Flinthart’s review: Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s — say what you like about the dodgy effects, the atrocious dubbing, the bizarro-world subtitles, the trails of crippled stuntmen and everything else, you still have to acknowledge it as one of the all-time great explosions of cinematic creativity. This was the period that made Jackie Chan a household name. This was where and when Michelle Yeoh really earned that Oscar of hers. Jet Li, Donny Yen, John Woo, Maggie Cheung, Wong Kar-Wai, Stephen Chow, Anita Mui, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark – check the career histories, and you’ll see just how much talent came screaming, kicking, chopping and shooting out of that brief time and that little place.

Back in the day, I was at university in Brisbane. Every now and again my mates and I would head into Fortitude Valley and the big old Chinatown Cinema. We’d bring in enormous soda bottles reloaded with vodka mixers, buy a pile of really weird snacks in the lobby, and then head up into the balcony seats to watch these wild, crazy, half-incomprehensible hyper-kinetic films while down below the random hookers and drug dealers did their business as usual. We never bothered them, and they didn’t give a damn about a bunch of crazy-ass gwailoh boys cheering and joking and laughing themselves stupid up there in the high seats.

Good times.

But you can’t review a whole decade of cinema, can you? I only wax lyrical here because frankly you kinda need to understand a little bit about the time and place that spawned it if you’re going to have any chance at all of facing up to a movie like The Seventh Curse (also known as Doctor Yuen and Wisely). You see, it was kung fu that threw Hong Kong cinema into the spotlight, making Bruce Lee a superstar and turning the whole world onto chop-socky epics. (Cue Carl Douglas – ‘Everybody was Kung Fu fighting! Those kids were fast as lightning…’) But by the eighties, kung fu period pieces just weren’t chopping enough cabbage any more.

Hong Kong, with an abundance of capital (both legal and illegal – I’ve often wondered how many billions were laundered through HK cinema back in the day), an explosion of talent, and a dearth of annoying occupational health and safety rules was absolutely churning out the movies. Sure, there was still an awful lot of kung fu… but buoyed up by an increasingly affluent Chinese audience (not to mention a growing geeky subculture worldwide) the film-makers were reaching out to embrace – well, pretty much anything and everything. Basically, if it was successful for Hollywood, the HK crew would grab chunks of whatever it was and just stuff those pieces into whatever they happened to have lying around.

Thus if you actually watch The Seventh Curse (and you probably should, because it’s ridiculous fun) you should be prepared to see a monster which clearly owes a lot to Aliens (released that same year, by no coincidence at all) and a sequence where intrepid temple-robbers must run from a giant rolling rock – err… stone Buddha head – that reeks of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s also plenty of guns, explosions, kung fu, fiendish magic, gore, boobs, and of course, untrustworthy subtitles. This is HK cinema at its most frenetically silly: glorious, batshit-crazy fun.

It’s got the cast for it, too. The irrepressible Maggie Cheung herself is Rainbow, the terminally cute wannabe-reporter perpetually diving headlong into danger and insanity. Siu-ho Chin (who probably should have been on that list at the start) is the remarkably athletic Doctor Yuen, as willing to go with the WHO into the weirdest chunks of darkest Thailand as he is to co-operate with the HK police department in a daring plot to resolve a deadly hostage crisis.

Best of all, Yuen’s bosom buddy ‘Wisely’ (Or Wesley? Or Wai Sei Lee?) is none other than Chow Yun-Fat, the absolute pinnacle of coolness himself. Seriously: Chow Yun-Fat is to ineffable suaveness what Bruce Lee is to legendary kung fu. His pipe-smoking occultist character moves between socializing with gorgeous women, creating counter-spells for hideous curses and grotesque magical parasites all the way to obliterating brutal monstrosities by the effective use of a shoulder-launched anti-tank grenade – which he does without so much as rumpling his elegant designer suit, naturally. He’s just that damn cool.

Plot? Oh, you want a plot? Yeah, The Seventh Curse has got plot. Way too much plot, really. It starts in a wood-panelled retiring room that could grace any English stately home. A bunch of folk in tuxedos and formal gowns are trading wit, and we segue into a story told in flashback: The Seventh Curse, in which Dr Yuen and Wisely(?) confront hideous magics from the deepest jungles. Mind you, this bit of the story starts with the Hong Kong police trying to storm a building full of armed no-goodniks with hostages. Of course, the best way to do that is to send in Doctor Yuen to treat an injured hostage… with guns and flash-grenades because that’s how a good eighties HK doctor operated.

