Black Magic

As far as I know this is a shaw bros. film. You can see touches of what I like to call "shaw-gloss". If you have seen many shaw movies you know what I am talking about. Reguardless of what I guy above me said, I enjoyed this film. I found it compelling to be quite honest. The setting being a "modern" urban city and jungle. A morality play or soap if you will, with bits of horror/gore thrown in for good measure. Fans of Asian horror might want to give this a try. It is oldschool. This is not a martial arts film . In one movie you get Ti-lung, Lo-lieh, nudity, breast-milk, potions, human flesh, decapitation, cool cars, crazy colors, Ti-lung with shades, a warlock, the list goes on. I bought the 2002 celestial/image version DVD. Quality was great. Decent sound/subtitle options. Tons of trailers which we all love. Keep an open mind this is an older movie from another country. Try something different!

Excellent cinematography, well-lit and razor sharp. Insane black magic rituals loaded with gore and offal. A creepy, well-directed classic from the Shaw Group, Black Magic is packed with sickness and perversity. The Saturday morning kids' TV show optical effects at the end was a poor way to end it.

This film is so essence of B. It has it all: voodoo, old hags, centipede eating, breast milk and the clichéd good versus evil battle at the end. It's so B, you can't help, but laugh through it all. No matter how much you criticize the film for its cheesy plot and sets as you're watching it, you're sure to watch it to the end!

A working class guy tired of working for a living has his sights on the wealth of a very spoiled rich woman who won't have anything to do with him. She in turn has it all, but as a rich,spoiled woman that's not enough. She wants the man she can't have, an honest working class man in love with the good working class girl. Enter evil magician who specialized in both love and death spells.

While the Shaw Brothers are definitely best-known for their martial arts flicks (as evidenced by a couple peeved reviews on this website), they did dip their fingers in other genres here and there. BLACK MAGIC was one of their forays into the horror sub-genre, telling the tale of a black magician and his various customers looking for love, murder or both.

BLACK MAGIC contains some nastiness and some awesome here and there: we've got rice given magical qualities by female genitalia, breast-milking, dead folks dissolving into maggot-infested skeletons and laser beam-shooting skulls. The problem, however, is that in between a few awesome scenes, the movie does really drag and gets quite repetitive (the black magician sets a curse, the good magician reverses the curse, then the black magician reverses it again, etc., etc.). It's all watchable, but it gets pretty run-of-the-mill near the middle. Luckily, the last 5-10 minutes are fantastic and worth wading through the mediocrity.

Overall, this is worth a look for Hong Kong horror fans, but you could do better if you looked around. For example, just a year later, the Shaw Bros. put out a (name-and-theme-only) sequel, BLACK MAGIC 2, which cranks the crazy factor up a couple notches and is basically an improvement in every way.

Ti Lung stars as construction worker Xu Nuo, who is the object of desire for his sexy millionaire boss Luo Yin (Ni Tien); however, despite the obvious attractions (horny woman hot for his body and bags of cash into the bargain), Xu Nuo remains faithful to his fiancé, teacher Quming (Lily Li)—at least until the desperate Luo visits evil sorcerer Sha Jianmai and pays him to whip her up a love potion...

Legendary Hong Kong martial arts studio Shaw Brothers had dabbled in supernatural horror before, producing spiritual romance movies, but it wasn't until 1975 that they started to embrace their trashier side, with Ho Meng Hua's Black Magic, a tale of evil sorcery and sex that introduced some of the more exploitative elements that would become staples of the genre in the years to come.

With Sha Jianmai's magic requiring such bizarre ingredients as a severed head, snake venom, a freshly exhumed corpse, rice that has been applied to a woman's vagina, severed fingers, centipedes, human breast milk, blood, hair and footprints trapped in mud, and the result of his spells being uncontrollable lust or sudden death, viewers can rest assured that this entertaining slice of wackiness delivers plenty of blood, gore, nudity and other assorted deviancy.

This being the first of its kind, it might not be quite as relentlessly nutzoid or as extreme as later, similarly themed films like Seeding of a Ghost, Corpse Mania or The Boxer's Omen, but it definitely has enough moments of madness to make it worthwhile, the action culminating with a particularly funny magical battle on a building site between Sha Jianmai and a benevolent magician, whose weapons include a skull emblazoned laser mirror, a shrunken head, and magical blue streaks of lightning.