Starring Yu Lung, Ching Li, Tina Chin Fei, An Ping, Wei Hung and Chen Hung Lieh, directed by Tetsuya Yamanouchi for Shaw Brothers and Jih Mao Film Company.
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At one point Na Cha grows multiple arms!
After eating a sacred peach and accidentally knocking the other seven peaches down to the mortal world, young Na Cha must deal with the human-looking devils that have appeared on Earth after various animals have chowed down on the mystical fruit.
A toad eats one of the sacred peaches
This seems like a kids fantasy film to begin with, but soon we’re presented with shots of groping couples making out and scenes of folks being killed by the devils, who have a penchant for turning themselves into the likenesses of loved ones.
A dragon looms up above a village…
…and the beast starts burning down the place!
There’s a decent kaiju moment when a giant dragon burns down a village, plus a subplot involving the devils attempting to prevent a military fleet from setting sail, and an airborne skirmish between Na Cha, a devil eagle and the dragon. To even the odds in this fight with the puppet predators, Na Cha grows in size and becomes multi-armed for a while!
Na Cha throws a sword into the devil eagle’s wing
Goat dude
NA CHA AND THE SEVEN DEVILS is a watchable Hong Kong-Taiwanese fantasy adventure coproduction that, just like similar mythical tales, continually introduces extra characters as the story progresses, including a snake dude, a bull dude and a goat dude, plus an immortal hero with a third eye called Yang Jian, who is aided by Celestial Dog: a canine companion wearing its own natty yellow costume!
Starring Tai Liang-Chun, Ai Fei, Lily Li, Wang Lai, Eric Chan and Yu Tsui-Ling, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung for Shaw Brothers.
The creature from the well assaults its first victim
The story takes place in a mansion in a quiet back alley, where the members of the dysfunctional Shi family and their servants act very superstitiously on the 1st and 15th day of each month, because this is when freaky stuff can happen, due to the fact that thirteen members of the family were killed by bandits and thrown into a dry well many years ago. When a weird, pink, toothy ‘bloody frog’ is encountered, this is seen as a bad omen for sure, as this amphibian always presages ominous events. Terrible things do begin to happen, with a slimy, horned monster crawling out of the well, intent on raping and killing.
Pink goo and tentacles
A slime-coated victim of the tentacle-monster
Kuei Chih-Hung, director of luridly memorable Hong Kong horror opuses like THE BOXER’S OMEN, CORPSE MANIA, BEWITCHED and THE KILLER SNAKES, clearly decided not to hold back when making this demented, gooey weird-fest, choosing to merge murder mystery plotting with creature feature imagery, adding exploitative sexual abuse scenes to make the movie that bit more sleazy.
Lots of goo dribbles from the tentacled creature onto its victims
Another ‘bloody frog’
The story somehow manages to combine a subplot involving certain relatives trying to kill off the Shi family’s wheelchair-bound matriarch (Lai) in order to inherit her house, with footage of a demon-headed well-monster with two tentacles instead of hind legs that sexually assaults its female victims and kills them with its flesh-ripping steel teeth, with shots of a mystery figure secretly feeding offal to a pit full of spiky bloody frogs, with scenes of abusive cousin Jinhua (Fei) hypnotising one of the maids so that he can have sex with her, resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. As you can see: Kuei Chih-Hung obviously believes that enough is never enough!
The well-critter rips chunks of flesh from people with its steel teeth
After seeing this poster you wanna see the movie, right?
We get close-ups of the tentacle-monster’s extendable appendage as it sucks out the eyeballs of elderly manservant Quan and see the critter cover its female victims with pink, gelatine-like slime… and yet… it’s eventually revealed that this beast is actually fake, just a guy in a suit! This is all an elaborate set-up, of course, involving fake identities, obscure secondary characters and the matriarch herself, who is not really disabled and can become an unstoppable maniac… until she is beheaded! The unimaginably preposterous denouement would have us believe that all of the strange happenings were fabricated and nothing supernatural actually occurred, yet the film never provides a real-world explanation for the existence of the flesh-eating bloody frogs, which chow down on several people, including a bound-up maid. Did these amphibians mutate purely because they were fed lots of offal? Does it matter, really? This is a loopy film where logic takes a backseat, so that the director can focus on batshit crazy stuff like a mad granny secretly sewing costumes for a kid’s skeleton in the attic, perverted amateur hypnotism, and outrageously far-fetched murder schemes.
