Very well executed

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Blistering performances.

An evil, clawed, cackling witch woman unleashes a savage humanoid snake monster that embarks on a brutal killing spree in a major city. The ever-suave Richard Harrison has to fend off several assassins who want his magic ring and must find the witch in order to stop her. Meanwhile, fetching lady reporter Helen fears that she might be the snake monster. Once again singularly all-thumbs writer/director Godfrey Ho does his customary slipshod cut'n'paste hackjob of haphazardly combining two separate films together with a flagrant disregard for both cinematic artistry and narrative coherence. For example, take the totally nonsensical sequence with Harrison picking up an attractive American hitch-hiker (she naturally flashes her breasts in order to get a ride from Richard). Harrison takes the lass to a movie theater, she performs a striptease for Richard, they proceed to make love, and the chick even attempts to kill him while they're in the middle of doing just what you think. Moreover, we've also got a constant swift pace, lots of graphic, yet cheesy gore, a few pulsating disco tunes blaring away on the soundtrack (one gal gets attacked by the monster while dancing in her living room to a pounding disco tune!), gaudy cinematography, sleazy soft-core sex, ineptly staged martial arts fights, laughably lousy dubbing (an Asian police officer sports an utterly incongruous plummy British accent!), tasty gratuitous female nudity, plenty of slithery snakes, a mysterious blind flute player, a riotously pathetic rubbery beast, and a fiery over-the-top conclusion. All these choice cruddy ingredients add up to produce one hilariously awful, but still hugely entertaining mess of a gut-busting schlock howler.

Dear God(frey)! What a bloody mess! Poor Richard Harrison yet again finds himself acting out some completely nonsensical scenes which are then edited into a completely non related, even more nonsensical movie! The plot concerns a female journalist who every now and then, against her will (at the beckoning of a blind, flute playing man) transforms into a snake demon type thing and proceeds to go on murderous rampages. This dramatic physiological change from a beautiful woman into a rubbery abomination is further instigated (so we're led to believe via newly edited in footage) by a wicked witch with long gold fingernails who spends her time banging on a drum and gyrating in a most uncoordinated manner....fair enough.Harrison's scenes concern his possession of a magic ring which ostensibly holds the key to the dissolution of the witch's power and the witch's minions' subsequent attempts to relieve Harrison of the said item (by violent means) Yes indeed - this film is bad! Headache inducing-ly bad in fact, but if you're a Godfrey Ho fan, then you wouldn't have it any other way! Highly recommended and a craptastic delight!

Another cut and paste film starring Richard Harrison from Joseph Lai's cinematic chop-shop IFD Films. But this time there is nary a ninja in sight as we have Harrison battling a demented witch who is killing people by controlling a woman who turns into a large half human/half snake monster. The main portion of the film deals with the snake woman and her love affair with a cop and that begins to get old after a while (although it is gory). The Harrison inserts have him going to find and destroy this "evil witch who lives in a red castle" and they are the highlight of the film. His first scene has him picking up a girl after she has flashed him on the side of the road. "I hate to see someone stand in the rain," he says. Then she tells him that she is an actress (she is actually an assassin sent by a witch) and they should head to the studio to check out her latest film. Cut to Harrison and that chick in a screening room watching one of her films which consists solely of her being tied up naked and painted on by some Chinese dude. Harrison looks at it completely stone faced and then leans over and says, "I've got to admit, you have f@#king talent!" She then proceeds to do a striptease for him set to the sounds of looped Jean Michele Jarre. The climactic battle features stings from both RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and SUPERMAN. Awesome!

