The Boxer's Omen (1983, Kuei Chi Hung)

56/100

Tough movie to write about, because it's completely unremarkable except when something totally insane is happening, which is roughly half the time. Perhaps it's been sufficiently long since I last mentioned the Theory Of Awesomeness, which someone in the nerd group casually created nearly a quarter century ago, during a heated debate about Donnie Darko. "As Mike D'Angelo pointed out," this individual wrote, "the movie is not flawless, but the point of being a good movie is not to lack flaws but to be filled with so much awesomeness that the flaws become irrelevant." I do not subscribe to this Theory (and indeed still don't much care for Donnie Darko after three tries), because, for whatever reason, ignoring the parts of a film that annoy and/or bore me just isn't something that I'm capable of, no matter how glorious the good stuff may be. If ever there were a candidate, it'd be Joe Versus the Volcano, which would have a 100 rating rather than its current "lowly" 84 (it's only #7 on this insanely stacked list were it not for how lame most of the Waponi Woo nonsense has always seemed to me. But no. What's awesome is awesome, what's not is not.

What's awesome about The Boxer's Omen are its various low-budget creature effects, among the most bizarrely imaginative I've ever seen. Attempting to describe most of them would be pointless, and in any case it's not always necessarily the design itself that's fun. We see several goofy spiders that resemble small plush toys (still big for spiders though), for example, but what you remember isn't the spiders themselves but the way that they use a proboscis that's clearly just an ordinary drinking straw to suck up some poison that looks more or less like spilled coffee. It's endearingly dumb, especially given that the villain's plan is to climb Spider-Man-style (he knows black magic) up to an abbot's ceiling and lower the now-venomous spiders down Tom-Cruise-style (they can spin webs) onto his sleeping form. Seems unduly arduous! Whenever The Boxer's Omen leaves reality behind, showcasing beasties that could've been fashioned from the Jim Henson Workshop's trash bin by talented teenagers, it's a swell time.

I had just assumed, however, that a celebrated Hong Kong picture from the '80s—even one with "boxer" right in the title—would involve plenty of martial-arts action. That Boxer's Omen has virtually none (the boxing sometimes gets martial-artsy) should by no means be some kind of automatic demerit...but its absence clarified for me why so many Hong Kong classics are so heavy on ass-kicking, wirework or gunplay. There's a lotta dead air in this sucker, scenes that are necessary to move the somewhat dozy plot forward (biggest offender: Chan returning to Hong Kong just so that he can break his sacred vow by having sex—which ultimately doesn't even matter, he's just told the workaround!) but have no real inherent interest. One might very credibly argue that the nutty stop-motion interludes and the black magician (meaning the color of his magic, not his skin color) cutting off his own head and trying to strangle our hero with what I guess are bloody nerves dangling from the neck hole and various other weird-ass shit serves as the equivalent of fight sequences or gun battles, and that's certainly true to an extent. The difference, I think, is one of kineticism. Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, which I adore, was made that same year, and it's largely the filmmaking that thrills me, Tsui's propulsive use of the camera. This is my first Kuei joint, and his formal approach here, at least, is much more static and functional (with a few dramatic zooms thrown in). Even in this Omen's most enjoyable scenes, you don't get that sense of moving so fleetly that longueurs have no opportunity to form. It plays like a highlight reel from an up-and-coming F/X house. (I felt similarly about Obayashi's House, as I recall.) And truth is, amusing as the creatures and whatnot are, I'm most likely to remember the mysterious glowing shape that appears to Chan in the night, floating through his house, and later gets revealed as conforming precisely to the roof of a temple in Thailand (where the abbot who'd saved him resides). 'Cause that's bona fide visual storytelling.