Kong horror cinema.

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The thing of greatest interest with Black Magic, why a film like it so much more better than a lot of modern horror films, is that it feels so much more transgressive in its viscous and lurid tone alongside having an internal logic mixed with this that's more compelling. Whether the mythology of the black magic is real or not, it's interesting that the good older wizard called upon to save the day, when the lead hunky male is brainwashed by magic for a rich and spoilt woman to have him as her boy toy, is also a black magic practitioner, suggesting evil here is dictated by an evil magician who provides death curses for gold jewellery and seduces female customers with his own magic. That and said logic in these Shaw Brothers horror films is one only found in their productions, the depiction of said magic is in its own distinct form you never forget.

The plot's got a few serpentine twists of interest - what starts off as a conman bum getting a love charm on the spoil rich woman leads to her hiring the same black magician for her own cause after the love charm works so successfully - but the real interest is witnessing the gruesome, strange sights of having to go to a graveyard to use the reanimated pus of a corpse for a spell, worms crawling under the skin next to someone's heart, bloody worms in a coconut used to curse someone with death if they don't pay up for the magician's services, and countless other macabre moments in a world where the worms are actual worms and even the plastic skull the villain has and waves around is still charmingly macabre, a sense of gross tangibility lost with CGI but found in international genre cinema from decades before.

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It's curious to see a company in Shaw Brothers, having martial arts films as their bread and butter, attempt other genres and awaiting to see if they ever slip into their comfort zone abruptly, a car chase suddenly happening the middle of the plot when you normally don't expect it in supernatural horror, and the ending in a construction site which brings in rotoscoped lightning, something that'd unfairly get mocked but for me here is Black Magic pulling out all the stops in context for a seventies film. Also the sense of mythology that the Shaw Brothers' martial arts films had, of mysterious fighting techniques and lore, does cross over into these horror films for very unexpected results, such as centipedes being a cure for love potion charms or how one needs the footprints of the target of interest, in the mud, as part of said love charms. The thing most likely to be the most notorious for new viewers to the film is how, also for a love charm, a female customer always has to provide their breast milk as a vital ingredient, something that's an excuse for nudity (body double or not) but, ironically, even if it's a lurid plot piece has far greater verisimilitude with real world magic in how fertility and symbols related to it do actually find themselves used in magical rituals or part of their ideologies, particularly with the emphasis on a strong Earth Mothers in modern paganism.

Admittedly there's two obvious issues with this view point watching a film like this, that one it'll be a crass reading from a foreigner's point of view of a culture's pulpy genre cinema, and two whether it's based on actual mythology or whether it was merely made up or exaggerated for the target audience indulging of exploitation horror films; in either case particularly with trying to comprehend another film like The Boxer's Omen (1983), which is notoriously bizarre, just accepting the more eyebrow raising moments of Black Magic matter-of-factly actually adds to the appeal of them. Particularly in my case, having found I hate most British horror films from this era, and bored with a lot of modern mainstream horror movies, something like this for all its flaws is so much more compelling because of this type of content that you never witness in English language horror movies barring the more underground ones and how it's attempts at depicting this supernatural content through the means they had give them their own distinct aesthetic.

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It's helps as well, in spite of the bland lead and his similarly bland love interest trying to claim him back as the figures the audience was meant to follow, it's still a Shaw Brothers film with their usual production value. It does emphasis more on-location exterior scenes rather than the built sets of their period films, which does give it a surprisingly gritty tone than to their usual work, but the fantastical sense of the artificial is still found from their films in the ways it tries to be creepy or just gross. This earthly sense of transformation and horror makes up for any issues with the plot because it taps into what horror as a genre should be, weird and utterly about the material in all its viscous form, and thankfully the plot's as melodramatic and surreally matter-of-fact about the events taking place as one would hope for, the fact that it comes from a region (Asia) where spirituality and mysticism are still held with great respect having a sincerity to the proceedings even if this is the pulp, deliberately gonzo take on witchcraft than a proper documentary. That and the best thing about Black Magic and the factor which punched me in the gut, the utterly unpredictable and incredible score by in-house Shaw Brothers composer Yung-Yu Chen. As erratic as it is eclectic, it's one of the most diverse and frantic scores I've come across in a long while; against a film as frantic as it, it seamlessly lunges from exotic lounge to psychedelic rock guitar, to literal electronic noise to what sounds like ambient whale song, every part of which especially through headphones compelling by itself. This type of production value puts a film like Black Magic films from various countries like Mystics of Bali (1981) because, rather than large passages of padding and less than stellar production value, Black Magic manages to both be compelling weird at times but have the technical quality that people praise Shaw Brothers for.

