The Boxer's Omen (1983) aka Mo (Arrow 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC 10bit AAC 1.0 Commentary HeVK) Chih-Hung Kuei Phillip Ko Fai Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong Wai Ka-Man Johnny Wang Lung-Wei Bolo Yeung Sze 80s zombie religious spider fantasy thai

The Boxer's Omen (1983) aka Mo, directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, Arrow remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original Cantonese theatrical mono, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085951/

Video encoded in two-pass 15.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available. Subtitles converted to SRT.

Note : This film is hard to talk about, because it makes my head hurt. This utter insanity is reminiscent of stuff like The Seventh Curse, Devil Fetus, or Holy Virgin vs Evil Dead, but with more Buddhist monky business, bad bat puppets, extravagant optical effects, and really slimy gore. It stars Phillip Ko Fai, Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, Wai Ka-Man, Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, and our old friend Bolo Yeung, and they're all giving their utter best to make this incredibly weird film work. Despite the sometimes laughable puppets and other ridiculousness, this is actually a pretty lavish production, the cinematography at times is very good, a lot of it was apparently shot on location in Thailand and Nepal, there are a lot of large-scale set pieces, and when the practical effects work, they really work, including some impressive fire effects and extravagant matte paintings.

Trying to summarize this is a fool's errand, really, but here goes: Chan Hung is a Hong Kong criminal whose brother Wing is a heavyweight boxer. Wing barely wins a brutal fight against Thai opponent Bu Bo, played by Bolo Yeung, but Bu Bo attacks him after the fight is over, and leaves him paralyzed. Soon after, the leaders of Hung's criminal organization are killed, and Hung is kidnapped, but an apparition of a Buddhist monk spraying water for some reason intervenes and kills the kidnappers. After this, Hung begins to have religious visions, and when his brother asks him to avenge him, he travels to Thailand to pursue Bu Bo. While in Thailand, he visits a temple, and the monks there tell him his coming was prophecied by the temple's head abbot Qing, who was killed by magical spiders injecting snake venom into his eyes a year earlier just as he was about to achieve final victory over a trio of black magicians in Hong Kong. Qing is dead, but sustains his soul in his decaying corpse, and needs Hung, who's his twin brother from a previous incarnation, to become a monk and finally defeat the evil sorcerers, helping Qing achieve immortality in the process. Hung agrees, and is trained as a monk under the name Baluo Kaidi. When he achieves mastery of the mystic arts, he becomes a hunter of evil, and after a magical duel with the sorcerer who killed Qing, he triumphs and brutally kills him. However, when he returns to Hong Kong, he can't resist having sex with his hot girlfriend, and thus troubles start, and the only way for him to defeat the remaining evil wizards is to retrieve the ashes of one of Qing's previous incarnations from a temple in Nepal, but an sexy undead zombie warrior woman created from a corpse and gestated inside a dead crocodile's guts is in close pursuit...

A pretty decent remaster here, not entirely clean, and grain is a bit variable, but color and contrast is good, and detail is fine. Note that a few shots, most notably nude scenes, seem to be taken from a lower quality source, but it's not all that distracting when you're busy ogling Wai Ka-Man's tits. Mono track also sounds fine, and the commentary track is interesting and informative, but probably a bit too serious than what this movie ideally needs.

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