Directed by Chen Chiu, starring Chan Sing, Barry Chan, Charlie Chin Chiang-Lin and Lin Ping.
This is the fox demon teacher of the evil Empress, who is also a fox demon!
Five diverse characters, including a fighting femme restaurateur named Miss Lotus, an upbeat undertaker and a young warrior called Dragon, discover they are actually the children of the murdered Song Dynasty Emperor. They join forces with an old Song general and a monkey-man to seek their revenge against the current, very ruthless rulers, who are able to mobilise supernatural allies against the heroes, thanks to the fact the Empress (Ping) is actually a kind of wolf/fox demon in disguise!
One of the bad guys! Boo!
The evil Empress is briefly seen with a canine head!
This cut-rate Taiwanese kung fu fantasy romp features such fantastical creatures as a friendly, white-furred monkey-guy with a blond hairdo, a fox demon that resembles a shoddy bear suit with a horse-like face, and a briefly-seen orange-haired, horned monster-dude. These critters are brought to life by guys in extremely crude costumes, whilst the other ‘demons’ working for the villainess tend to be human-looking, with the ability to go transparent, disappear and reappear. At one point a squad of staff-wielding supernatural fighters wearing fur tunics are summoned to fight the heroes and, when they’re killed, they become empty fur tunics lying on the ground.
Monkey magic!
African poster for the movie
The horned monster-dude is stabbed with the ‘Demon Killer Sword’
The five heroes possess elemental powers, meaning they can emit fire or bursts of water, fly through the air, or crawl speedily through dirt and sand, but these powers are used rather sparingly. One dude even briefly hitches a ride on a big puppet bird.
Riding on a puppet bird!
This all sounds great, but the film’s choppy editing makes some sequences downright confusing to follow and the budget is so very low the movie cannot hope to deliver the fantasy spectacle that the story requires. But, hey, it features a lot of fights!
Directed by ‘Joe Livingstone’, starring Mick Stuart, Walter Bond, Richard Phillips, Suen Kwok-Ming, Wang Kuan-Hsiung and Angela Mao.
The narrative often struggles to make total sense
Newly-shot footage of hopping vampires, a silver-suited hero called Shadow Warrior and various ninjas is intercut into an older gambling movie called GIANT OF CASINO, which features Angela Mao and Wang Kuan-Hsiung. The freshly concocted plot involves blue-faced vampires used as part of a smuggling operation and ninjas sent on a mission to eliminate Steve Cox, the Gambling King.
Some traditional-style Chinese hopping vampires
Shadow Warrior arms himself with a couple of spears
Points of interest include ninjas turned into grinning hopping vampires, Shadow Warrior using a bell to distract a bunch bouncing vampires during a breakneck skirmish, a holy man performing a ceremony to heal injured vamps that seems to involve sticking sparklers into them, and a voodoo doll used to control a priest.
Ninjas are turned into grinning hopping vampires!
Just as this film seems to be on the verge of being almost coherent, the movie cuts to a shot of a ghost girl skipping, before jumping back to more Shadow-Warrior-versus-vampires action. Alex, aka Shadow Warrior, undergoes a ceremony involving a yellow-robed priest painting special symbols on his torso and then throwing shrine dolls ‘into’ his body. Alex becomes a more powerful version of the helmeted Shadow Warrior and, at one point, with the help of the priest, starts doing some moonwalking, before he batters his vampire foes with explosive punches and kicks!
Please note that there are no scenes of ninjas with rocket launches attacking helicopter gunships in the movie itself…
…but there are scenes of undead ninjas fighting silver-suited Shadow Warrior!
Often erroneously listed as a Godfrey Ho opus (nobody seems to know who definitely directed it, perhaps it was Tommy Cheng), this Tomas Tang production is a cheap, cheesy, cheerful challenge to every viewer’s sense of narrative logic. This brain-melter is also known as DEVIL DYNAMITE and, cheekily, ROBO VAMPIRE 2: DEVIL’S DYNAMITE, obviously in an attempt to pass off silver-garbed hero Shadow Warrior as the infamous ‘Robo-Warrior’.