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Halloween 31 For 31: Hex (1980)

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Director: Chih-Hung Kuei

Screenplay: Chih-Hung Kuei and Chin-Hua Tan

Cast: Ni Tien (as Chan Sau Ying);  Yung Wang (as Yeung Chun Yu); Szu-Chia Chen (as Leung Kei Wah)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #33

[WARNING: Contains spoilers but they will be individually signposted to avoid.]

Hex, if anything, is unpredictable, the result of which leads to a twisted array of emotions as you react to everything that happens for the first viewing. Immediately, now that Blu-Ray exists and that their archive has been brilliantly preserved, it's clear just how good the in-house style was for Shaw Brothers studio. Predominantly known for martial arts movies, their extensions into other genres were just as distinct and stylised. The set-based locations and aesthetic of their films is impeccable, here a period piece like the martial arts films where a hateful husband Chun-yu (Jung Wang) is drowned by his incredibly ill wife Chan Sau-ying (Ni Tien) and the daughter of a former servant (Szu-Chia Chen). The style of the film, including its occasionally use distinct camera movements (crawling along the ground through corridors, aerials shots) has a class and immense grace to it, an elegance to the period trappings that wrong foots a viewer when the plot twists start to throw conventions on their heads and things start to get weird.

Hex is reminiscent of the martial art films in its tone, and not only an escape scene for a young monk which takes on the athleticism of the more well known films from the company, the pacey and melodramatic aspects here as well, where a cross eyed furniture mover acts with an exaggerated sense of mannerism closer to a choreographed style or how the acting has a generally heightened tone to it. The mix is curious as, founder and central figure Run Run Shaw used his influence on his own studio to create extravagantly made films with rich aesthetics, but let his directors and t3echnical teams make films with gladly stepped in broad and comedic moments alongside the serious scenes, such as the older Buddhist monk that appears who gets threatened by a severed hand. The tonal shifts are prevalent in Hong Kong cinema and Asian filmmaking in general, but here it's a very distinct style that even when it comes to their more serious minded films is common in Shaw Bros. movie in how heightened and ever changing in plotting they can be. Especially here where the first half is serious and dramatic, as the wife fears of being haunted by her dead husband, but is punctured by comedy and exceptionally silly frights, it has a ridiculous charm to it.

Then when Hex reaches its middle half it starts to get more gothic and morbid as it goes along. More atmosphere as those who've reaped the benefits of the major change in plotting get haunted themselves. The plot twists are so drastic I have to be exceptionally  careful and give a [Spoiler Warning] as it leads to a conspiracy to bump a person off for greed, only for the husband, still alive, and his lover to be haunted to the point of madness by their own ghost [Spoiler ends]. What started as an elegant, melodramatic horror tale becomes more lurid and inventively peculiar, where the amount of frights become more frequent and a gleeful revenge haunting starts with more comedy and more tension. This does mean unfortunately you see a live snake get chopped in half with a cleaver, of its time, but besides this you get more slapstick, more ghoulish frights and the in-house style becomes even more colourful and decorative for a hyper-stylised, kinetic ghost tale, one where the characters are constantly looking over their shoulder as they have no idea where the ghost will appear to scare them. If there's any flaw to this style on a first viewing, it's so quick in pacing at times that you can actually get lost at points.

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Finally the film in its last quarter gets insane. The director Chih-Hung Kuei later made The Boxer's Omen (1983), the most infamous of the Shaw Brothers catalogue, and the suddenly jump in baroque style and lunacy starts to make sense when you realise this. The style becomes even more awashed in colour and the bold lighting style used is exceptional even next to what was done earlier in the film, while the unique mix of sorcery and magic he has in this film and The Boxer's is an idiosyncratic and fascinating one, its realism to exiting practices or lack of it not an issue when it gives him carte blanche to have mind-blowing and ridiculous details and moments as a result, such as the unexpected use of chickens blood here.

Hex after three quarters of its length as a solid horror story turns into something else involving a very eyebrow raising exorcism, an elaborate solo dance choreography involving a completely naked women painted in symbols writhing around as an elderly sorceress hits her with a shoe, so prolonged that I found myself dumbfounded by it, so much nudity onscreen that it could cause even the most desensitised of porn viewers to blush. Then there's [Spoiler Warning] a reinterpretation of the most famous story from Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964) with much more female nudity, and a final plot twist so unexpected and un-signposted that it comes from the school of Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), i.e. able to get away with being out of nowhere by how unexpected and baffling as a result it is.  As a result, even amongst some of the films that I've watched during the period of writing these current reviews, this felt like getting a couple of bricks to the head and surprisingly pleasant for that reason, emphasise that even someone like myself who's seen a lot of bizarre films can still be taken aback by a movie on the first viewing.

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