The cunning plan is derailed by the intrusion of Rainbow, a cub reporter intent on Getting The Story by throwing herself at whatever looks most dangerous and violent in any given situation. Despite Rainbow’s intervention, the resourceful Doctor Yuen manages to (violently! Guns! Kung fu!) create an opportunity for the HK police to storm the place. Of course, Doc Yuen is kinda pissed at Rainbow, which sets the scene for a sort of HK interpretation of an adversarial romance/rivalry between the two, complete with car chases and one-upmanships. But Yuen gets back to his apartment where he discovers a surprisingly naked woman. Before things can get sticky a complete rando ninja-type breaks in, kung-fu fights Yuen, tells him that one year is up and his blood spell is activated and he should stay away from sex.

Spoiler: Yuen doesn’t.

Once blood erupts from Yuen’s thigh in the middle of fun and games with Surprisingly Naked Woman, the only possible thing he can do is consult ultra-cool occultist Wai Sei Lee, his bosom buddy and ‘master’ of some sort or another. Wisely(?) asks him (in between practicing his putting) if he’s ever been to Northern Thailand… and naturally, this cues a nested flashback. (So we’re now in a flashback sequence within an entire story told in flashback. Yeah. Cop that, Inception!)

Now things get really complicated. First, total babe Betsy erupts nymphlike from the jungle waters clad (Why?) only in a thin white tunic-thing that clings transparently to her excellent curves. Yuen is immediately love-struck. Not that it does him any good: Betsy is a member of the deadly-dangerous Worm Tribe, noted for their fiendish magics. Not only that, she’s already got a thing going with Black Dragon, a dashing young Worm Tribe warrior (AKA the ninja-rando who turned up to smack Yuen about and tell him the one-year period of grace was over.) Worse: Betsy has spurned the advances of an Evil (is there any other kind?) Priest of the Worm Tribe who is trying to extort sex out of her by threatening to sacrifice her to Old Ancestor… so Betsy’s a bit unavailable.

This doesn’t stop Yuen from checking the situation out and there we see Old Ancestor come to life as first a clumsy mummy-puppet thing, rapidly transforming into a xenomorph-like murderbeast once he gets a bit of blood in him from a couple other hapless sacrifices. One long sequence of escapes and fights and captivity and explosions and magic spells and helicopters and mass battles later, Doctor Yuen has fled, but he’s under the influence of the Seven Blood Curse and a year later, he’s got just six days to live.

Can Wisely come up with a plan to break the curse, destroy the Evil Priest and Old Ancestor, free Betsy to boink Black Dragon and still keep his briar pipe lit? Oh, yeah. You bet he can. But Yuen’s going to have to recover some Holy Ashes from a Buddhist temple full of ass-kicking kung fu monks, and there’s a bunch of Worm Tribe types stealing a hundred children for their blood so the Evil Priest can renew his Little Ghost spell and…

Yeah. Excellent. Make some popcorn and grab some drinks. Doctor Yuen and Wai Sei Lee are gonna kick epic monster butt!

Intermission!

• How does a cub reporter cover a hostage situation? Easy! Knock out the policewoman pretending to be a nurse and take her place. Yep. That’s not gonna cause trouble.
• Uh, wow. Where the hells did Yuen get that awesome coat?
• Creative use of an inflating car jack! Yuen 1, Rainbow 0
• Surprise! Naked Babe!
• Surprise! Ninja Attack. Oh wait… is there any other kind?
• Dammit! How is Chow Yun-Fat that cool?
• You gotta love women who swim in filmy white tunics…
• ‘My guys’? Who wrote these subtitles? Ouch!
• Mummies! Special effects! Monsters! Blood!
• Kung Fu battle between Doctor Yuen and a ludicrous mummy marionette? Hells yeah!
• ‘Besty! Besty!’ – yeah, brilliant subtitles again.
• ‘I’ll punish you on behalf of God…’ Why? Is He busy or something?
• Betsy? Seriously… why are you… oh, hell. Did you just cut a lump out of your boob and feed it to Yuen? Oh, the humanity!
• That’s a big Buddha…
• Huh. Chow Yun-Fat is so cool he doesn’t even need to reload his grenade launcher!