'What the Hell's this all about?'- remarks Richard Harrison to his dead porno star girlfriend after shes tried to kill him and vomited orange liquid during their back row nookie in a sex cinema. Its a question you may be asking yourself after experiencing this slice of random cut and paste filmmaking. The backbone of Scorpion Thunderbolt is an unreleased (at lea st to the west) asian horror movie- which in the age old tradition has been fleshed out with new footage featuring an american star to sell it to western territories. In its original incarnation Scorpion tells the tale of Helen Yu- a journalist who hides a dreadful secret- shes a snake monster! In flashback we witness Helen's mother to be being lead astray by a handsome young man. During an outdoor quickie with the strapping lad the girl discovers he is really a human sized snake. The whole encounter was revenge motivated on his/its part since the girl's father sells dead snakes and boils them down for soup. The girl gives birth to Helen but the apparently normal child is a monster who turns on its mother during breast feeding. A bloodbath ensues with the girl's father trying to take an axe to the infant, only to have his eyes pulled out by snakes, blinded he inadvertently murders his daughter with the axe. In present day Hong Kong- Helen is transformed against her will into the snake monster by a sinister blind night-watchman and his mysterious flute playing (which can also make dogs walk backwards). The film begins with one such gore murder as a nubile girl is chased by a weirdo only to end up eviscerated by the monster. The police, lead by Inspector Jackie Ko- initially suspect this bald limping loony of the killings and track him down to a mental hospital where he's in the process of eating a cat- he reacts to attempts at capture by beating the cops with the dead pussy and hiding up a tree. In the process of the investigation Helen falls in love with Ko- who has his own problems in the form of a revenge crazed ex-con he helped put away. Breaking into Ko's home the masked criminal handcuffs Ko to a table forcing him to watch as the man ties up and strips a pretty female police office in one of the films more censor troubling scenes. Ko breaks free and fights the madman, while in a neighbouring apartment block the monster goes bonkers mutilating some disco chicks- the monster's speciality being mashing girls faces in with its giant claws. Ko and Helen go on a date but its a disaster, the masked man shoots up their picnic and an attack by snakes causes Ko to crash the car. Finally they end up in a hotel where Helen again turns into the snake monster snuffing out a couple in a sauna. When Helen tells him the ghastly truth Ko remarks 'Does that mean... I'm in love with a vampire?'- of course it'll all end in tears. The 'new' plotline which is at best clumsily interwoven into this narrative concerns some nonsense about Richard Harrison and the 'hypnotising power of a woman's witchery'. Under the orders of a witch everyones out to stomp Richard, whether its the plumber or the aforementioned sex actress who hitches rides by flashing her attributes at passing motorists. With one of his worst films recently under his belt (Eurocine's kiddie movie Get Up Kiko and Run) getting flashed by bimbos and breaking bones must have been a blessed relief to Harrison. Scorpion Thunderbolt slithered out from the studios of Joseph Lai's IFD films- in the mid- Eighties Joe's niche was to have the ubiquitous Godfrey Ho shoot footage of Harrison to pad out the rottenest of Kung-Fu films (never did it matter that the new footage didn't remotely fit in with the rest of the film). The commercial surface of this enterprise is best illustrated in titles like Ninja Commandments, Ninja Dragon, Ninja Hunt, Ninja Kill, Ninja Show-down, Ninja Terminator, Ninja The Protector, Ninja Thunderbolt and Ninja Operation parts 1 to 8. A rare nugget in this cinematic rough- Scorpion Thunderbolt has all the unpredictability of a hard core mental patient- even in its original version the tone catapults from slapstick farce to heavy duty gore. A Shocking Asia-esque feel also looms over the film with its 'amour' of settings like red light districts and tacky discos. Add to this the fact that you are just never quite sure what's meant to be funny and what's unintentional and you have a film butchered of what sense it may have once possessed but retaining a power to take you off guard. If the idea of a blind night-watchman is absurd the film ups the ante by having him appear on a TV chatshow at one point 'a most talented man he's a blind night-watchman who has overcome gout and arthritis- he also plays the flute'. The highlight though belongs to the Jerry Lewis impersonator who learns the hard way that its not wise to kick an irate snake monster's tail. Remarkably there is way too much to savour in this true grab bag of a film for one single viewing- for moments of unguarded lunacy only filter out with each viewing. Scorpion Thunderbolt will provide a weeks worth of late night viewing fuel for tired eyes- the stunningly inappropriate use of Jean- Michel Jarre's Oxygene is worth the price of admission alone.