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.