Bloody frogs chew on Quan’s face!
Off with her head!
A tied-up maid is unable to escape an attack by a bunch of bloody frogs!
The main character is quite Norman Bates-like sometimes, only he’s more disturbed than Norman!
Starring Kam Kwok-Leung, Li Lin-Lin, Chen Chun, Lin Feng and Ko Ti-Hua, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung for Shaw Brothers.
A box full of slithering snakes
Snakes on the carpet!
Zhihong is a poor, gawky, bullied youth living in a shack next to a snake bladder store in a rundown Hong Kong neighbourhood. When an injured cobra slithers through a crack in the store wall, entering Zhihong’s ramshackle home, he decides to stitch up the serpent’s wound and look after it, triggering a set of circumstances that will lead to Zhihong using his killer cobra, plus more reptiles liberated from the store, to avenge himself against those who have treated him badly.
Shaw Brothers horror at its sleazy best
A bloody-mouthed lizard
Unlike Willard (1971), however, which this film is obviously inspired by, Zhihong is a far more disturbed protagonist compared to the rat-obsessed main character in the American original. In a scene where Zhihong carries a prostitute who’d tried to mug him back to his shack, The Killer Snakes queasily merges Zhihong’s desire to get back at his tormentors with his disturbed sexual urges, showing him take advantage of the woman by tying her up and licking her. Though Zhihong himself has been a victim of bullying, he does far worse, allowing his snake friends to violate his captive in a sweaty, seedy scene that uses black and white flashbacks to suggest Zhihong’s dark urges stem from childhood memories of abuse and voyeurism.
Zhihong allows his bondage fantasies to get out of hand
Starting with mondo-style footage of live snakes having their gall bladders cut out, this film is sordid and repellent in many ways, but it is well shot and lit, juggling its exploitative components expertly. Bondage fantasies, scenes of Zhihong letting monitor lizards scratch his latest tied-up female victim, a set piece involving an abusive character chopping up snakes for real with a sword before he’s constricted to death by a huge python, plus other grindhouse elements, show how this movie set its sights on offending and disturbing its viewers, a goal it obviously succeeded in achieving with sleazy ease.
Zhihong lets monitor lizards attack one of his captives
Starring Yueh Hua, Lo Lieh and Ching Li, directed by Chor Yuen, for Shaw Brothers.
DVD cover
Members of various clans hunt for the hiding place of a legendary weapon. One of these warriors is swordsman Fei (Hua), intent on finding this deadly device before it gets into the hands of someone who will use it for evil purposes.
Fight!
THE WEB OF DEATH, directed by Chor Yuen, is a tangled tale of rival sects, including the 5 Venom Clan, Qingyi Clan and Holy Fire Clan, who are all immersed in a plot featuring such fantastical elements as acid pit traps and characters able to unleash energy beams from their hands.
Some of these martial arts masters can fire power beams from their hands
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The highlight of the film is undoubtedly the secret weapon at the centre of the tale, known as the Spider. This is a hand-held smoking lantern containing a glowing tarantula that makes roaring sounds, emits deadly poisonous gas and creates massive webs that can trap its victims. The use of this curious device, which causes some casualties to develop blackened faces as they expire, adds a layer of surrealism to the film and helps make the finale very strange, absurd and spectacular.
Lo Lieh unleashes the Spider weapon!
The tarantula within the lantern is normal-sized
The faces of some victims of this otherworldly arachnid go black as they die
Everyone gets trapped within an electrified web
Although the plot can be overly convoluted at times, the film is entertaining, with colourful costumes and wonderful eye candy sets, the most impressive of which is a voluminous chamber containing stone balconies and a large, red spider sculpture.
Starring Ivy Ling Po, Chin Han, Chen Feng-Chen, Hung Sing-Chung and Tung Li, directed by Pao Hsueh-Li, with action direction by Simon Chui Yee-Ngau and Chui Chung-Hok.
