I Would Like to See It: The Boxer's Omen

A Buddhist monk travels to Hong Kong to do battle with a dark sorcerer. With a single gesture he reduces the man to a bubbling pile of slimy, greenish flesh which then crumbles away, a time-lapse shot of worms eating through the facsimile of of a body to expose the withered crone beneath, who in turn collapses and decays until a bat emerges from her mouth and flies to the monk’s palm. Returning to Thailand, the monk performs an intricate religious ritual at his monastery to bind and destroy the bat. We cut to another dark wizard, informed as we meet him of the destruction of his servant — the bat — which he reanimates by eating live rats and spitting their blood onto a twinned skeleton. The monk destroys the bat’s animate skeleton with a golden hammer. Irate, the wizard summons and milks a trio of cobras and then feeds their venom to some spiders. Some time later we see him infiltrate the monk’s temple, himself creeping spider-like along the ceiling, and release said spiders, which drop onto the monk’s face and pierce his eyes with poisoned needles, killing him.

We see literally all of this in an aside to what up until that moment was the main plot, and the minute it’s done we cut back to the unrelated monk explaining it. Chih-Hung Kuei’s The Boxer’s Omen is completely batshit. It’s a movie where a magician in silk pajamas cuts off a chicken’s head and sprinkles the blood on crocodile skulls, where a dead monk tells a small-time boxer that they were twins in a previous life and now their fates are forever entwined, where a bunch of wizards create a hot homunculus by sewing a bunch of goop inside a dead crocodile and barfing on it. At no point does it offer explanations. At no point does it slow down. Here’s a Buddhist automaton wielding half a dozen swords and hammers. Here’s three grown men emerging wrapped in cellophane and dripping with pink goop from the corpse of a woman. Here’s a bunch of crocodiles mating and swimming around! Why not!

Phillip Ko is charming as horny greaser-turned-Buddhist champion Fei Kao and the film’s martial arts sequence (there’s an entire boxing subplot sort of dropped into the middle of the ongoing battle between good and evil) are fun and lively. Its sets are a bizarre mixture of gorgeous Buddhist temples and monasteries and random cheap sound stages, and combined with its complete lack of interest in “fooling” its audience by aiming for realism with its special effects there’s a hectic sense of stage production about the whole thing, like we’re watching a gigantic, expensive pantomime play out while someone happens to record it. There’s nothing quite like The Boxer’s Omen. Its formula, so far as it has one, certainly doesn’t lend itself to easy reproduction. That’s the source of its charm, really; it’s completely and totally unique, a frenetic blend of a dozen different art forms, from puppetry to the performing folk arts, which joyously rockets off wherever it wants to go.