If I was having a bunch of friends over for a Halloween night marathon of bat-crazy Horror, of course Hausu would be on the agenda. I’d introduce people to Alucarda and Horrors of Malformed Men, but The Boxer’s Omen is the one I think everyone would be talking about the next day because its particular insanity is closest to Hausu, but it doesn’t have that film’s reputation.
Reading other reviews has convinced me that I don’t want to try and describe the plot, because it ends up taking several paragraphs and it doesn’t make things any more clear. It’s one of the last films by Hong Kong’s The Shaw Brothers and opens normal enough with a kickboxing fight. Afterwards there are monks and demons, black magic, zombie animals, spiders who slurp up a strange brew with tiny straws and a nude woman covered in flies who is magically birthed from the sealed corpse of a crocodile.
It’s rare that I will recommend a film simply for its bizarre imagery, but despite some of the images being rather gross my overall reaction is one of “where has this film been all my life”. The endless creativity on display is exhilarating, and exhausting before the end, though as soon as it was over I was looking up other films by this director. Many of the effects are practical and look cheap, but that was part of the fun. I wasn’t dazzled by images but admiring the parade of DIY craziness.
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