Happy Halloween 2023 - Seeding of a Ghost (1983)

Seeding of a Ghost (1983)
Chinese Title: 種鬼
Translation: Seeking Ghosts

 

Starring: Norman Tsui Siu-Keung, Phillip Ko Fei, Wai Ka-Man, Maria Yuen Chi-Wai, Wang Yong, Hung San-Nam, Tien Mi, Pak Man-Biu, Yee Muk Kwan San, Foo Ling-Kei
Director: Richard Yeung Kuen

 

Having watched this and Bewitched back to back both times, I still have a hard time deciding what to make of Seeding of the Ghost. It apparently was supposed to be part of the Black Magic series (which two films I have not seen as of yet), and books like Asian Cult Cinema suggest that it was. It certainly does deal with black magic, although the movie is practically a porno as much as it is a horror film. If you thought Forbidden World went overboard on the sex, you haven’t seen nothing yet.

The movie begins with an interesting twist of fatalism that is really a case of “No Fair.” A black magic sorcerer (Indonesian “actor” Yee Muk Kwan San) is caught grave robbing by the locals and makes a break for it. While fleeing the appropriately angry mob, he is run over by a taxi driven by Chow (Phillip Ko Fei, of Yes Madam 5 and The Loot). The mob disperses when they see that he’s been injured, presumably so as not to be implicated in a case of vehicular manslaughter. When Chow checks to see just who it was he ran into, he finds no body. A few minutes later, the sorcerer materializes in Chow’s backseat and tells him that despite his not having done that on accident, he will be cursed with bad luck. Best case scenario? He gets sick. Worst case scenario? He loses his whole family.

If Chow were a superstitious man, he would look for a Buddhist Priest or Taoist Ghostbuster to undo the curse. But he goes about life as if nothing happened. Enter Irene Chow (Maria Yuen, of Lethal Panther and Curse), Chow’s wife. She works as a dealer at a casino, which attracts all sorts of rich businessman types. One of those is playboy Fang Ming (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung, of Duel to the Death and Wing Chun), who instantly is smitten with Irene. Although she initially plays down his attempts to flirt with her, the idea of getting involved with a rich guy does seem more appetizing than being married to a humble cabbie. So, it isn’t long before she lets Fang into her knickers.

But you know how these affairs with married men go, right? At some point, they are going to want to be the Number One squeeze and no longer the Girl On The Side. Irene starts talking about leaving her husband and pressures Fang Ming to do the same to his longsuffering wife (Wai Ka-Man, of The Boxer’s Omen and City Ninja). Fang Ming is reluctant to give up his wife and during an argument while Fang is driving Irene home from one of their trysts, she gets out of the car in a huff…in the middle of nowhere. I guess Fang Ming shouldn’t have pissed off a couple of young ne’er-to-do-wells in a convertible a few minutes earlier, because they find Irene alone in the dark and immediately try to rape her. They chase Irene into an abandoned mansion, where the rich kid, Peter (Hung San-Nam, of Masked Avengers and Treasure Hunters), rapes her. When it’s Paul’s time, the dude chickens out, but not before he accidentally pushes Irene off the balcony, where she is impaled on a set of decorative wrought iron spears.

It is Chow who finds his wife’s body, albeit through a series of supernatural coincidences that lead the police to count him as one of the suspects. The subsequent investigation reveals that Irene was sleeping with Fang Ming and that Peter and Paul may very well be the ones responsible for her rape and murder. At this point, things go from bad to worse for Chow. First, Peter and Paul try to jump and beat him to death in an attempt to snuff him out as a witness. Second, Chow attacks Fang Ming in retaliation for sleeping with his wife and gets his leg broken in the process. At this point, Chow realizes that the sorcerer was on to something. So, he goes to the sorcerer asking for black magic vengeance against those who wrong his wife. The sorcerer initially refuses, until Chow reminds him that he knows all about the fellow’s penchant for grave robbing…

This sort of marks the halfway point of the film. From here on out, the film goes into gross-out overdrive as the sorcerer performs the “Seeding of a Ghost” ritual to torment Chow’s enemies before ultimately killing them. Things start out small: hallucinations, brain eating and worm vomit. But things quickly escalate to spirit possession, incest and the giving birth to a ghost baby—which looks like a combination of Biollante by way of The Return of the Aliens’ Deadly Spawn. And all of this thanks to the “loving” relationship between a devoted (but cuckolded) husband and the rotting corpse of his wife.

I would say that the main problem with the story is that there really is nobody to root for here. Chow is sympathetic to a point, but he’s doing an awful amount of damage for the honor of a woman whom he knows is a gold-digging hussy. Although Fang Ming starts turning a new leaf after his wife gets pulled into the whole mess, he’s still an adulterous jerk who helped set all of his in motion. And neither Peter nor Paul deserves any of our sympathies as rapists and murderers. Once the real magic portion of the film starts, Chow more or less is pushed to the sidelines as he watches the sorcerer (heh) work his magic.

Bewitched felt like a pseudo-documentary treatise on the mechanics of black magic, melded with a police procedural film. It’s the sort of film that establishes enough about how the spells are “cast” and how they function that you could make a follow-up without less research, since so much is spelled out in that film. Seeding of the Ghost goes into some of the mechanics of the spells, but not to the level of detail as Bewitched. It does feel like the sort of movie you would watch after Bewitched or the first Black Magic movie, either of which would give you a firm idea of how SE Asian witchcraft functions. This film, unlike Bewitched, does suggest a price to be paid for invoking this sort of witchcraft: Chow’s body gradually is covered by scale-like lesions; by the end of the film, he looks like radiation victim. Where it does falter is in the obligatory exorcism sequence, in which the two priests are dressed in Taoist robes, but keep on talking about Buddha in their incantations. How does that work?

Besides all the black magic and all the unpleasantness that comes with the territory, this is a very sleazy film. The movie gives us no fewer that four pairs of naked breasts, plus three pairs of pasty female buttocks, three sacred bushes and three sex scenes. Even stranger is that one of the spells in contingent on Chow’s willingness to make out with the rotting corpse of his wife. But that’s just sickening. What is truly mind-boggling is when we get to witness a sex scene in mid-air between a corpse and the spirit of one of her victims, portrayed as cell animation. That is not something you see every day.

On the whole, Bewitched is the grosser of the two films. This film has its moments, but nothing to the effect of drinking prodigious amounts of fetus blood or stuffing handfuls of maggots in your mouth (not to mention violence against real animals). Seeding of the Ghost is far more salacious and has a better climax, involving a tentacled flesh monster that would not be out of place in John Carpenter’s The Thing. I suppose if Versátil Home Video here in Brazil releases the other two Black Magic films or Hex on their Obras-Primas de Terror: Terror Asiático Volume 2 collection, I’ll check those out, too.