Das Omen des Bösen

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.

"Black Magic" is an entertaining bit of Shaw Bros. craziness about witchcraft and breast milk.

The plot, as is often the case with Hongkongese flicks, feels like it was made up while the movie was made. For example, it concerns a battle between a good and a bad magician, but the good magician isn't introduced until the end of the movie. Wouldn't it have made sense to establish him as a good guy earlier on?

Characters also come and go without rhyme or reason. You get used to seeing certain people and expect they'll stick around, but oftentimes, they don't.

However, if you're a fan of weird Asian movies - and there are no weirder movies than those from Asia - you'll probably think that that adds to the film's bizarre, off the wall charm, which it has in spades.

The plot concerns several people visiting an evil magician in Malaysia to produce love potions and occasionally, to have people killed. These potions require hair torn from the person's head, and sometimes also breast milk taken straight from the source. I read some rubbish online about this movie being softcore, but that is ridiculous. There's no sex, and the only nudity shows a bare breast while the milk is extracted.

Anyway, assorted people visit the bad magician to get potions and put curses on each other, until the good magician is introduced and they have a fight in a construction yard.

Apparently (according to Wikipedia) the bad magician fell in love himself with one of the girls, but I don't remember that.

The movie is really just a collection of nifty set pieces involving black magic and its supernatural effects on people. There's not enough of a plot to string parts of the movie together, so I felt my attention waning. Either way, there's enough weirdness to please fans of Asian cult flicks, and the movie is generally entertaining.

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.

Black Magic is a Shaw Bros. film made back in 1975. Some think it is their first horror film but it is not. The movie is basically a modern story (modern of '75) of old Asian folklore. This movie spawned many films that were similar but none were quite on par with this. Usually, the others were far more violent and that is what they relied on. This movie didn't need to be gory in-order for it to be good.

The story is about a very selfish rich woman. She can have anything she wants. Anything except a certain man who wants nothing to do with her. So she goes and finds the help of a Black Magic Magician to put a love spell on him. The spell works until the mans wife and friends find the help of another magician to break the spell and kill the Black Magic Magician.

That is the storyline for the most part. You would have to watch the film because there is a lot more going on than just that.

This film is certainly not as violent as some of the Shaw Bros. films that I have seen, but, it is a nice change from all of their Martial Arts films, which are excellent as well. The story is well done and you actually start caring for some of the characters. So when bad things happen to them you start getting really frustrated.

For fans of Asian Cinema everywhere, this movie comes highly recommend from me and from many others. Check out the nice DVD that was released not to long ago, it's worth the money. 8/10

Martial arts hero Ti Lung plays Hsu Lo,who runs up against an evil black magic practitioner San Kan-Mi.San Kan-Mi wants to seduce Hsu's fiancée Wang Chu-Ying and places a death spell on him and a love spell on her,hoping to kill two birds with one stone.Another veteran witch doctor comes to the rescue of the spellbound lovers...Slightly gruesome horror flick from the legendary Shaw Brothers.There is self-mutilation ,grisly black magic ritual involving freshly buried corpse and finally some people are disintegrating into masses of putrid flesh,maggots and bones in a matter of seconds.I haven't seen "Black Magic II",but it's supposedly even more gruesome.If you liked this check out also hysterically funny "Oily Maniac".7 out of 10.