Zhong gui

Yang Chuan's "Zhong gui" (released internationally as "Seeding of a Ghost") represents Shaw Brothers' late-period foray into supernatural horror, arriving at a time when the studio was already beginning to wind down its legendary output. This 1983 offering attempts to blend noir-tinged crime drama with traditional Chinese black magic folklore, though the execution feels uneven throughout its 88-minute runtime.

The film opens with a compelling premise that immediately establishes its dark trajectory. Philip Ko delivers a committed performance as Chow Tung, a taxi driver whose mundane existence becomes entangled with forces beyond his comprehension. Ko, a former member of the celebrated Venoms troupe, brings a grounded intensity to his role that anchors the increasingly bizarre proceedings. His transformation from ordinary working man to grief-stricken widower seeking supernatural vengeance feels authentic within the film's heightened reality.

Norman Chu provides solid support as the mysterious sorcerer whose accidental encounter with Chow sets the narrative machinery in motion. The dynamic between these two characters forms the emotional core of the film, with Chu's performance walking the line between menacing and sympathetic. However, the supporting cast, including Maria Jo as Chow's ill-fated wife Irene, feels somewhat underutilized given the dramatic weight their characters carry.

Yang Chuan's direction shows flashes of atmospheric brilliance, particularly in the film's opening act where he establishes a palpable sense of urban dread. The Hong Kong locations are captured with a gritty authenticity that serves the story well, creating an environment where supernatural elements feel organically integrated into the city's shadows. The cinematography effectively uses darkness and confined spaces to build tension, though the visual effects work varies considerably in quality.

Where "Seeding of a Ghost" stumbles is in its tonal inconsistencies and pacing issues. The film struggles to maintain momentum during its middle section, with certain sequences feeling indulgent rather than necessary. The revenge plot, while emotionally justified, unfolds in ways that feel both predictable and occasionally exploitative. The supernatural elements, which should provide the film's most compelling moments, sometimes veer into territory that feels more sensational than genuinely frightening.

The film's treatment of violence and sexuality reflects the Shaw Brothers house style of the early 1980s, though modern viewers may find certain aspects dated or problematic. The practical effects work, while ambitious for its time and budget, doesn't always convince, particularly during the film's more fantastical sequences.

"Seeding of a Ghost" succeeds best when it focuses on the human drama at its center - a man's grief and his desperate desire for justice. The exploration of how loss can drive someone to embrace darkness provides the film with its strongest emotional beats. However, the execution of this premise feels somewhat hollow, never fully committing to either its crime thriller elements or its supernatural horror aspirations.

SEEDING OF A GHOST is a pretty bizarre HK horror film about infidelity and revenge. Although the film is pretty decent as a whole, I didn't find it quite as gory or intense as many other reviewers.

A cab driver is out doing his thing one night and accidentally runs down a sorcerer (talk about bad luck...). The sorcerer talks about a curse on the cab drivers family and the driver ain't really buyin' it...until his wife is raped and murdered, that is. The cab driver goes back to the sorcerer to try and enlist his help in exacting a little black-magic revenge on the thugs responsible for his wife's death, and things start to go downhill from there. The sorcerer and the cabbie dig up the cabbie's dead wife to use in a ritual to bring vengeance down on those involved with her death. The resulting payback sure is a bitch...

SEEDING has some pretty decent scenes and a few gross-out moments, but not quite as many as I was expecting. The pace is pretty slow at first and the "cool parts" don't really happen until pretty close to the end. The creature that bursts from the pregnant woman towards the very end is pretty cool looking and is rightly compared to some of the creature FX used in Carpenter's THE THING. Not a bad film overall, could have used a little more gore and a little more action towards the first half of the film. Recommended for those into strange Asian horror. 6.5/10

I have been putting this off for a few years (I have had the DVD since 2009) mainly because I thought it was going to be shockfest that outdid The Boxer's Omen in gonzo-style horror. Well it was not even close to The Boxer's Omen which still holds a place deep in the suppressed subconscious of my cranium (actually it is more weird and gross than actually scary). In fact this has to be one of the most overstated and over-hyped horror films of Hong Kong though this is not a horrible film.

Chow (Phillip Ko: The Boxer's Omen, Shaolin Intruders) interrupts black magic by inadvertently saving the life of a black magic priest who is being chased down by an angry mob. Because of this the priest says at best he will get very sick and at worst his whole family will die. Since this is a horror film we know which scenario is going to take place. A film with him just being sick would not be as fun. But it is especially hilarious that it seems that the angry mob gets off clean and that he picked up the priest far from where the incantation went awry. I am probably over-thinking this.

