The Boxer’s Omen

The Boxer’s Omen, Kuei Chih-hung’s second-to-last film, is absolutely unlike anything you’ve seen before. The director’s Shaw Brothers career is only recently enjoying renewed appreciation after giving us some certified classics across genres, from women-in-prison war pictures (The Bamboo House of Dolls, 1973), to biker-gang flicks (Killers on Wheels, 1976), to wuxia (Killer Constable, 1980), and beyond. However, he may be best known for his horror output. The super-sleazy and nihilistic The Killer Snakes (1974), which injected gore and sadomasochistic fantasies into a Willard variation, may be Kuei’s best-known, or most infamous, work to the foreign market. Yet my favorites have always been his black-magic films.

In 1975, Ho Meng-hua unleashed Black Magic onto Chinese audiences, kicking off a glorious new subgenre. While not as extreme as much of its offspring, the film still has its share of cannibalism, corpses, bug-eating, and nasty curses. Typically, this subgenre involves some poor sucker looking for more out of life, turning to sorcery, and finding out that the forces unleashed are more than they bargained for. Goopy special effects and abundant nudity are also usually involved. Kuei gave us several mainstays in this vein, including Hex (1980) and Bewitched (1981), but The Boxer’s Omen is definitely the pinnacle.

A semi-sequel to Bewitched, the film follows Chan Hung (prolific actor Phillip Ko rocking some seriously awesome ’80s HK gangster style), who swears vengeance on Thai fighter Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung, who definitely doesn’t get enough screen time) for paralyzing his brother during a boxing match. This rather standard setup leads Hung to Thailand, where he naturally becomes involved in a holy war between a gang of black-magic sorcerers and Buddhist monks attempting to grant their dead abbot immortality. So you basically have 10 to 15 minutes of routine revenge drama (minus a couple of religious apparitions) before 75 minutes of sheer what-the-fuck-did-just-watch imagery assaults your senses. There are reanimated animal corpses (multiple kinds), floating heads with dangling entrails attacking people, trained-assassin spiders, brutal boxing bouts, masses of maggots, some sex (of course), potions made from human brains, a rotting corpse sewn into a dead crocodile that turns into a naked undead devil-woman, and more neon lighting than you’d find in any Nicolas Winding Refn film.

This is Kuei firing on all cylinders, green-pus explosions and all. A technical marvel willing to go all the way to offend in its excesses, The Boxer’s Omen is a must-see-with-friends experience. The film abandons its basic plot to become an orgy of visuals that will be seared into your brain—until you begin to doubt you actually saw what you think you did. It is a shame that Kuei made only one more movie (the 1984 comedy Misfire) before leaving Shaw Brothers (after 33 features and four shorts), emigrating to California, and opening a pizzeria. He had a distinct gonzo style among the studio’s talent pool, and his rediscovery more than 20 years after his death is much-deserved. 🩸