The Seventh Curse (1986)

Just perfect...

Crappy film

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The Seventh Curse is an early Chow Yun Fat movie and is described as being a Hong Kong Indiana Jones. The major difference is that Indiana Jones never received an R rating in Australia (R = restricted to viewers over 18 years of age. Recently I discovered that the R rating in the United States is not the same as the R rating here in Australia. Chasing Amy received an MA in Australia and an R America but I digress).The movie is about an anthropologist, Dr Chester, who stumbles across an attractive woman bathing in a pool in the middle of the jungle in Thailand. He is warned by the expedition leader that she belongs to a tribe run by a witchdoctor, but he ignores his warnings and goes and looks at the tribe. He discovers that the woman is going to be sacrificed to a demon (actually an ancestor, but basically a demon) so he throws caution to the wind and rescues her. Unfortunately they are caught and everybody in his expedition is killed. He escapes but has been inflicted with a curse which causes eruptions on his body. This curse is saited but after a year it begins to happen again so he must return to Thailand and find an antidote.There isn't much in this movie to discuss because it is little more than an adventure movie. The version I watched was dubbed, which is bad because the sound track has to be redone meaning that the sounds effects tend to be worse. I prefer subtitled films. The movie deserved its R rating because it had people being ripped apart by demons, spinal cords being sucked out and generally a lot of grossness. What I found weird (and a little annoying) was that they blacked out the rude bits in the movies. I really don't understand why they did that. If the actress didn't want her rude bits shown then they could have filmed it differently. It just really seemed unusual that they would do such a thing.This was a reasonable movie. It had lots of action and lots of mooks getting beaten up and gunned down. It had demons ripping people to pieces and it had the typical Indiana Jones type of stuff with deadly idols, ancient traps, and evil witchdoctors. Not something that stands out. The thing is that they ended it on a moral note as this woman who was deformed was not able to have her deformities removed so they said, "beauty is on the inside, not on the outside." This statement I sort of hold true and I shall explain below.The one thing that we become preoccupied with is the fact that we want a "good looking girlfriend." There is nothing really wrong with that, but what can one describe as being good looking. Well, I think Plato describes it the best in the Symposium. There are levels, starting with the physical and ending with the absolute. One may go for physical beauty but soon discover that this is simply an empty shell with nothing inside, so we go up to the intellectual, the moral, and finally the absolute. What is the absolute? Well Plato claims that it is not possible to exist in this shadow world, but the truth is that you know when you encounter the absolute, because you just know. No, it is not the one true love, because I know of a number of women whose beauty to me is absolute yet I would not marry any of them.

The slick Dr Yuan who' s searching for an Aids cure stumbles across a sacrificial ceremony to an ancestral god in the jungles of Thailand. So he risks his life to rescue Bachu and because of that he receives a blood curse from the evil sorcerer. For about a year or so the curse was halted, but now it's starting to affect him again. Pockets of blood burst from his veins and the seventh time it happens will kill him, so he must venture back to rid this curse that could kill him in a couple of days.Honk Kong's take on an Indiana Jones film you could say, is rather over-the-top nonsense and incredibly comical. It fascinatingly dives into action-horror-adventure-fantasy mode, but there's no real substance behind it and cohesion. Though, saying that this mixed hybrid does equal a lot fun with it dabbling in black magic, martial arts, shootouts, sacrifices, gore, nudity and broad comedy. So basically this extravaganza is high on energy with its lively action set pieces and strong violence that overshadows the illogical and ludicrous plot that has some scenes which are totally unbelievable to comprehend. The way it starts out you may think it's just another normal action/martial arts film, but then you'll see how offbeat this adventure really is.Low-budget special effects fill the screen, which are fairly shoddy (walking skeleton, which are a bizarre sight) or there are some decent and memorable creations. Such as the little demon imp that looks pretty horrendous and that goes for the attitude too. The transformation scene of the ancestral demon, which kinda resembled that of the monster in "Alien", is pretty well arranged and it looks fairly good. The score was fairly forceful and energetic, but sometimes it got too sappy. Jumpy camera-work went hand-to-hand with the frantic pace. The performances were all over the place and some just got on my nerves. Chow Yen-Fat has only has a small role, but he makes the most of it. The dialogue is incredibly stilted tripe, but hey it goes with this camp and the humour on show was slapstick and rather juvenile. Well-staged and creative deaths are achieved to great impact. Graphic face peeling and bubbling, kids getting crushed, ripping body parts and body spilling out maggots are just some of those. The backdrop made great use of the dense jungle setting and that of the ruins and temple; especially the massive Budda set-up. We're also given a graphic climax with an abundance of guts and flesh and a big body explosion to end it. There's even room for a moral to end the story with and it's delivered in a rather cheesy way.It's nothing else more than exploitation/supernatural/action galore with tremendously high-spirited stunts (when they go flying by force they really fly across the screen) and buckets of blood.