Chow's wife Irene has been cheating on him because of his lowly taxi driver job, taxi drivers are a deranged lot (ask Anthony Wong), and his hair (seriously one of the worst wigs I have seen, worse than a Sammo Hung haircut). She is enticed by playboy Anthony Fong Ming (Norman Chu Siu-Keung: Bastard Swordsman) who visits her job of dealing cards and showers her with money, gifts, better hair (to be fair to Phillip check out Norman's perm in Hong Kong Godfather) and affection. One night those two adulterers have a fight and she gets out of the car and goes off by herself. Never good to be alone late at night when ruffians are about. She is confronted by two young hooligans who chase her down, one rapes her and ultimately she gets killed (why she runs into an abandoned house I do not know, why there would be an abandoned house in an abandoned area Hong Kong I also do not know).

When Chow finds out she is dead, he is ultimately a suspect for about 15 seconds. Fong is another suspect and despondent Chow finds out about the affair. He gets bad ideas in his head and wants revenge at all costs for those involved and goes to the black magic priest (still dressed like a shirtless jungle native; I wonder if he goes to the store like that) to seek revenge. This requires that they dig out his wife's corpse and he is warned that his monomaniacal revenge will likely result in his demise as well. The corpse is used quite effectively and it is creepy, the most scary aspect of the film. You can see it on the cover of the DVD and poster.

Fans of horror could do worse by seeking this out. I do not think it is as unique/interesting/gratuitous as Black Magic or The Boxer's Omen out of the Shaw Brothers horror oeuvre and I would suggest seeking those out first. This film overdoes the sleazy exploitation aspect of it, elongates the nudity and the film comes off more as a voyeuristic exercise especially in the beginning which starts to drag on. The slow motion topless running scene becomes almost absurd in its length and its use of the zoom lens. But you do get the benefit of a few fight scenes decently done involving Phillip Ko (still mad about the outcome with Norman Chu) who proves once again that you should not mess with taxi drivers or Phillip Ko. You also get a variety of gross out moments, Taoist priests, scares all done better in a variety of Hong Kong films. However, when the ghost is seeded there are plenty of horror elements, while keeping the exploitation element alive, especially towards the finale that will be of interest to viewers. There you get to witness a creature that seems inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing while a segment from the soundtrack from Alien is played.

I have the R1 Image release and it has English and Spanish subtitles. It comes with the Mandarin mono dub only. The R3 IVL release comes with both the Cantonese and Mandarin dub. At the time of the Hong Kong audience would have heard the Cantonese soundtrack, but most of the transnational audience would have heard it in Mandarin. Since at the time post dubbing was the norm and multiple dialects were often used on set it does not matter as much to me. However, this is a controversial topic where some have to have the "preferred" dub. I personally would like a release from this time period to have both the Cantonese and Mandarin language, but I will take what I can get. There are plenty of the Image released Shaw Brothers trailers (not the original trailers) on this release, but no trailer for the movie.

Angry men chase a sinister warlock through a misty cemetery. He runs into a street and under the wheels of a taxi driven by Chow, but then appears in the back seat of the speeding taxi. Irene, who deals cards at a Hong Kong casino, tries to pressure her boyfriend, Fang, into divorcing his wife so they can be together; she's married to Chow, who is diddling on the side, as well.

These characters, like the viewer, are stuck in a dull soap-opera for awhile, but SEEDING OF A GHOST shoots into high gear after Irene is raped and murdered by two young thugs. An enraged, grieving Chow blackmails the warlock into casting spells on the killers, Fang, and assorted friends and relatives.

From there, the filmmakers throw in every sick twist imaginable. Chow and the warlock exhume Irene's corpse. In the warlock's lair, and Chow is instructed to paint the decrepit body with coconut oil, "So she';ll feel better." As she comes alive, her killers start to hallucinate. One of the rapists is brought to her for some mystical necrophilia. This union culminates in a posthumous pregnancy, which is somehow transferred to the womb of Fang's expectant wife.

In the all-out, gory finale, the demon fetus liberates itself from the mother and goes on a murderous rampage. One character eats brains out of a coconut shell; there's an exploding toilet, strangulation by bra strap, gravity-defying sex, and (gulp) blood pastries. In one hideous sequence, Chow drains all of his blood into Irene's corpse as he slowly dies in agony.