Directed by Andrew Lau, starring Aaron Kwok, Ekin Cheng, Sonny Chiba, Kristy Yang, Michael Tse, Roy Cheung and Anthony Wong.
Region 1 DVD cover
Lord Conquer, power-hungry leader of the Conquerer’s Clan, raises two boys called Wind and Cloud as his sons, after it is foretold they will bring him good fortune. Together with Conquer’s adopted son Frost, youngsters Wind and Cloud grow up to become powerful fighters under their Lord’s tutelage, bonding with each other and Conquer’s daughter Charity. But when the Lord instructs Charity to wed Wind, rather than Cloud, who is the man she actually loves, the stage is set for a confrontation that leads to Charity’s death at the hands of her father. Matters become much more dark and deadly after Wind and Cloud learn that Conquer killed their parents and now wants to murder them too.
Wind versus a cave dragon
THE STORM RIDERS, based on the comic book series by Ma Wing-shing, is a big Hong Kong action-fantasy wuxia movie full of characters with super-powered skills, prophesies, betrayals and legendary weapons with names like Blizzard Blade, Ultimate Sword, Fire Unicorn Sword and Unchallenged Sword.
They got some big swords
One superpower is the ability to expertly-manipulate streams of water
Lord Conquer unleashes an energy sphere!
Aaron Kwok, as Cloud, is good at pop-dramatic posturing, whether he’s moodily sitting on a rooftop with a billowing cape, standing under a waterfall as he angrily shouts at the sky, or screaming in heartbroken anguish as he detonates plumes of water in a lake. Meanwhile, Sonny Chiba, as the single-minded, driven Lord Conquer, is regal, ruthless and looks the consummate badass at all times.
Cloud versus Lord Conquer
There’s a not-too-convincing CGI cave dragon and a less-than-photorealistic special effects-laden duel on and around a giant, stone Buddha, but these moments are acceptable as they exist within the comic book world of this movie. Far more impressive elements include the splendid Sword Grave set and the many scenes showing the characters creating energy spheres, manipulating water, spinning at super-velocities and generating shock waves. The inclusion of surprising plot ideas, such as Cloud ripping off his arm so that he can use the blood as a weapon, and a doctor realising he must sever his own ‘Fire Beast Arm’ and transplant the limb onto Cloud’s body, help keep the movie exotic and fantastical.
This dragon is the guardian of special ‘Blood Bodhi’ fruit
After Cloud yanks off his arm in a fight, a helpful doctor cuts off one of his own arms to donate to our hero!
Watch out for a bamboo forest fight, ‘Firey’ the Fire Monkey (which is never on fire, sadly) and a showdown between Lord Conquer and Sword Saint, where we get the chance to see Anthony Wong floating into action like a glowing Moses/Obi-Wan Kenobi, giving off an aquamarine light as he immobilises everyone in his path!
Directed by Titus Ho, starring Kent Tong, Poon Lai-Yin and Ga Lun.
A film crew sneaks into an off-limits burial place in Borneo, releasing a Red Dwarf ghost, triggering a murderous curse that will only be halted when a grey-haired sorcerer and a Buddhist Lama finally intervene.
Blu-ray slipcase artwork
This unashamedly exploitative release from Nikko International Productions & Films presents us with the typical Hong Kong horror movie staples of arcane rituals and chanting monks, mixing them into a salacious brew heavily indebted to western movies.
Sometimes the mask of the Red Dwarf ghost is superimposed over the image of its possessed victim
Scorpions swarm over a sorcerer!
Mondo footage of the slaughter of real pigs, a meddling documentary crew and the depiction of indigenous tribespeople as cruel savages hint at the influence of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, while a set piece involving main protagonist Stella being assaulted by a possessed bamboo bed that forces her legs wide open above an oil lamp is undoubtedly inspired by THE EVIL DEAD.
Stella is attacked by parts of her bamboo bed…
…and she’s forced by the bamboo poles to slowly lower downwards, towards a lit oil lamp
Let’s face it, if you’re interested in these kind of films, then this poster is definitely going to persuade you to watch it!
