The Seventh Curse / Dr. Yuen and Wisely / Yuen Chun Hap yu Wai See Lee (1986) ***

     Along with peplum and oddball TV flicks, another hitherto-neglected corner of the cinematic cosmos where I’d like to spend more of my time going forward is the realm of Asian— and especially Hong Kong— fantasy and horror films. I don’t mean martial arts movies here, although I’m sure there’ll end up being plenty of overlap. Rather, I’m looking to explore the world of hopping vampires, Chinese witchcraft, Malay and Indochinese cryptids, yokai, and that sort of thing. For a Westerner, this remains even now a cinema of steep learning curves, regarding which reliable information can be difficult to come by. That, more than anything, is what’s kept me merely nibbling around the edges of Asian fantasy and horror all these years, but now I’m sorely in need of a challenge to rekindle my enthusiasm for this website. Forcing myself to become a clueless neophyte again by charging headlong into unfamiliar territory seems like just the thing. The Seventh Curse, meanwhile, seems like a good place to start, since its horrors are purely the products of modern Chinese imaginations, neither requiring nor particularly rewarding hours of preliminary research into traditional Asiatic bogeymen or ideas about the supernatural. The film nevertheless features plenty of wild shit of a kind that you’re simply not going to find in any comparable production from Europe or the Americas.

     There is one thing, however, that it’s useful for a gwailo to know going into The Seventh Curse: the film’s heroes are the brainchildren of hugely prolific, Shanghai-born and Hong Kong-based pulp novelist Ni Kuang. The principal protagonist, Dr. Yuen Chan Hsieh, figures in 32 of Ni’s books, while the savant whom Yuen calls in for backup— whose name is variously transliterated as Wesley or Wisely— figures in an incredible 145 (plus several more books by other authors writing with Ni’s blessing, but without his direct participation). I’ve not read a word of any of them— indeed, I can find no indication that any are even available in English translation— but from what little I’ve been able to piece together, the Yuen stories are mostly adventure yarns in which the doctor gets himself into various sorts of trouble with isolated cultures and forgotten holdovers of ancient civilizations, while the Wisely stories tend to be paranormal mysteries in something like the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin. I wish I could tell you whether or not Ni was actually influenced by those characters (or others like them), but like I said, this is a field in which reliable information is hard to find if you can’t read Chinese. Nor have I been able to ascertain whether The Seventh Curse was adapted from some specific, previously published Ni Kuang story, or whether screenwriters Wong Jing and Yuen Kai Chi merely threw together ideas plucked willy-nilly from Ni’s back catalog. Either way, Ni was directly involved in the production at least to the extent of playing a fictionalized version of himself in a framing sequence that presents the two heroes as real-life friends of his.

     If we disregard the frame, then The Seventh Curse begins on an unexpected note, with a SWAT team (or whatever the Hong Kong police call their local equivalent) under the command of Captain Ho (Yasuaki Kurata, from Call Me Dragon and Unicorn Fist) responding to a hostage situation. After an exchange of gunfire, one of the criminals announces that the cops have managed to wound a hostage, sending him into a heart attack or a seizure or some such thing. Ho gets the bad guys’ permission to send in a doctor, and then summons Yuen Chan Hsieh (Chin Siu Ho, of Mr. Vampire and Demon of the Lute), a physician whom the captain rather bizarrely identifies as being renowned for his courage. Ho has an ulterior motive in securing medical attention for the injured hostage. He intends for his subordinate, Inspector Chiang (Kara Hui Ying Hung, from The Brave Archer and The Peacock King), to accompany Yuen disguised as a nurse, and bearing a first-aid kit stuffed with flash-bang grenades. When the grenades go off, Ho’s men will exploit the ensuing confusion by storming the building. Unfortunately, Ho hasn’t figured on dimwit heiress photojournalist Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, of Hero and Flying Dagger). Rebuffed by the officers maintaining Ho’s perimeter, she sneaks in, waylays Chiang while the latter is changing into her nurse’s uniform, and takes the inspector’s place. Unsurprisingly, her substitution throws a huge spanner into the works, and while it’s difficult to blame Tsui Hung specifically for the needlessly massive body count in the forthcoming raid, we can’t really say she has nothing to do with it, either.

