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 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.

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.

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!  

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.