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The masked swordsman turns out to be the other dude’s brother just messing around
A spike-fingered woman with black hair and white robes stabs men in the back of their necks with her poisoned metal talons, turning them into zombie-like minions, who dutifully carry her around in a coffin. Other men are also attacked, becoming members of the undead after their female assailant shoots metal pins into their necks. Three brothers decide to take on the local villains, including a hunchback and Chang Kung Chin, but two of the bros are transformed into undead vassals, leaving just Lu Tien Bao to avenge them.
One of the zombified minions
Watch out for her deadly digits…
…but she’s actually the heroine, who teams up with Lu Tien Bao
Interestingly, the spike-fingered woman is revealed to be the heroine, sleeping in her coffin merely to seem spooky and the minions she has zombified are actually bad men. Her sister, however, is really nasty and will turn anyone into the living dead with her metal pins. Lu and good sis join forces to rid the land of this evil, which is headquartered in the temple of Chang Kung Chin.
This is the bad sister: she’s evil!
Atmospheric, evocatively-lit sets and the story’s horror trappings definitely help this early 70s Shaw Brothers wuxia stand out. I love the cheeky ending too, where the heroine finally tells Lu what her name is… but the shot freezes, meaning we never learn what she’s called!
Directed by Taylor Wong, starring Derek Yee, Yu On-On, Kara Wai, Lo Lieh, Alex Man and Shih Kien. From the wonderful Shaw Brothers studio.
DVD cover
Long Jianfei gets kicked into a chasm, but he is fortunately saved by a gold-skinned, winged creature called Dameng, which is kind of like a small dragon with the face of a friendly triceratops. Dameng takes Jianfei to its blind master, called Flaming Cloud Devil, who becomes Jianfei’s foster father.
Flaming Cloud Devil feeds his dragon pet, Dameng
Jianfe is taught Buddha’s Palm skills by his new dad and he’s soon swept along in a series of confrontations, as various old martial arts masters, including Sun Biling and Bi Gu of East Island, settle scores, team-up, argue or are betrayed by others.
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Dameng, Flaming Cloud Devil and Jianfei
With lots of leaping, spinning and flying characters from such groups as Ten Thousand Swords Clan and Dark Moon Clan, that perform outlandish skills like Heavenly Foot and Three Invincible Palms, this film is swamped with colourful cartoon animation force-beams, cell animated daggers, cartoon flames and so much more!
Super-fu powers!
It’s all kicking off!
One character uses Tortoise Style: the ability to fake death, whilst another master lets loose with the Wrath of Ten Thousand Buddhas Stroke, which results in loads of cartoon buddhist swastikas flying everywhere, as trees break, lightning flashes and a storm rages! That’s quite a technique!
Flaming Cloud Devil launches his Wrath of Ten Thousand Buddhas Stroke…
…which causes cartoon swastikas to fly everywhere!
The soundtrack, very often loud and discordant, adds to the wild, off-kilter nature of the movie, helping to compliment such over the top visuals as the villain known as Foot Monster using a super-extendable leg to attack adversaries, a kid with a large facial cyst from which he can squirt acidic fluid, turning his victims into green mush, plus the unsheathed Golden Dragon Dagger that looks and sounds like a lightsaber!
Jianfei wields his lightsaber, er, I mean Golden Dragon Dagger!
Foot Monster, played by Shih (ENTER THE DRAGON) Kien, unleashes his extendable leg…
…which can stretch really far!
A kid warrior squirts acid pus from his big boil!
BUDDHA’S PALM is a riotous amalgamation of sounds, cell animated power effects, insane fantasy super-fu skills and larger than life characters. Wonderful stuff!
Another shot of Dameng, Flaming Cloud Devil and Jianfei
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Colourful cartoon eye candy!
Okay, one more look at cute ol’ Dameng…
Dameng is always doing stuff in the scenes he’s featured in
Directed by Pao Hsueh-Li, starring Danny Lee, Tan Nei, Lin Chen-Chi and Shih Chung-Tien.
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The hero fights a gorilla skilled in kung fu. You heard me right: a gorilla skilled in kung fu!
Saying that this Shaw Brothers movie, based loosely on the novel ‘Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils’, is off the wall is no understatement…
The pre-credit sequence features the Emperor’s brother sending light beams from his fingers to shoot off the legs of his lover’s husband, Wang Yu Win (names vary depending on which film print you watch): yikes!