     Over the next several days, Tsui Hung makes an enormous nuisance of herself for Dr. Yuen. That’s because her interaction with him at the scene of the hostage crisis convinced her that he was a big news story just waiting to happen, and she figures a beefcake pictorial in the society pages of one of the papers for which she freelances would be the perfect way to introduce him to the media-consuming public. (I’ve often wondered, by the way, if journalism in the Sinosphere is really anywhere near as screwy as movies from that region make it out to be.) The reporter may actually be the least troublesome pest following Yuen around right now, though. One night, just as he’s settling into a romantic evening in with his English-speaking gwailo girlfriend (Fairlie Ruth Kodrick), a Thai bruiser (Dick Wei, from The Kid with the Golden Arm and Zu: The Warriors from Magic Mountain) who calls himself Hak Lung— “Black Dragon”— breaks into Yuen’s luxurious flat. Yuen punches first and asks questions later (for a doctor, his kung fu isn’t half bad), but he’s ultimately no match for Hak Lung. Instead of delivering the expected finishing blow once Yuen is down, however, Hak Lung merely immobilizes the doctor and tells him that his blood curse is now a year old. No, Yuen doesn’t understand what that means, either. Hak Lung also tells Yuen that somebody named Bachu (hilariously transliterated as “Betsy” in the English-language subtitles) has been placed under a ghost spell, and badly needs his help. Yuen must come to Thailand for the sake of both her life and his. Finally, Hak Lung warns Yuen to abstain from sex until this whole business is sorted out; arousal will only exacerbate the relapse of his curse. Naturally, the doctor doesn’t listen to any of that. He just climbs right into bed with his girlfriend as soon as Hak Lung leaves, and no sooner is the deed done than Yuen suffers an explosive hemorrhage in his left thigh. Blood curse, you say?

     The following evening, Yuen goes to see not Hak Lung, but an old mentor of his who is well versed in the mysteries of the occult and the paranormal. Yeah, that would be Wisely (Chow Yun Fat, from Bed for Day, Bed for Night, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Naturally, Wisely will need the full background if he’s to be able to help his younger friend, and the telling of Yuen’s tale triggers a flashback that consumes roughly a quarter of the film. It seems that exactly one year ago, Yuen was in Thailand as part of an expedition led by a Western botanist (Ken Boyle, of Twisted Love and The Ghost Snatchers). They were seeking a cure for AIDS within the cornucopia of the Southeast Asian jungle, but what they found was an isolated people known as the Worm Tribe. Yuen met and fell in lust with a girl of the Worm Tribe— the aforementioned Bachu/Betsy (Return of the Demon’s Chui Sau Lai)— and thereby became embroiled in a tribal power struggle when the shaman Aquala (Elvis Tsui Kam Kong, from Sex and Zen and Holy Flame of the Martial World) chose her for sacrifice to a malevolent undead being called Old Ancestor. Yuen tried to rescue Bachu, and succeeded exactly as far as enabling the girl to escape from both Old Ancestor and Aquala. Unfortunately, he also got every other member of the expedition killed, and himself put under a magical curse that ought to have slain him, too, in seven days. The only reason why Yuen is alive to tell his story now is because Bachu caught up with him on the sixth day, and transferred to his body her specimen of the supernatural parasite that gives her people their name. As we now know, however, the power of Bachu’s magic tapeworm sufficed only to drive Aquala’s blood curse into remission for a single year. Now that it’s active again, Yuen will surely die unless he can find recourse to stronger magic. Wisely informs him that there’s nothing he can do there in Hong Kong. He will have to accompany Yuen and Hak Lung to the Thai jungle to see what counter-spells might be available from the Worm Tribe’s hostile neighbors. Oh— and Tsui Hung will be coming, too, on account of she’s Wisely’s cousin. You won’t like that any more than Yuen does, I promise you.