RED SPELL SPELLS RED is certainly full of incident. Memorable moments include the very gross spectacle of a Borneo tribesman eating the innards of a still-alive chicken, Stella’s possessed period blood provoking a supernatural incident, death-by-jungle-vines, people succumbing to scorpion infestations, and a finale in which the grey-haired holy man allows himself to be covered in scorpions and immolated.
Even leaves can be deadly in this film
Skewered on bamboo!
Scorpions go in for the kill!
A very Hong Kong-style exorcism ceremony!
Let’s just spare a moment to consider put-upon documentarian Stella (Lai-Yin), who finds herself in multiple situations that inevitably result in her clothes getting wet. She is also plagued with a Scorpion Spell that causes her to exude these black arthropods from a wound near a red birthmark, making her deadly to anyone who gets too close to her. Even when the helpful sorcerer is trying to cure her, this calls for the poor woman to be bound to a rotating water wheel (cue more wet clothing shots), then sprinkled with powder made from the ground-up skull of the sorcerer’s dead daughter, before having a chunk of possessed flesh ripped from her shoulder. This is definitely a location shoot Stella will want to forget!
Poon Lai-Yin, as Stella, has got wet clothing again!
As part of the exorcism process, Stella is strapped to a revolving water wheel…
…which means, of course, Stella gets really wet again!
All in all, RED SPELL SPELLS RED is a gonzo, shameless piece of brazen Hong Kong exploitation filmmaking that lovers of vulgar, mad & muddled mondo horror movies will love.
If you’ve no wish to see a live chicken eaten by a dude, don’t watch this film!
Cheng Fu falls asleep, holding the sea snail shell
Directed by Ling Shang and starring Candice Yu, Tony Wong, Little Unicorn and Tien Ching.
Candice Yu as the snail fairy and Tony Wong as Cheng Fu
Tien Ching plays the hero’s extremely obnoxious cousin
Nice guy Cheng Fu (Wong), who his bullied by his uncle’s family, picks up a sea snail shell, takes it home, and has a dream, in which a small fairy implores him to drip some blood into the shell. Cheng Fu wakes from his dream and does, indeed, dribble some blood from his finger into the snail’s shell.
In Cheng Fu’s dream the snail fairy asks for his help
The snail fairy, now in the form of an attractive woman (Yu), falls in love with Cheng Fu, starts providing him with lovely meals, then magically tidies-up and repairs the shack-like home that his mean-spirited uncle has banished him to. The mollusc fairy and Cheng Fu eventually decide to get married. Ah, how sweet!
Hong Kong poster
But the couple must deal with Cheng Fu’s nasty relatives, especially a slimy, obnoxious cousin (Ching), who hires thugs to kidnap the fairy. The pair also come under threat from a snake demon villain (Unicorn), who can take on the form of an actual snake, a larger (puppet) serpent, a frog-eating monk or a snake-human.
When in the guise of a monk, the snake demon gobbles-up a bunch of frogs!
At one point the demon becomes a large, striped snake
The quality of the snake-human’s makeup is, ah, less than Oscar standard
The cheap budget means that the snake-human is basically actor Little Unicorn with face makeup of the standard seen at a children’s birthday party, the trick effects are achieved by such simple methods as double exposure, music is ‘borrowed’ from various movies, including KING KONG (1976) and CARRIE (1976), and the undersea world of the snail fairies is a realism-free set with lots of bubbles floating about in it.
Bubbles float around in the realm of the snail fairies
A moderately interesting moment involves Cheng Fu becoming a skilled fighter when his fairy love’s spirit enters his body, enabling him to beat his adversaries using different styles of kung fu, plus there’s a diverting sequence in a theatrical-looking cavern, where the snail fairy’s two sisters combat several supernatural demon fighters, including a gold dude, a red dude and a ‘wood’ dude, who creaks when he moves and can transform into multiple flying logs.
Red demon-dude
This golden demon-dude actually turns into a large bar of gold during the fight!
The wood demon-dude makes creaking sounds when he moves his arms and legs
Money limitations, however, mean that what ends up on-screen usually fails to do justice to the ideas, but the tale is actually quite charming in a fairy tale kind of way, ensuring that you keep watching as the put-upon hero and his snail fairy bride overcome all obstacles and live happily ever after.