Using a finger-beam to shoot at the legs of his lover’s husband!
First one leg is sliced away…
…and then the second leg is shot off!
Twenty years later, Wang (aka Yellow Robe Man) seeks revenge on the man who crippled him, by attempting to kill his foe’s son, Tuan Yu (Lee). Oh, by the way, Wang now has metal, telescopic, clawed bird feet which he can contract and expand for use in battle!
Wang can eject his metal bird feet over long distances with his super-extending tubular limbs!
Wang is aided by his brother, who has dime store fangs, a bald, veined, scabby scalp, a metal crab-type pincer in place of one of his arms and a partly mangled face. At one point this dude pinches a guy in the groin with his pincer, lobbing the victim through the air.
Wang’s brother ain’t pretty
Watch out for his pincer!
Fight!
Tuan Yu is helped by a girl called Ling Ar, who has the power to make snakes glow and bore into people’s bodies, and masked swordswoman Miss Moo, who is revealed to be his stepsister.
One of Ling Ar’s magical, glowing snakes
A cheap-but-colourful set
Tuan Yu wrestles with a giant, red snake that attacks him in the woods. He wins and, because he drank some of the serpent’s blood, he attains the power to fire beams from his hands (like his dad) and the ability, at one point, to run up vertical walls.
Tuan Yu battles the snake in the water!
When Moo and Tuan Yu are thrown into a pit, they are attacked by a kung fu-skilled gorilla (a man in a suit, of course)… and Tuan Yu kills the simian adversary by using a hand-strike to chop off one of its arms!
Kung fu gorilla!
This ape won’t be so happy…
…once he gets his arm chopped off!
Tuan Yu develops even more powers after eating a glowing, green toad. This makes him totally invincible, enabling him to escape the pit.
Tuan Yu, his father and the Emperor, all of whom can fire laser/heat beams, have a final battle with pole-legged Wang and his clawed brother. Tuan Yu, who is now really super-charged, blows the fanged brother’s head off and then blasts Wang, who dissolves in multi-colours onto the floor. Miss Moo also dies, and Tuan Yu rides off with Ling Ar.
Folks have got all kinds of powers in this film…
…including the ability to shoot heat-beams from their hands
Zap!
This oddball production contains lots of optical/cell animated beam/magic effects during the finale and also boasts an oral flamethrower trick: Wang breaths flames onto his foes and, during the last fight, there’s a contest between his jet of flame and Tuan Yu’s red/green hand beams.
The merging of weird storyline, so-so optical effects (Miss Moo fires cartoon darts out of a bone weapon), theatrical, colourful sets, frenzied pacing and a gorilla that knows kung fu does manage to elicit a decent amount of warped respect for this film!
Flame breath!
This isn’t a normal bone…
…it fires cartoon darts!
Some more imagery for the flick…
Chinese poster
German ‘limited edition’
German video cover
One more look at the snake fight…
Sssssssssss!
And, finally, let’s see the villain’s ‘mouth flamethrower’ technique in action…
Directed by Meng-Hua Ho. Starring Danny Lee, Ping Chen, Lily Li, Lun Hua, Hsieh Wang and Angela Yu Chien.
He’s oily and he’s a maniac
There’s no escaping the Oily Maniac…
Written by Lam Chua (as Tsai Lan), this Malaysia-set story revolves around disabled seeker of justice Sheng Yung, who works for a law firm and finds himself compelled to use a spell that turns him into a supernatural, oily being, enabling him to protect his childhood sweetheart Little Yue (Chen) from lowlife characters.
Sheng (Danny Lee) loves Little Yue, though the film reveals that his disability stops her from returning the affectionSheng dribbles beneath the door as a viscous puddle……and then turns into the roaring Oily Maniac, ready to kill Little Yue’s would-be rapist attacker!
Yung, however, begins to use his sludgy alter ego to inflict muddy vigilante justice on various other deceitful characters, including an unlicensed female surgeon who botches boob jobs and an actress that accuses an innocent neighbour of rape in court. Once Yung discovers that his corrupt, sleazoid boss is in cahoots with Yue’s new boyfriend, in a scheme that will eventually lead to Yue’s rape and suicide, events rapidly spiral out of control, climaxing in confrontations with machete-wielding thugs and the local cops.