SEEDING OF A GHOST is lively and competently directed, especially during two prolonged episodes in which magicians battle unsuccessful to put an end to the vendetta. Special effects credits are all top-notch, which will be of no comfort to viewers with queasy stomachs.

Yang Chuan is the man who directed this film, SEEDING OF A GHOST (1983) for the legendary Hong Kong Shaw Brothers, who produced many martial art classics and many "explicit horrors" which are so rare not many know anything about them. SEEDING is among the most insane films I've seen and this hyper rare film surpassed most likely every expections I had, and those were very high. I knew Hong Kong film makers can create things which simply cannot be found from elsewhere, and in the horror genre, they are as unique as in action and fantasy, too.

SEEDING tells the story of a cab driver (Philip Ko), whose wife has a lover whom with she spends a lot of time. One night the wife, Irene, is attacked in the street and raped and killed by some hooligans. The taxi driver husband finds her and sadly becomes number one suspect for the murder. At the very beginning and during the credits of the film, the taxi driver met a strange fellow who said he knows about and practises black magic and other "voodoo related stuff." He said to the cab driver that things may not go very well for him from now on because they have met.. Now, after the murder of his wife, the taxi driver remembers this guy and tracks him down. He finds the ominous looking man, and wants to revenge the murder of his wife. The black magic warlock agrees and he creates a horrific curse on all those who were involved in the murder. What follows is a series of over-the-top gory and insane mayhem filled with black magic, devils, tentacle monsters, worms and other things one would expect finding from Hell itself.

This film is the final nail to the coffin of the fact that the Hong Kong film makers really know how to create dark horror films, which this kind of films are called among the cult cinema specialists. Other similar "dark horrors" are (I haven't managed to track these down yet) RAPE AFTER, BLACK MAGIC and BLACK MAGIC 2 aka REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES. Many of these are produced by the Shaw Brothers and directed by man named Ho Men-Hua, and as far as I know, only RAPE AFTER isn't by Shaw and Ho, unlike many source books seem to say. I've heard this from one very reliable Asian cinema specialist who I believe of course in these difficult questions about these more-than-rare Asian films and oddities.

SEEDING OF A GHOST is dark with the capital D. There is smoke and shadows everywhere and only the beginning of the film has some genuine day light which seems peaceful and safe. But once the curse starts to affect, there's no hope for light or safety no more to the characters than the viewer! The effects are perhaps the most important elements here as they are so imaginative and detailed to the maximum effect. The monsters and creatures from the other side are as effective as in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) for example, and the budget for SEEDING wasn't too big I think, so they are all created by great imagination and talent to spend the limited budget.

The gore filled and monster inhabited mayhem on screen is incredible. There is a "devil fetus" who explodes through the hapless mother who starts to feel pain in her belly. What comes from her stomach is equally horrific as in David Cronenberg's masterpiece The Fly (1986), and it's very close to the tentacle monster in Carpenter's The Thing, too. Especially SEEDING's finale, during which this devil fetus is born, too, is an amazing barrage of bloody and nightmarish terror which cannot be controlled by the hapless people trapped inside that fateful apartment. The devil fetus once it gets born kills its victims with nasty tentacles which impale and rip anybody hapless enough to get in touch with them. There's also some very graphic nightmare scenes before the ending, too, and one of these is also illustrated in Tom Weisser's Asian Trash Cinema Book next to SEEDING review. I mean the scene in which one of the rapists suddenly starts to vomit worms while eating his food. Also the scene in which the guy gets his spine cursed through his back in explicit detail is again something never before seen in any other horror effort. These Hong Kong directors can create something which necessarily doesn't require plenty of money, but are as (and often, more) effective and nerve shocking as those made with plenty of money but not so plenty of talent.

The dialogue and screenplay isn't too great at all, and the dialogue especially is inept. People say what they think and they say things which should not be said in any noteworthy film. Everybody always screams something like "What are you doing!" when character's stomach explodes or gets his spine ripped off by an invisible force. This kind of brainless dialogue is very usual with some Hong Kong films, and I hated to find it that much in SEEDING, too. But I came to conclusion that the film is perfect in its "dark DARK horror level" so I don't give this the lower rating it deserved because of these errors. If reviewed as a piece of cinema, this would definitely not get the 10 stars rating, but when reviewed as a piece of Hong Kong terror cinema and Asian cult cinema, then this gets easily the ten rating, because it is something I hadn't seen before and something I think isn't easily surpassed anymore. I hope I can track RAPE AFTER and others of its kind down soon and see can they surpass the insanity and impact of SEEDING OF A GHOST in any way. Have a good night's sleep!