A servant girl who loves Cheng Fu and is jealous of the snail fairy is eventually killed by the snake demon…
…and she transforms into this hyper-realistic skeleton
Thai poster
This cover art features imagery not featured in the movie itself
Directed by Chiang Tai and starring Chen Hsiu-Chen, Hsi Hsiang and Chin Ling Chih.
Poster
Yun Chung Lung, also known as Prince 3, is a golden dragon deity. He is banished to the human world as penitence for causing catastrophic flooding during a battle with another, evil dragon. Lung, now in human form and aided by a young, lovestruck couple, takes on the devils causing problems in the kingdom, including one flesh-hungry villain disguised as an ill, old lady.
Yun Chung Lung
Red Devil…
…confronts a giant, white ape…
…and they fight…
…and, at one point, the ape downs Red Devil with a drop kick!
Also known as MOTHER GODDESS VS THE SEA DEMON, this Taiwanese fantasy production uses stock footage from THE FOUNDING OF THE MING DYNASTY (1971) and EXORCISING SWORD (1975), plus music purloined from the likes of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979), and is of most interest when giant monsters take centre stage. These creatures include a colossal, red-haired, fanged demon-dude with reptilian hands & feet, a massive white ape, two serpentine (marionette) dragons, a bat-eared lake monster that resembles a kind of gigantic gill-man, a large (puppet) cobra and a huge, humanoid monster with long white hair and bulging eyes. Oh, there are various giant, floating heads, too!
Dragon versus Red Devil
Dragon versus dragon
Lake monster!
He’s got bat-ears, fangs and whiskers!
What big, orange eyes you have!
Giant, floating monster head fires green lightning bolts from its eyes!
These beasties, mainly men-in-suit creations, possess varied powers, including the ability to breath flame, shoot electrical power beams from their eyes and, at one point, flip from one monster form to another.
Monster footage from THE FOUNDING OF THE MING DYNASTY is used in this movie
More monster footage is taken from EXORCISING SWORD, also known as THE DEVIL FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
Miniature sets get flooded, animated energy bolts fill the screen, suicide is treated very lightly, the human drama moments tend to drag and, generally, the movie comes across as a cheap, sometimes plodding merging of fairy tale, sub-Toho kaiju flick and baffling mythological yarn.
Directed by Hwa I Hung, starring Billy Chong, Chan Lau, Chang Tao and Cheng Ka Ying .
Poster
Ocean Shores video sleeve
A renegade priest brings the dead back to life as eyeless, hopping zombies to help a bad guy called Mu Tai kill his opponents, but the villain dies in one of his own boobytraps, so his ghost demands to be reincarnated in another body. Mu Tai’s spirit ends up residing in the corpse of hero Pang’s father, but a faulty ritual turns him into a white-faced, part-human & part-ghost being, who’s hellbent on murdering several folks. To make matters worse, Pang (Chong) is also targeted by scar-faced undead villain Long, a guy so tough he even carries on fighting when his hands and feet catch fire! Fortunately for Pang, the handy intervention of a Buddhist monk imbues him with the power to defeat Long, who is finally lynched with prayer beads and stabbed to death with a tree branch.
Is Pang’s dad dead or unwell or a zombie?
Nice eyebrows!
This is a corpse, innit?
This Eternal Film Company production is a comedic fantasy-horror-actioner, starring the likeable Billy Chong, which merges lively bouts of kung fu, humour and supernatural hijinks with music borrowed from the likes of MOONRAKER and EXORCIST II.
This leaf hat will make you invisible to vampires and zombies – honest!
The movie informs us that spirits need to be nailed to the corpses they are going to inhabit and reveals the fact that a hat constructed from leaves can make its wearer invisible to the living dead!
Video cover
There’s some super-fast editing for several fight scenes, plus speeded-up farcical chases, though this all actually works out fine within the context of this film, which is, after all, an exaggerated comedy kung fu horror flick.
Directed by Ted Kingsbrook, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Kent Wills, Trudy Calder, Lucas Byrne, Sorapong Chatree, Sun Chien and Jack Mackay.