An example of less than perfect breast surgery…
The Oily Maniac runs amok in an operating theatre! The female surgeon gets splatted!
This Shaw Brothers release, sporting pretty decent production values, is a crazy blend of 70s-style exploitation, horror and action, with some courtroom dramatics added to the mix.
Courtroom shenanigans
The movie’s unique selling point, of course, is the Oily Maniac himself, initially brought to life when Sheng kneels at the bottom of a pit he’s dug in the centre of his living room, chanting a special spell as the hole fills with water. Sheng is submerged beneath the muddy waters… then rises back into view, transformed into a yellow-eyed, mud & oil-coated humanoid monster… as the music from JAWS plays on the soundtrack! This bizarre, grungy creature has an exposed, red beating heart and emits an echoey roar similar to the kind of sounds the monsters made in the cartoon series SCOOBY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU!
Sheng performs the ritual that will turn him into the Oily Maniac
Look into my glowing, yellow eyes…
The Oily Maniac can turn into an animated, not particularly realistic mud puddle, which slithers around the place, before forming back into a slime-covered humanoid. We see this cartoony splash of goo zipping about floors and walls quite a few times in the movie, accompanied by the JAWS music! After his various attacks, the Oily Maniac always changes back into Sheng, who wakes up lying on the floor of his home, covered in oil splotches.
Here comes the animated slime puddle!
Whenever Sheng wants to become the monstrous maniac, he must coat himself in oily substances to trigger the transformation, so we get to see him do such things as pump diesel over his body at a gas station or submerge himself in a barrel of boiling oil near a road construction site.
Once he’s the Oily Maniac again, he can either slither about as that squirmy puddle or go on the rampage as the lumbering, blobby beast. Interestingly, when it suits him, the Oily Maniac ceases his slow, cumbersome mode of walking and becomes able to leap around very agilely indeed, dashing across rooftops and running over the top of vehicles.
At one point the Oily Maniac spits out oil……which splatters all over his attackers!
Memorable set pieces include the glistening, oil-coated monster rising from a pink bathtub to attack a victim and a rampage through an operating theatre that specialises in restoring women’s hymens!
A hymen-replacement operation that will soon be interrupted by the Oily Maniac!
It came out of the bathtub!
As a scared lover prays for mercy, the muddy monster paces away after killing his latest victim in her pink bathroom
Danny Lee, years before starring in John Woo’s THE KILLER (1989), dabbled in several fantastical Shaw Brothers productions in the 1970s, including THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977) and THE SUPER INFRAMAN (1975). But it’s in THE OILY MANIAC that Lee gets to really immerse himself in an oddball, weirder-than-weird tale. As Sheng, who is disabled (due to contracting polio as a child), he is initially a browbeaten character inspired to become a powerful, avenging pile of slime to protect Little Yue, but his motivations become increasingly muddled, leading to him killing nurses simply because they happen to work for the unlicensed surgeon.
The Oily Maniac seeks revenge on Sheng’s shady boss as he canoodles with his secretary in a car
Constantly finding excuses to feature bare female breasts and various misogynistic moments, THE OILY MANIAC is certainly sleazy much of the time, intermingling these exploitative sequences with avenging monster action that predates Troma’s THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984).
The gooey glob-thing in action!
The scenes featuring the vengeful mud-man are actually not particularly gory, but they’re certainly outlandishly enjoyable to watch, culminating in a couple of large-scale showdowns, where we see the Oily Maniac transfixed with blades and shot at by the police. But there’s no stopping this sebaceous mound of muck, who can always turn into a pool of cartoon sludge, so when his slimy arm and his oily head get chopped off at one point… they simply regrow again! Finally, it is a co-worker, who loves Sheng, that ends the Oily Maniac’s reign of vigilante terror by setting him on fire.
Oily Maniac’s arm is cut off……but it grows back!Oily Maniac’s head is cut off……but it grows back!Don’t ya love the look of this muddy mutha?!
A colourful, cruel, crazy Shaw Brothers B-movie gem.
UK DVD cover
Okay then, one more shot of this oily beauty…
Echoey growl!!!
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien.
Monster Zone 