Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex Trilogy (1980-1982)

(which is only a trilogy because the Shaw Brothers said so, but those are the rules of exploitation filmmaking.)

Hex (1980): The first Hex falls right into the middle of one of the Shaws’ small early 80s commercial renaissances, when suddenly, their black magic movies were a real commercial, centipede-filled proposition. Hex, though, particularly reminds me of a cross between Les Diaboliques and a Japanese kaidan, with only the last act that includes an incredible, beautiful and very very weird, colour-gel filled exorcism, going full on HK-weird when most movies would be starting to put their feet up for an epilogue.

Here, an abusive husband is drowned by his ill, long-suffering wife (Tanny Tien Ni not doing the femme fatale for once; I actually prefer her in this mode) and her new maid, only to apparently return as a ghost. There follow quite a few twists – even a few twists too many for my usual tastes, but Kuei (who also co-writes) times every reveal so well, I didn’t find myself caring about the implausibility and strained logic of certain “natural” explanations.

Visually, this is a deeply moody film, full of the darkest shadows, highly dramatically expressive weather, and drenched not only in rain showers but in all the colours of Hongkong horror, all of which fit melodrama as well as horror and the thriller form and its plot twists.

Hex vs Witchcraft (1980): So, following the success of Hex, the Shaws apparently felt the need to put a sequel out as quickly as possible. This went to cinemas only three months after the first film. How many centipedes had to die for the black magic needed to manage that magic trick? Apparently none. Instead, the studio got by simply renaming the next film Kuei was working on, a goofy gambler and ghost comedy in which a shiftless, luckless and deeply unlikable gambler (James Yi Lui) is pressed into marrying a female ghost who proceeds to wreak well deserved havoc on his life, and occasionally turns into a skeleton-faced ghost in a black widow’s dress that looks rather like a German Edgar Wallace krimi villain.

Apart from this having sod all to do with the first film – for obvious reasons – HvW also suffers from not being a great comedy. Now, it is true that comedy often doesn’t translate very well over language and cultural borders, so maybe there’s some great, clever wordplay here, or really funny dialogue. Though, given how much emphasis Kuei puts on “funny” noises on the soundtrack to remind the audience some bit of slapstick is supposed to be funny, I rather doubt the existence of hidden depths.

Be that as it may, physical comedy and slapstick do tend to translate well enough, and here, too, the film just falls flat. The timing of those scenes is off more often than not, and there’s also very little imagination on display when it comes to the set-up of the general physical goofiness. It’s all very bland and generic, and not even particularly interesting to look at.

Hex After Hex (1982): The final Hex keeps with the gambling and ghost comedy, but is an all around more accomplished film than its predecessor. Perhaps because our ghost Rosy’s (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) new husband is portrayed by Lo Meng, whose martial arts training does give him a leg up in the realm of physical comedy (though you wouldn’t confuse him with Jackie Chan), or perhaps because the film generally has better ideas for its slapstick set-ups and includes a couple of the moments of copyright-smattering insanity so beloved of Hongkong cinema of this era – here, Rosy transforms first into a dime store yoda and then into a version of Darth Vader that has clearly studied magical girls anime – or perhaps because Kuei does at least from time to time display a bit of the visual imagination that makes his better movies so exciting.

This still isn’t a masterpiece, mind you, well, perhaps the climax is, but it is a marked improvement on the middle film of the not really trilogy.

The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Original title: 魔

When his brother Wing (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei) is so badly hurt in a ring fight against a rather evil Thai Boxer (Bolo Yeung) he’ll never be able to walk again, gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) swears vengeance. Before he can do much about it apart from setting a date with the villain, his daily life of fighting and tough-guying is interrupted by a glowing buddha-like figure who spouts water like a rather improbable water fountain. Said figure wants Hung to come to him, for reasons he’s not going to explain.

As luck will have it, when Hung comes to Thailand for his grudge match against the Thai Boxer, he stumbles upon a temple whose abbot the glowing figure apparently is. Said abbot was close to achieving either nirvana or bodhisattva status when he was cursed during an extensive long range magic duel against a black magician. Now, instead of attaining a glorious state, he’s starting to slowly rot away.

Which is a problem for Hung as well, because in a former life, he was the abbot’s twin; they are still spiritually connected, so the curse will kill Hung as well, eventually. The only way out is for our very reluctant protagonist to become a monk (abstaining from sex is a real problem for this friend of the female breast) and learn some proper Buddhist magic. And even if Hung should manage to beat the magician, there are further complications in front of him.

This bare description of its first forty minutes or so does not in the least do justice to the incredible amount of macabre craziness Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Boxer’s Omen gets up to. Much of the film is taken up by a series of magical duels that take place on black sound stages with mood lights, during which an incredible amount of some of the weirdest stuff ever put to screen takes place. Heads rip themselves from bodies, eyes turn to maggoty holes, little bat skeletons slow-motion hop away, and so on, and so forth until one is overwhelmed by the film’s sheer focus on being weird. Once things have gotten going, which does not take long at all, there’s no stopping Kuei’s – or screenwriter Szw-To On’s – imagination when it comes to body horror, strange uses of body parts, and whatever you might imagine belongs into a film like this.

I’ve seen enough black magic and Buddhist horrific folk magic in movies to actually recognize quite a few of the tropes and magical basics on display here, but The Boxer’s Omen uses their more traditional weird only as a springboard for flights of wild and macabre visual fancy that are peculiar even for the weirdest stage of horror filmmaking in Hongkong. Despite the film mostly consisting of a couple of – pretty great – martial arts fights and drawn-out magical duels, there’s really never a dull moment here. That’s not only thanks to Kuei’s willingness to make every idea he encounters weirder, but also because he has such a great eye for creating a mood of the truly outré throughout, a hand for the exalted camera angle as well as for the most bizarre lighting choice for any given scene. The film seems to set out to stretch the concepts of the folk magic concepts it uses to such extremes, they leave the actual logic underlying them behind and become a form of pure free-floating weirdness. It is an exhausting joy to watch.

Reflecting on the film afterwards is rather more like trying to remember a vivid and utterly bizarre nightmare than thinking about a movie I’ve seen, which either is a huge recommendation or a terrible insult, depending on who is reading this.