Lots of people get eaten!
Master Cooper, who controls people-munching killer crocs from a golden cave, plans to team-up with Monica (Calder), the blonde sorceress who is running a ‘vampire business’. Together they hope their crocodiles and hopping vamps will take over the world, but agent Bruce Thompson (Wills) is determined to prevent this evil plan from happening.
VHS cover
A grungy-faced hopping vampire
Master Cooper dwells on his golden cave, sitting within the skeletal jaws of a croc
OMG! Where to start with this incredibly weird cut-and-paste flick?! Well, here’s just some of the things that occur… There are multiple crocodile attacks, both in the water and on land, with a high bodycount and much screaming. Monica performs seemingly pointless incantations, at one point causing several fish to spill from a vampire’s mouth, into a fishbowl, which then fly up into a different vampire’s mouth. A levitating dude loses his concentration and falls prey to a hungry crocodile. A guy vomits up maggots. A smaller man-in-suit croc does tricks for villagers. Some of the vampires are of the Chinese hopping variety, whilst others are more like zombie-vamps with green blood. Oh… and the crocodiles are actually the spirits of people who have become reptiles, so they often appear in human form too!
Witch-woman Monica has long, steel nails!
The croc footage stems from a Thai film called KRAI THONG 2 (1985) and the main crocodile, though not exactly a Hollywood-standard animatronic creation, is a pretty serviceable full-size model that munches down on many, many extras. The low tech attack scenes actually possess a pacy verve, as loads of people run, shout and get bitten or carried away. One of the reasons these reptile assaults stand out is because they are never isolated incidents: the various crocs don’t bother waiting around to pick off lone victims, they launch onslaughts against groups of people near their homes or at riverside markets. Most of these attacks involve the actors struggling in the reptile’s jaws, but there’s one particular scene that is quite gory, with limbs being bitten off, and I’m sure actual amputees were cast to portray these legless or armless victims.
A dude has his leg bitten off
A man tries to pull a victim back out of the croc’s mouth!
KRAI THONG 2 provided much of the footage for this cut-and-paste production
It’s a real WTF moment when one of the crocs turns into its human form (a young woman called Maria) for the very first time. It’s revealed that Maria is the deceased girlfriend of a local man called Jack and she says such things as “If you really cared for me, Jack, you’d be a crocodile too, and then we could both be together right away, what do you think?”
Jack makes a crocodile let go of its latest victim…
…and the croc transforms into his dead sweetheart Maria!
The film focuses more on the crocodile spirits in their human form later in the story, in scenes mainly based in the golden cave, referred to as Sea World. This is the location where two croc-demon guys, one called Donald and the other named Stephen, fight one another, with Stephen hurling small, stuffed-looking crocodiles at Donald!
Okay, now THAT is what you call a poster!
The film reaches dual climaxes, one involving Jack as a croc-fighting hero with a special spear & dagger, the other finale boasting a showdown between Bruce, vampires and witch-lady Monica, who suddenly develops a fake-looking, throbbing belly, from which bursts a slimy human head!
Bruce Thompson versus Monica!
The zombie-vampires leak greenish blood when they are stabbed
This dumb, fun Tomas Tang production, often mistakenly credited as a Godfrey Ho film, is utterly batshit crazy, filled with so much incident, including a croc biting the head off a water buffalo, a machine gun assassination attempt, and a crocodile with diamond teeth, that the film actually makes other cut-and-paste epics like SCORPION THUNDERBOLT look like coherent, perfectly normal movies by comparison!
At one point one of the crocodiles glides through the air!
Directed by Joe Livingstone, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Robin Mackay, Nian Watts and Harry Myles.
Japanese VHS cover
Tom, an anti-drug agent, is mortally wounded whilst taking on narcos, who are using Chinese hopping vampires as weapons and as a means to smuggle their heroin shipments. Tom dies on the operating table, but it is decided to transform him into an android… enter the robo-warrior!
We can rebuild him! We have the technology!
