Jiang tou

As far as I know this is a shaw bros. film. You can see touches of what I like to call "shaw-gloss". If you have seen many shaw movies you know what I am talking about. Reguardless of what I guy above me said, I enjoyed this film. I found it compelling to be quite honest. The setting being a "modern" urban city and jungle. A morality play or soap if you will, with bits of horror/gore thrown in for good measure. Fans of Asian horror might want to give this a try. It is oldschool. This is not a martial arts film . In one movie you get Ti-lung, Lo-lieh, nudity, breast-milk, potions, human flesh, decapitation, cool cars, crazy colors, Ti-lung with shades, a warlock, the list goes on. I bought the 2002 celestial/image version DVD. Quality was great. Decent sound/subtitle options. Tons of trailers which we all love. Keep an open mind this is an older movie from another country. Try something different!

Ti Lung stars as construction worker Xu Nuo, who is the object of desire for his sexy millionaire boss Luo Yin (Ni Tien); however, despite the obvious attractions (horny woman hot for his body and bags of cash into the bargain), Xu Nuo remains faithful to his fiancé, teacher Quming (Lily Li)—at least until the desperate Luo visits evil sorcerer Sha Jianmai and pays him to whip her up a love potion...

Legendary Hong Kong martial arts studio Shaw Brothers had dabbled in supernatural horror before, producing spiritual romance movies, but it wasn't until 1975 that they started to embrace their trashier side, with Ho Meng Hua's Black Magic, a tale of evil sorcery and sex that introduced some of the more exploitative elements that would become staples of the genre in the years to come.

With Sha Jianmai's magic requiring such bizarre ingredients as a severed head, snake venom, a freshly exhumed corpse, rice that has been applied to a woman's vagina, severed fingers, centipedes, human breast milk, blood, hair and footprints trapped in mud, and the result of his spells being uncontrollable lust or sudden death, viewers can rest assured that this entertaining slice of wackiness delivers plenty of blood, gore, nudity and other assorted deviancy.

This being the first of its kind, it might not be quite as relentlessly nutzoid or as extreme as later, similarly themed films like Seeding of a Ghost, Corpse Mania or The Boxer's Omen, but it definitely has enough moments of madness to make it worthwhile, the action culminating with a particularly funny magical battle on a building site between Sha Jianmai and a benevolent magician, whose weapons include a skull emblazoned laser mirror, a shrunken head, and magical blue streaks of lightning.

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

"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.