This could be discribed as a splatter version of Indiana Jones. Throw in some martial art scenes, stupid looking monsters and a dull Chow-fat, and The Seventh Curse is what you get! It's stupid and badly acted, but the entertainment value is huge. This is what entertainment is all about...

THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986) is something of a companion feature to WITCH FROM NEPAL (1986) a similarly themed Hong Kong supernatural thriller which also features Chow Yun-Fat. CURSE is the more entertaining of the two, thanks to its frequent action and impressive gore effects, although WITCH had a more interesting premise and would have made a better film with more imaginative direction. CURSE has plenty of imagination, but not enough of a story to keep us involved in the twists and turns of the convoluted plot about a Hong Kong doctor seeking to rid himself of a blood curse by going back to Thailand to confront the sorcerer who cursed him. (WITCH was about characters from Nepal who come to Hong Kong to follow the central character.)SEVENTH CURSE is a film in the `Wisely' series about a young expert in the occult, played by a different actor in each of the films (the others include LEGEND OF WISELY and BURY ME HIGH). Wisely, here called `Wesley' in the subtitles, is played by Chow Yun-Fat, who has only a supporting role as he is called on to help out his friend, the doctor, at various points. Chin Siu Ho plays the kung fu-fighting doctor and may be known to kung fu fans for his roles in the Jet Li films TAI CHI MASTER and FIST OF LEGEND. Maggie Cheung plays a nosy lady reporter, the kind that barges into every dangerous situation imaginable. Dick Wei, the Nepalese sorcerer in WITCH FROM NEPAL, plays a good guy here, a Thai warrior who helps the doctor in Thailand.There are lots of action scenes involving kung fu combat or shootouts in which the heroes face down dozens of anonymous Thais. The white-faced sorcerer, Aquala, played by Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, makes quite a formidable villain and has a pack of monsters at his disposal, all created with make-up effects similar to those used in the ALIEN series and numerous Hollywood monster films of the time. Given the lower HK budgets, the effects here are quite good. There is a Crypt-Keeper-style living skeleton called `Old Ancestor' who, at one point, sucks what appears to be the spinal cord from a man's back.The problem with the gore effects is that no one really takes the monsters very seriously. Chow stands around smoking a pipe incessantly, even in the midst of peril. We're never actually scared by the over-the-top effects. Only Maggie reacts with fright and emotion, although her character is so quick to scream, like so many old monster movie heroines, that we don't really feel any tension. Still, HK fans will be hard-pressed not to drop their jaws at the sight of two of HK's greatest stars, Chow Yun-Fat and Maggie Cheung, battling bloodthirsty reptilian monsters in a giant cave in the film's finale.There are cameo appearances by kung fu vets Wang Lung Wei, Yasuaki Kurata, and Kara Hui Ying Hung in the opening action scene, a terrorist/hostage/SWAT team standoff in an office building.