Narco villain
Dastardly priest
ROBO VAMPIRE, a cut-and-paste movie courtesy of producer Tomas Tang’s Filmark International, closely resembles the kind of productions made by director Godfrey Ho, the king of such chimeric flicks, which is why the film is very often falsely attributed to him. So who is ‘Joe Livingstone’, then? I don’t know the answer to that, but the owner of IFD Films & Arts Ltd, Toby Russell, assures me that it isn’t Mr Ho. So let’s move on…
Hopping vampire
A scab-faced vampire with a mouthful of his victim’s flesh!
Much of the footage in ROBO VAMPIRE, especially the hostage rescue mission sequences, is sourced from the Thai actioner PAA LOHGAN (1984). The new spliced-in material is all the hopping vampire and robo-dude stuff and, interestingly, these additional scenes are actually better lit than the original movie footage, which usually isn’t the case.
At one point robo-warrior levitates!
The main character, a stomping, low tech, silver-suited dude with a big gun, is not actually a vampire, as you might have expected considering the film’s title. He’s just a cut-price android, though he does skirmish with many scabby-faced, hopping bloodsuckers throughout the film’s running time.
Android versus vamps!
In one action sequence, the robo-warrior battles armed bad guys on a beach, where they attempt to immolate him, but when this fails he is assailed by vampires that pop-up from the sand. This is a shoddily-shot, gloriously cheesy set piece that ends with a tin foil-covered dummy, representing the android protagonist, being blown-up by a rocket launcher! But don’t you worry, the tech guys weld robo-warrior back together again pretty quickly and easily.
Such amazing special effects!
Though the jungle-based rescue subplot is a mainly underwhelming series of shoot-outs, fights, some water torture and explosions, with far too many characters being introduced into the story, a lot of the other incidents in the movie are quite memorable, including drugs being hidden in a real dead cow’s slit-open belly, romantic interludes between a ghostly woman and her gorilla-faced super-vampire lover, a bloody eye-poking, fireworks being fired from the ape-mask-vampire’s sleeves, and a fight between the now-topless female ghost and a priest! Once the she-spirit defeats the evil holy man, our android hero then scorches the gorilla-vampire with his machine gun, which is now in flamethrower mode (cue burning dummy on a wire)!
The female ghost
A gorilla-faced vampire! Yes, you heard me right: a gorilla-faced vampire!
Another shot of the girl ghost
Weird, cheap, trashy and cheerful nonsense.
You don’t mess with a flamethrower-wielding android!
A monster hand reaches up to grab a buddhist monk…
Directed by Roc Tien, starring Roc Tien (who also wrote the script), Meng Fei, Chun Sing and Tien Ho.
Also known as THE SILVER SPEAR, this Taiwanese wuxia production begins like a murder mystery, with several warriors dying of poisoning in a mountain valley. The hero, Silver Hermit, is accused of the killings and becomes embroiled in a story that encompasses concealed identities, buddhist monks, hidden allegiances, secret siblings, the search for a tunnel to the much-desired Green Jade Villa, the destruction of an entire town, and the return of a vampiric villain called Immortal…
VHS sleeve
A coupla monks
This movie, from IFD Films & Arts LTD, starts really well, with a nicely-paced first act located in misty, snowy valley sets that mix together artificiality and atmospherics effectively. However, after the villain Silver Spear reveals that he poisoned the victims as part of his plan to ensure he inherits Green Jade Villa, the movie becomes more and more confusing, thanks to choppy editing, many over-dark sequences and the introduction of a multitude of characters, many of whom are concealing their real identities.
Green Jade Villa
SILVER HERMIT FROM SHAOLIN TEMPLE is based on a novel by Gu Long, so perhaps the filmmakers tried to cram too much of the book’s plot into the movie. Whatever the reason is for the semi-incoherence, by the time the blood-sucking bad guy Immortal is introduced into the tale you do begin to wonder whether the story is actually being made up as it goes along. On the plus side, the involvement of this villain, who sports a wild, Albert Einstein-esque haircut (and is referred to as ‘a beast from Persia’), does mean you get the opportunity to enjoy watching a tall, clawed, pale-faced, fang-mouthed monster-man rampage about the place during the hectic finale!
Poster
Video sleeve
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