Black Magic (1975) by Ho Meng-hua

Director: Ho Meng-hua

Year: 1975

Country: Hong Kong

Alternate Titles: Jiang tou

Genre: Supernatural

Plot:

Desperate to find a man, a woman visits a sorcerer to get a spell together that will get her lover to finally be with her and goes through the tortuous activities to acquire the proper ingredients, but when the spell is ineffective, his methods trigger a benevolent sorcerer to fight off their plans.

Review:

Overall, this was a mixed bag of a genre effort. For the most part, the main aspect that comes across rather well is the immensely bizarre and unconventional activities required to perform the spell in question, requiring a laundry list of special topics or items that are gathered here. Once the idea is agreed upon, the process starts up, going from collecting a woman’s severed head, the hair from his head, or snake venom to digging up a fresh corpse, draining breast milk from her, and placing everything inside a special ceremonial concoction alongside other bizarre factors, as there’s a really overt sense of gruesome imagery offered up as the whole thing takes off. Interspersed with scenes of her trying and failing to seduce him naturally while the ingredients gather on the outskirts, the mounting tension of whether she can finish the potion in time makes everything feel important and urgent.

This makes the later half all the more impactful, with this section seeing the end results of the spell coming to fruition and the race to figure out what’s going on. With it established that the love potion has worked when he leaves her at the church following the wedding and runs into her arms instead, the purpose of the spell becomes obvious and sets both her and her friend out to find the cause of everything, revealing the curse placed on him that needs the work of a good wizard to fight off their trap. This results not just in the means of breaking the hold with equal parts of black magic, but also the various setpieces used to keep him in line, from the guard dog to prevent him from leaving and the staff used to hold him there, meaning that it becomes more about building up to the combat between the two sorcerers taking place as this comes about incredibly nicely. Graced with a weirdness to what’s going on that’s immensely thrilling throughout, there are some really likable factors here that hold this one up.

There are a few issues here that keep this one down. Among the biggest issues to be had here is the incredibly sluggish and lacking pace, where it’s so focused on trying to build up the reasons why she’s interested in him that hardly anything ever happens. There’s a lot of time here focusing on how she feels about him and trying to get him to fall for her instead of his girlfriend, from pulling him aside into compromising positions to seemingly harmless dates, but always setting herself up as the kind of intrusion on his life that it feels like everything that happens here is designed to seduce him. This works to set everything up and establish why she’s chasing after him, but it’s all too sluggish and dragged out to the point of being a chore to get through before it gets back to his friends trying to free him from her spell. That leads into a slew of comically silly and exaggerated ideas at the end, trying to make everything normal again, something that’s inherently wrong but instead manages to be goofy enough to be hard to take seriously as a way of keeping him safe. These are all that end up holding this one down.

Overview: ****/5

A likable and generally enjoyable genre effort, there’s a lot to like here, with plenty of worthwhile factors that keep this one going, despite a couple of problematic factors that hold it back slightly. Those with an interest in this kind of genre fare, who are curious about it, or who are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.