The Centipede Horror (1982)

The Centipede Horror (1982)
Chinese Title: 蜈蚣咒
Translation: Centipede Spell

Starring: Margaret Lee Din-Long, , Michael Miu Kiu-Wai, Stephen Yip Tin-Hang, Chan Fook-Choi, Hussein Hassan, Wang Lai, Yau Pui-Ling, Lau Tik-Fan, Amy Chan Suet-Min
Director: Keith Lee Pak-Ling

Centipedes are a species of arthropod that don't get a whole lot of love in Western genre cinema. I don't know why. They're fast; they have lots of legs moving at the same time; they're voracious predators capable of eating anything in their path, including small vertebrates; and they're venomous to boot. But the West has ignored them in favor of spiders (giant and normal-sized), scorpions, cockroaches, crabs, ants, and wasps. I think we got a glimpse of an oversized centipede in Peter Jackson's King Kong (when Naomi Watts is hiding inside a log), but that's about it.

The Chinese, however, have a greater appreciation for the animal. Perhaps it's because the creature has a greater role in its people's reality. There are at least two movies (Jet Li's Last Hero in China and Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee's Kid from Kwangtung) that feature a centipede dance, much like the more traditional Lion Dance and Dragon Dance. And let's not forget A Chinese Ghost Story II, which features a giant flying centipede at its climax. 

And then there's this film. I came into this film with high hopes. After all, Chinese cinema has famously been known for venturing so deep into the bizarre that almost anything else seems tame in comparison. They also refuse to "play by the rules" in terms of what to depict and who to kill. Chinese movies often benefit from a breakneck pace, which foregoes tension-building in favor of throwing as much at you as the filmmakers can imagine. 

A rich young woman (Yau Pui-Ling, of By Hook or By Crook) goes to SE Asia (presumably Thailand) with some friends against the wishes of her mother. Apparently the woman's grandfather had warned the family to never visit that region. The woman is attacked in the sticks by a legion of centipedes and is hospitalized. The woman experiences extreme necrosis from her wounds and eventually succumbs to them (although the fact that centipedes pour out of the oozing wounds upon her death let us know that SOMETHING IS UP). Her brother (Michael Miu Kiu-Wai, of Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars and The Dragon Family), who had flown to Thailand just in time to see his sister die, starts investigating his family's background to find out why his grandfather wanted his kin to stay the heck away from SE Asia. And *that* will ultimately the brother in harm's way.

First things first: I like how Western movies portray the backwoods of Thailand as a hot spot for old muay thai masters, while the Chinese think of the place as crawling with black magic sorcerers.

So, is this film weird, bizarre and transgressive? Yes and no. It feels pretty standard until the last act, which gives us a White magic exorcism and a duel between black and White magic sorcerers (Hussein Hassan and Shaw Brothers veteran Stephen Yip Tin-Hang) that includes reanimated chicken skeletons, plus a few nasty images to close out the film. The way the villain meets his maker is especially strange, although it sort of makes sense with the film's internal logic. Beware of magic talismans bathed in snake venom. 

The most transgressive moment come during a flashback sequence which explains why the grandpa had made the cryptic warning to his family. I find it hard to see Hollywood doing the same thing in a movie.

The finale is basically the Chinese version of the "They're Creeping Up On You" segment from Creepshow, but with centipedes. People who get the heevy-jeevies just by looking at creepy crawlers should love this part.

What about the pace? The film starts out good, but bogs down a lot in the second act when the main character starts his investigation. The only weirdness we see is a sorcerer curing a woman of a scorpion spell, with the help of his two pet ghosts (unlike the rest of the magic, the movie actually explains how that Works). It picks up again at the end, but a lot of the tension has dissipated by then. So what should be frightening and disturbing is mainly just weird and gross.

Part of the reason the second act bogs down is because of the sketchy way the magic is portrayed. The film is extremely ambiguous in just how much of the film's events are related to magic spells directed at the victim, and how much of it is an actual curse. If it were more explicitly the latter, than the film might have held a little more tension during the second act, since we would know that the hero is racing against time to solve the mystery and save himself. The nature of the spells and how they function is left to our imagination, and that's okay. But how the hero had encounters with centipedes and visions of kids in red before he went back to Thailand is never explained and eventually forgotten. Were they bad omens? Were they part of a curse? Is it karma? We never find out and it ends up hurting the film.

In his Asian Cult Cinema, author Thomas Weisser described this movie, especially the end, as being a cinematic endurance test. I never felt that, although people with low tolerance for many-legged creatures may feel differently. To me, it was a pedestrian horror film with a few weird, memorable, and even gross moments.