     No one should be terribly surprised to discover that The Seventh Curse is bugshit bonkers, at least not if they’ve ever seen more than two or three other genre movies of Chinese origin from approximately the 1970’s through the early 1990’s. What might be a tad surprising, though, is how well made this movie is at the same time. If I had to identify a single scene from The Seventh Curse as indicative of its essence, I’d point to the first clash between Yuen and Old Ancestor, before the latter transforms into a cross between Gyaos and a Giger alien. What we have there is a kung fu fight between a man and a full-sized marionette mummy, which isn’t the least bit shy about looking exactly like what it is, and yet the scene works anyway. That’s partly because Old Ancestor is just a really terrific puppet, comparable in both design and build quality to the ones that sometimes represent the Knights Templar zombies in Tombs of the Blind Dead and its sequels, but with the looser articulation needed to punch, kick, and leap with sufficient speed and agility to pose a credible-seeming threat to Chin Siu Ho. But it’s also a matter of cunning editing, judicious lighting design, and inventive choreography. I’m not sure how Hong Kong movies handle the division of labor between directors and action directors, so I’m also not sure how to divvy up the credit between Lam Nai Choi and Yuen Bun (who held the two positions respectively on The Seventh Curse), or between the staffs of artists and technicians working under each of them. What I am sure of is that their work amply compensates for whatever limitations Old Ancestor possessed, and gave that wired-together bundle of fake bones an illusion of life and personality fit to rival many of the far more sophisticated puppet characters in contemporary Hollywood productions.

     More generally, but on a related note, I’m very impressed with The Seventh Curse’s illusory visual sumptuousness. True, Golden Harvest was a major studio by Hong Kong standards, but I’m nevertheless used to their movies from this era (at least the ones made without overseas financing) looking cheap and shoddy. The Seventh Curse rarely does. Whether it’s flaunting Yuen and Wisely’s jet-set lifestyle or trying to spook us with a haunted tomb, this movie displays a level of craftsmanship and even taste that is wildly disproportionate to its actual production cost. It’s an almost Bava-esque feat of budget-stretching. There may be some substance to that comparison, too, because Lam Nai Choi turns out to have something important in common with Mario Bava: they were both cinematographers before they took up directing, and they both remained cinematographers even after they graduated to the folding canvas chair. I’ve often noticed that directors who got their start as cameramen tend to have a knack for squeezing the maximum possible visual flair out of whatever pittance their producers saw fit to grant them. On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that Lam had some help during the envy-porn segments of the film, insofar as The Seventh Curse enjoyed an impressive assemblage of high-end product placement. I’ve never seen a movie with so many brand logos in its closing credits! At the very least, all those endorsements must have spared the production considerable expense when outfitting the various rich-dude apartment sets, freeing up commensurate amounts of cash for monster suits, ambulatory crypts, and gore effects.

     Speaking of which, the last thing I want to mention about The Seventh Curse is its exuberance in the field of blood and guts. It isn’t just the amount, the explicitness, or the effectiveness of the carnage in this movie that stands out, but the cracked imagination that went into devising new ways to sicken the audience. Dr. Yuen’s daily explosive hemorrhages are just the beginning, too. Old Ancestor turns out to eat the spinal cords of the people offered to him in sacrifice. Aquala keeps a sort of supernatural attack dog called the Little Ghost, which somewhat resembles a large, deformed fetus, and which kills by chewing its way into, out of, and through its victims’ bodies. And the creation of the Little Ghost requires the blood of 100 children, which Aquala and his lackeys harvest by tossing kids into a granite squishing machine! Of course, Lam’s final film was the infamous The Story of Ricky, so arguably that sort of thing is only to be expected from him. Still, the kid-squisher is a hell of a thing to have sprung on you without warning. I approve wholeheartedly.

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