Truly Dreadful Film

Awesome Movie

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Dr. Yuen (Siu-Ho Chin), a young, impetulant man (he is erroneously referred to as a cop in the summary), is on an expedition in Thailand to find herbs to treat AIDS, when he interrupts a local tribe's ritual in order to save a young woman with whom he's infatuated who is about to. He and the woman are soon captured and cursed, he with a Blood Curse, she with a Ghost Curse. A year passes and the Blood Curse arises to remind the doctor of his deed. He must venture back to Thailand to stop the curse from killing. Together with Dragon (Dick Wei), a Thai native who lives in the area Dr. Yuen visited, Wesley (Chow Yun-Fat), Su (Sibelle Hu Hui-Chung) and annoying reporter Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk), Dr. Yuen travels back to the origin of the curse. It is a good thing Dr. Yuen carries and arsenal and is accompanied by Dragon and Wesley, because his own M.A. are not what one expects in a Golden Harvest Film. Dr. Yuen has 7 days to stop the curse or die. Each day at the same time, an artery bursts somewhere in Yuen's body. The 7th day, his heart will burst. Not exactly a countdown anyone wants. He has to deal with crazy Sorcerer Aquila, Aquila's henchmen, a bizarre "demon" which resembles a sperm with fangs and what is supposed to be a flying God to reach the Buddha concealing the cure for the 7th Curse. I do feel sorry for any black hued animal in Thailand after watching this. If you ignore all the times Dr. Yuen gets his butt handed to him, the M.A. in this is pretty good. The special effects are good for the era. A rocket launcher is used to save the day. So, if you like explosives and wasting bullets, this is a good one to watch. There are cameos of Golden Harvest vets in this movie that make up for some of the campiness. I gave it a 7 for the cameos and the M.A. sequences.

The Seventh Curse is an early Chow Yun Fat movie and is described as being a Hong Kong Indiana Jones. The major difference is that Indiana Jones never received an R rating in Australia (R = restricted to viewers over 18 years of age. Recently I discovered that the R rating in the United States is not the same as the R rating here in Australia. Chasing Amy received an MA in Australia and an R America but I digress).The movie is about an anthropologist, Dr Chester, who stumbles across an attractive woman bathing in a pool in the middle of the jungle in Thailand. He is warned by the expedition leader that she belongs to a tribe run by a witchdoctor, but he ignores his warnings and goes and looks at the tribe. He discovers that the woman is going to be sacrificed to a demon (actually an ancestor, but basically a demon) so he throws caution to the wind and rescues her. Unfortunately they are caught and everybody in his expedition is killed. He escapes but has been inflicted with a curse which causes eruptions on his body. This curse is saited but after a year it begins to happen again so he must return to Thailand and find an antidote.There isn't much in this movie to discuss because it is little more than an adventure movie. The version I watched was dubbed, which is bad because the sound track has to be redone meaning that the sounds effects tend to be worse. I prefer subtitled films. The movie deserved its R rating because it had people being ripped apart by demons, spinal cords being sucked out and generally a lot of grossness. What I found weird (and a little annoying) was that they blacked out the rude bits in the movies. I really don't understand why they did that. If the actress didn't want her rude bits shown then they could have filmed it differently. It just really seemed unusual that they would do such a thing.This was a reasonable movie. It had lots of action and lots of mooks getting beaten up and gunned down. It had demons ripping people to pieces and it had the typical Indiana Jones type of stuff with deadly idols, ancient traps, and evil witchdoctors. Not something that stands out. The thing is that they ended it on a moral note as this woman who was deformed was not able to have her deformities removed so they said, "beauty is on the inside, not on the outside." This statement I sort of hold true and I shall explain below.The one thing that we become preoccupied with is the fact that we want a "good looking girlfriend." There is nothing really wrong with that, but what can one describe as being good looking. Well, I think Plato describes it the best in the Symposium. There are levels, starting with the physical and ending with the absolute. One may go for physical beauty but soon discover that this is simply an empty shell with nothing inside, so we go up to the intellectual, the moral, and finally the absolute. What is the absolute? Well Plato claims that it is not possible to exist in this shadow world, but the truth is that you know when you encounter the absolute, because you just know. No, it is not the one true love, because I know of a number of women whose beauty to me is absolute yet I would not marry any of them.

The special effects in "The Seventh Curse" are incredible. Particularly memorable are those nasty little demons that look like deformed babies; they fly at you and eat you up in about 5 seconds, like piranhas. But the rest of the film is just frantic, mindless drivel. The filmmakers throw in everything but the kitchen sink (from an irrelevant hostage situation at the beginning to karate-chopping monks), hoping that the pieces will somehow fit together - they don't. I never cared about anyone or anything in this film, except for the adorable Maggie Cheung, and even she is too loud at times. Chow Yun-Fat fans will be disappointed with his very minor part, but at least they will be rewarded at the end, when he shows why he is the epitome of "cool": all the other characters waste their time trying to fight the huge unstoppable bloodthirsty flying "Alien"-like monster, but he enters the scene and simply.....I don't want to spoil it, see for yourself. (**)

a mixture of action, martial arts and mythology (better: fantasy). none of the genres is worked out consequently. the film uses special effects that remind me of japanese trash movies of the sixties (although the film has clear 80s elements such as the fast action editing). the characters are quite simple and not very elaborated. the story makes itself relative: it is all told at a party: all in all just a joke to show off.