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| Images courtesy of Visual Vengeance |
The name Chang Cheh is synonymous with ShawScope, being a
regular prolific filmworker for the Hong Kong widescreen wuxia empire throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. With special
attention lavished upon him by Arrow Video and particularly Eureka
Entertainment who have licensed over many of his most renowned works including
boxed sets such as Furious Swords and Fantastic Warriors as well as Horrible History. Looking at my Letterboxd
entries, the most watched director in my account turned out to be none other
than Chang Cheh who between the Eureka and Arrow releases have filled my movie
watching plate pretty rapidly. It wasn’t
anything I set out to do, just how the film reviewing beast worked out this
time.
The last place I expected his name to turn up was on the
shot-on-videotape grime factory known as Visual Vengeance, a boutique label our
readers are certainly familiar with by now given the sheer amount we’ve waded
through over the past year. Ordinarily
Visual Vengeance caters towards films shot on VHS, Beta, Digital Video and
sometimes film whether it be Super 8mm or sometimes even 16mm. Rarely if ever does a widescreen 2.35:1 scope
35mm film grace Visual Vengeance’s library.
But with the 2K restoration of a beat up but otherwise intact print of
Chang Cheh’s 1984 non-ShawScope wuxia The Nine Demons, it would appear
the boutique label is expanding their horizons and branching out into films
that aren’t up to par for Arrow or Eureka but are ripe for the taking in Visual
Vengeance’s hands.
Fighter Zou Qi (Tien-Chi Cheng) is on the run from the usual
stock trade adversaries after his brother Gary (Chris Lee Kin-Sang) is
kidnapped and tortured by the nefarious Mr. Yin (Tai-Peng Yu). Fleeing into the woods, he falls into a trap
door under the ground which leads to a mystical multicolored chamber called The
Black Paradise (more or less a stand-in for Hell) where he encounters demons
including The Black Prince of Hell who presents our hero Zou Qi with a
Faustian deal where he is adorned with a necklace made of human skulls which
feed on human blood and transform in and out of a maternal demon and her eight
demon children. Given the opportunity to
avenge himself, the plot thickens when Zou Qi learns there’s a caveat to
controlling The Nine Demons who have their own agenda and threaten to eat
up everyone and everything until there’s no life left.
Bizarre, batshit and bonkers to a degree not seen even in some
of the more outlandish offerings of ShawScope Vol. 4 which catered to
all of the weird and psychedelic offbeat entries, The Nine Demons for
newcomers as well as studied fans of the wuxia defies easy categorization. Fantastical and supernatural but pushing the
envelope in terms of ambitious insanity, it represents both a reunion of sorts
for Chang Cheh and his Venom Mob cast while veering so far into
supernatural surrealism and innovative technical filmmaking it escapes
description in layman’s terms and instead pushes into something metaphysical
and cranium cracking. The fight
choreography characteristic of the Venom Mob cast carries over beautifully
and the scope camerawork by The Deadly Sword cinematographer Kuo-Ren Wu
captures the multicolored psychedelic hallucinatory essence of the piece. The acting is serviceable and largely devoted
to the fight choreography but it is plainly obvious that the real star of this
madcap lunatic fantasy is the director himself.
Produced by Chang He Film Company and released in 1984, The
Nine Demons co-authored by recurring ShawScope screenwriter Kuang Ni, The
Nine Demons with its scratchiness in between reel changes and seeming water
damage on the footage near the ending isn’t fit for Eureka or Arrow but
perfectly poised for Visual Vengeance to get into the Hong Kong wuxia
business. Featuring a new 2K transfer
supervised by archivist Toby Russell and featuring plentiful extras including a
VHS transfer version for those who like their Visual Vengeances to feel scuzzy,
the set comes with reversible sleeve art, an original slipcover and a
collectible book of essays detailing this unusual production.
Easily the craziest wuxia I myself have
currently come across, the Visual Vengeance set will satisfy genre fans as well
as completists keeping up on the oeuvre of Chang Cheh. As a Visual Vengeance title working with a
scope widescreen film rather than an Academy Ratio videotape, it shows the
company opening their doors up to more niche opportunities while still
qualifying the release as a bona fide Visual Vengeance disc. Their netherworld of regional shot-on-video
homegrown movies just got a lot bigger.
--Andrew Kotwicki
