By [For the month of July, we will be covering the New York Asian Film Festival and the (also New York-based) Japan Cuts Film Festival, which together form one of the largest showcases of Asian cinema in the world. For our NYAFF coverage, head over here. For Japan Cuts, here.]
Over the weekend, Alec and I talked about the difficulty of scoring cult movies. It’s one thing to write about them like we do in Cult Club every month, but asssigning an actual number or grade is sometimes problematic. There are certain cult films that render criticism moot. That’s the power of bugged-out oddness — the rules of normal evaluation no longer apply. Some cult movies exist in a place beyond math.
We talked about this because of Boxer’s Omen, a Hong Kong black magic horror/fantasy film from 1983. It’s not a good movie by any means, but the experience of watching Boxer’s Omen is incredible. Like so many cult films, Boxer’s Omen is one odd duck in the best possible way. It is one of the weirdest things you’ll ever watch; an answer to the little-asked question, “What if a young Peter Jackson made a movie in Hong Kong?”
Boxer’s Omen (Mo | 魔)
Director: Chih-Hung Kuei
Rating: NR
Country: China (Hong Kong)
Boxer’s Omen has a set up straight out of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer: a dominant Thai fighter (Bolo Yeung) horribly maims our hero’s brother in the ring; our hero (Philip Ko) looks to avenge this wrong. But then he gets wrapped up in a strange tale of unexpected reincarnation, crazy ass Buddhism, and gross-out black magic. Blood, entrails, vomiting, puppetry, and the eating of vomit ensues. At one point, our hero pukes up a live spotted moray eel. It’s a scene that out-Poltergeist-IIs Poltergeist II, and it’s a Shaw Brothers film to boot.
For years, Shaw Brothers Studios was top of the pops in the Hong Kong film industry, delivering a steady output of classic films: The Five Deadly Venoms, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, One Armed Swordsman, Five Fingers of Death. The venerable studio started to wane with the rise of Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest, even despite fine calls to their former glory (e.g., Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter, Legendary Weapons of China). Shaw Brothers began to make a couple oddball films — anything that would stick that might make some money — and the results were movies like Boxer’s Omen and Infra-Man (one of the first movies I remember watching as a child, still an unironic favorite).
With Boxer’s Omen, you know what kind of movie you’re in for early on. Blood and spit fly furiously during the opening kickboxing match. It’s more like watching a Thai spit-take competition, or perhaps people trying to out-gargle each other. There’s also the requisite and gratuitous T and A before the first instance of the supernatural. There are shots that would have made Samuel L. Bronkowitz and Mo Fuzz proud. (Production values, baby.) But our hero soon learns of his secret (and deceased) Buddhist monk twin, now a talking, dried-out husk of a body that resembles terracotta. Another wrong, this one magical, must be righted.
The magic battles and rituals are at the center of Boxer’s Omen, and they’re the main reason to watch the film. Here you’ll find that vomit eating, twice-chewed food, slime, speaking in tongues (or possibly just Tagalog), puss, secretions, and just general messiness. Armies of alligator skulls and bat puppets are abound as well, and there’s one insane creature effect that looks like it could have been done in The Thing, complete with bloody, clingy tendrils flailing at the air like a hungry squid on crank. There is such insane creativity in these sequences, and I’m not sure if they’re based on some Chinese and Thai magic lore or were just cooked up for the film. Tobin’s Spirit Guide has no listing for Alligator Skull Parade.
When we first learn about the magic war, we watch a man’s skin rupture and suppurate with bubbles, he turns into a hag, and then a bat comes out her mouth, which is captured, taken to a temple, and dissolved with Buddhist acid. Here’s the thing: it gets even crazier after that. And it gets absolutely revolting, and entertainingly so. I mentioned Peter Jackson at the very beginning, and I think Boxer’s Omen is something like a cross between Bad Taste and Shaolin Drunkard, one of Yuen Woo-Ping’s directorial efforts that is similarly unhinged but nowhere near as gross.
The black magic and the sorcerer battles tend to be more interesting than the Buddhism segments, which are staid and sometimes a little dull. There is one exceptional scene when monks chant and charge up our hero. turning him into a master of spiritual kung-fu. The sequence features some well-done animation as Buddha power (for lack of a better word) gets integrated into his system. It’s surreal and, surprisingly, rather moving. The sequence wouldn’t feel out of place in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.
Yet those creative, insane, and spiritual strengths of Boxer’s Omen also reveal a lot of narrative weaknesses. Many of the intervening scenes between the magic battles drag, but almost anything would drag after seeing a bizarre green alien head extinguish a fire by screaming, or watching three men spit out and rechew each other’s food. Certain moments feel as if director Chih-Hung Kuei is just killing time, filling the space with images taken abroad. Like lots of middling action movies, Boxer’s Omen is all about the set pieces rather than the whole, but the set pieces really make up for those deficiencies through sheer force of mad will. You can forgive a movie for slowness when you know that the apology will be batshit crazy.
That’s why scoring a movie like Boxer’s Omen becomes so difficult. It goes bananas, and then spits the bananas out to be re-eaten. It’s a movie unlike anything else, and if there’s something else like it, I really want to see that. Boxer’s Omen is also really trashy and kitschy (in both good ways and bad ways) and not really well made. But then again, some of those make-up effects and creature effects are wonderful works of low-budget magic. It’s the clash of nightmarish inventiveness and the banal nature of evaluation. The movie shouldn’t even be judged — it simply is.
With cult movies there’s a fine line between the film and the experience of the film. Whatever the final number may be, Boxer’s Omen is an experience you should have.
