Review The Seventh Curse

divemaster13

Member: Rank 4
For Monday's review I give you a Grade-B bizarro HK low-budget bucket 'o fun:

The Seventh Curse (1986)
Directed by Nam Lai-Choi
Starring Yun-Fat Chow, Maggie Cheung, and Siu-hou Chin
In Cantonese or Mandarin with English subtitles
Film: 4 stars (out of 5)

I got to thinking about grade-B fun popcorn flicks, guilty pleasures, and all that. And a film that immediately pops into mind is The Seventh Curse, a mid ’80s Hong Kong whackadoodle movie. Buy it, rent it, stream it--whatever. It’s great for those nights where you just want to sit down to some over-the-top campy fun.

I could sit here and try to type out a plot synopsis, but really there’s no point. You can read the synopsis off the back of the DVD (an R0 cheapie), which makes little to no sense whatsoever, yet somehow tells you everything you need to know. This film is a gonzo mixed bag of just about everything fun you could pack into a film. It’s like Indiana Jones dropped acid and walked into kung-fu/black-magic horror/gore/human sacrifice/monster/jungle adventure/softcore titillation/shoot-’em up action film.

Here's a quick run-down of just some of what you will find in this movie:
-- a kung fu martial-arts doctor
-- a jungle-dwelling “worm tribe”
-- a giant booby-trapped Buddha
-- children being mooshed to death in a stone press so their blood can be collected for nefarious purposes
-- a flying brain-eating fetus (“the little ghost”)
-- a flying bat-like demon (“Old Ancestor”) that looks suspiciously ripped off from “Alien”
-- a blue-eyed skelton (also “Old Ancestor”) that looks suspiciously ripped off from the “Tales from the Crypt” Crypt-keeper
-- a woman carving out a piece of her naked breast in order to feed it to a man to cure him of an evil spell
-- a man ripping into his own stomach only to find it filled with writhing maggots
-- a couple of gratuitous wet t-shirt moments
-- a cute and perky reporter who turns out to be fairly handy with automatic weapons and booby traps because (of course!) she studied Viet Cong tactics in jounalism school

and
-- Chow Yun Fat standing around puffing on a pipe doing basically nothing the whole movie until he shows up at the end out of nowhere with a bazooka (!)

So, grab some munchies, maybe a beer or two and have fun!
 
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