Gou hun jiang tou

Incredible Chinese horror sickie about an evil warlock who casts nasty spells and creates an army of living dead by driving magic nails into dead people's skulls. If the nails are removed, the zombies rot into viscous messes. All kinds of ultra-vileness, such as worms slithering from wounds, eyeball-eating, a man pushing a spike through his face, the caesarean birth of a lump of putrescent tissue, pulsating sores, and more pretty good barf-inducing scenes. Weird and great, along the lines of The Devil. Stars Ti Lung and Lo Lieh, so you know there's a little martial arts action, such as a fight on a skylift. Rarely seen, so take any chance to see it you can - kill if you have to!

You might be surprised by the "Black Magic" films, as they have no martial arts in them yet they were made by the famous Shaw Brothers' Studio. Instead they are gross films about the occult. However, despite the gross scenes, most of it is really pretty tame. What IS gross are the scenes where the octogenarian black magician is shown drinking human breast milk to stay youthful! Yuck! And, speaking of that, this and the previous film in the series both have a lot of nudity--so it's probably not a good film to watch with your mother.

As for the first film (1975), it was a thoroughly stupid and low-budget film. While this one is also stupid and low-budget, it manages to work much better--with a more believable bad guy, better special effects and some really, really spooky scenes. It's still not an especially good film, but considering how bad the first one was, it could only improve!! Not worth seeking out unless you could use a laugh or have a bizarre fetish about breast milk.

Two doctors Ti Lung and Lam Wai-tiu take wives Tanny Tien Ni and Lily Li on vacation and there they met the horrors of black magic.Lo Lieh plays an evil sorcerer,who whips female pubic hairs and breast milk into powerful zombie potions,controls his creations via giant metal spikes pounded into their heads.Not only does he turn Li into an walking dead after luring her from the group,he casts a love spell on both Ti's wife and his colleague.This surprisingly eerie Shaw Brothers productions offers some nifty special effects and gross-out moments.I enjoyed "Black Magic" and "Black Magic Terror" and this sequel to Meng Hua Ho's horror hit is also worth looking for.7 out of 10.

In a Hong Kong hospital, worried doctors scratch their heads about a patient covered with pulsating ulcers, who is diagnosed as suffering from black magic. Another patient has worms crawling under his skin. It's the work of a zombie master named Fang, who hangs out in discos, drinks human milk to survive, and drives a Mercedes-Benz.

He picks up a woman at a bar, takes her to his basement dungeon, and pulls a long spike out of the top of her head with a pair of tongs. The spike enables his zombie spell, so right away she keels over, turns into a hag, and expires.

Fang captures one of the doctor's wives, demanding, "I shall drink your milk every day, understand?" The rest of the movie's dubbed dialogs is just as wild. Using his victim's pubic hair, he creates a potion to make her produce milk. Meantime, the doctors sit around talking about how they don't believe in magic.

Eventually, they set a trap for Fang but it backfires. Only one man is left to confront the magician, as well as an army of zombies that includes some of his friends, who have been "spiked." Much of the film's horror imagery is appalling: One woman becomes pregnant overnight and aborts a monstrous fetus; someone who tries to double-cross Fang starts pulling out clumps of his hair and quickly melts into a fleshy blob.

It is some time since I had watched a Hong Kong film from the Shaw Brothers and this turned out to be quite a surprise. Number one was the fantastic clarity of the picture (thank you Blu-ray) but No.2 was that instead of being set in the British colony, these are Singapore locations. Mainly we see the botanical gardens but also a glimpse of Orchard Road and the cable cars going over to the island. No sight at all of Chinatown! Story is crap, acting pretty much the same but there is so much vigour here and the urge to put everything in that we get quite a concoction. I liked the nine inch nails, hammered in and wrenched out of people's skulls, the main protagonist's need to drink human milk (one of many opportunities for nudity) and the gory seeping body fissures brought on by the infamous 'black magic'. Not for everyone but rather a novelty.