The Boxer's Omen is a 1983 Shaw Brothers horror-drama-Mind Screw film directed by Kuei Chi-Hung.
What started off as a rather typical drama, where the protagonist, Chan Hung (Philip Ko) witnessed his younger brother, Chan Wing, a Hong Kong boxer partaking in a tournament in Bangkok, ends up getting crippled by the cheating champion Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung), quickly takes a nosedive into pure, mind-melting insanity. As Chan Hung attempts to avenge his brother's defeat, he ends up getting dragged into a conspiracy involving some evil South-East Asian voodoo cult, and finds out his previous life as a priest and his destiny to stop the awakening of a voodoo demon.
A whole lot of drug-fueled, off-the-rails craziness ensues, including reanimated bat skeletons, giant spiders, reanimated crocodile spirits, flying demon heads, skinless female demons who bleeds blue, half-human and half-spider hybrids, living skulls of crocodiles, potions made from human brains cooked in human skulls...
Wait, what does this have to do with boxing again?
See also Seeding of a Ghost, released by the same studios in the same year.
The Boxer's Omen contains examples of:
- Bilingual Bonus: The voodoo priest is chanting in Tagalog. For instance, when reanimating the skeletal bat, he clearly said "Dali! Dali!" (Hurry!)
- Body Horror: Most of the effects of the voodoo spell. Notably, the unfortunate man whose body ends up bubbling all over before popping one after another. It's as disturbing as it sounds
◊. - Dem Bones: While conducting the voodoo ritual, the priest causes a dead bat to be melted down to bones... and then animate those bones so it stood up and starts walking jerkily across the room, in one of the many, many trippy visuals throughout the film.
- Dirty Coward: Bu Bo, the Thai boxer, who after getting beaten down by Chan Wing on a boxing ring, attacks Wing In the Back and cripples him.
- Eye of Newt: Most of the ingredient used by the voodoo priest counts, including banana skins, bat's wings, chicken feathers... special mention for the voodoo demon's resurrecting ritual, which involves stitching a corpse, complete with amulets and herbs, into the disembowelled corpse of a crocodile.
- Eye Scream:
- Bu Bo, while in the locker room, had a sudden hallucination where his eyeballs start ejecting maggots.
- The temple's monk gets incapacitated when giant spiders summoned by the voodoo priest stabs his eyes with stingers.
- Facial Markings: The voodoo priest paints his face before his rituals.
- Flaying Alive: The demonic woman who is summoned by the unholy ritual at the end of the film. Who was defeated by having her skin ripped off in one fell swoop. Complete with copious amounts of blue blood.
- Flying Face: This film features the penanggalan cryptid from South-East Asian folklore, a demon which is just a severed head with it's entrails and intestines dangling out from it's neck, as summoned by the witch doctor.
- Genre Shift: From boxing drama to schlocky, voodoo-themed folk horror film loaded with one Mind Screw moment after another, all within the first 15 minutes.
- Gorn: All over the place. From a disemboweled crocodile to a decapitated chicken and a decomposing bat...
- Hollywood Voodoo: Yeah... something about an evil voodoo cult being involved in a tourist in Hong Kong being destined to become a monk, whether he wants it or not?
- Losing Your Head: During the black magic ritual gone wrong, the witch doctor's head, upon being possessed, ends up detaaching itself and floats around, with it's intestines a-dangling underneath lashing out like a series of whips. Yes, it's a weird movie.
- Mind Screw: The Movie.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: One of the voodoo demon's penultimate form manifests itself as a giant alligator, who tries to chomp down on Chan Hung until Chan managed to hold the alligator-demon at bay with some Palate Propping.
- Never Trust a Title: the title - and to an extent, the opening scene - implies the movie to be a typical 80s boxing film in the vein of the Rocky sequels. All those misconceptions went to hell in the second act the moment audiences sees a voodoo priest's detaching, flying head. It it gets weirder and crazier from there.
- Raising the Steaks: The voodoo priest reanimates a dead bat and a stuffed alligator.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: And what's even worse is that the vomit contains a live eel...
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Bu Bo, the cheating boxer who crippled Chan Hung's brother, and is the catalyst behind Chan Hung coming to Thailand... and yet for some reason, he disappears in the second half of the film without being mentioned ever again.
