Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Leofwine_draca SEEDING OF A GHOST is another incredibly visceral slice of Hong Kong horror that comes to us courtesy of the Shaw Brothers studio. It's a film that might as well be called BLACK MAGIC 3 as it feels very much like the previous films in that series as opposed to something like HEX or THE BOXER'S OMEN, more contemporary fare. The film's protagonist is the excellent and under-appreciated Phillip Ko, who plays a taxi driver whose life falls apart when he accidentally interrupts a black magic spell by knocking over the wizard busy casting it.The film then slows down a gear to depict Ko's wife, busy having an affair with co-star Norman Chu. This goes on for a while and there's plenty of sex and nudity for those who enjoy that stuff. Eventually, Ko's wife is accidentally killed after being raped by a couple of street thugs, and he brings her back from the dead for revenge. You know the score here: there's a whole bunch of icky ritual scenes with a dead body, some outlandish and pioneering special effects work, and lots of weird deaths and decaying scenes.This film's major sources of inspiration seem to be THE THING, DEATH WISH 2, ALIEN, and THE EVIL DEAD. The FX are wacky and gross in the extreme and also very good. Ko and Chu are seasoned professionals and help to ground the movie; they play off nicely against each other too. There's a little action here and there although the main emphasis is on displaying the female form in its unclothed glory. The usual worm-spewing gross-out scenes are present. Things build to a mini monster movie climax which really does have to be seen to be believed; it's something else, that's for sure.

PKazee A grave robber is chased onto the road and accidentally run over by taxi driver, Philip Ko Fei. Ko Fei gets out of the car to check on the man, but he has disappeared, only to reappear in Ko Fei's back seat. He tells Ko Fei that he is a Taoist wizard and he used black magic to save himself from death. He also tell's Ko Fei that he (Ko Fei) is now cursed to a life of misfortune for having crossing paths with him. Sure enough, we soon discover that Ko Fei's wife is having an affair with the married Norman Chu. Roughly 20 minutes of unspectacular nude romping leads up to Chu refusing her offer of the both of them leaving their spouses for one another. She gets angry and jumps out of the car, but not before the pair have an ugly encounter with a couple of cocky young men in a red sports car. Both cars leave, and the woman then makes her way to a phone booth, where she calls her hubby's taxi dispatcher to ask that they send Ko Fei over immediately to fetch her. Before he gets there, however, the guys in the red sports car return. They abduct her and take her to an abandoned mansion, where one of them rapes her and knocks her about a bit, accidentally causing her to fall over a balcony ledge to her death. Upon arriving at the phone booth, Ko Fei receives another call from the taxi dispatcher informing him that his wife is now at the mansion, a message that seems rather curious, given that nobody at the mansion had access to a phone, and – in fact – when questioned later, the dispatcher says she made no such call to Ko Fei. Ko Fei then seeks out the Taoist wizard for help and THAT is when the film really begins to get good. It takes a LONG time to get to this point (maybe 40 minutes), but everything from this point on is great fun involving a reanimated corpse with a need to be "seeded", the demonic possession of Norman Chu's wife, and the bloody, explosive birth of the corpse's revenge-seeking evil seed!

Shawn McKenna I have been putting this off for a few years (I have had the DVD since 2009) mainly because I thought it was going to be shockfest that outdid The Boxer's Omen in gonzo-style horror. Well it was not even close to The Boxer's Omen which still holds a place deep in the suppressed subconscious of my cranium (actually it is more weird and gross than actually scary). In fact this has to be one of the most overstated and over-hyped horror films of Hong Kong though this is not a horrible film.Chow (Phillip Ko: The Boxer's Omen, Shaolin Intruders) interrupts black magic by inadvertently saving the life of a black magic priest who is being chased down by an angry mob. Because of this the priest says at best he will get very sick and at worst his whole family will die. Since this is a horror film we know which scenario is going to take place. A film with him just being sick would not be as fun. But it is especially hilarious that it seems that the angry mob gets off clean and that he picked up the priest far from where the incantation went awry. I am probably over-thinking this.Chow's wife Irene has been cheating on him because of his lowly taxi driver job, taxi drivers are a deranged lot (ask Anthony Wong), and his hair (seriously one of the worst wigs I have seen, worse than a Sammo Hung haircut). She is enticed by playboy Anthony Fong Ming (Norman Chu Siu-Keung: Bastard Swordsman) who visits her job of dealing cards and showers her with money, gifts, better hair (to be fair to Phillip check out Norman's perm in Hong Kong Godfather) and affection. One night those two adulterers have a fight and she gets out of the car and goes off by herself. Never good to be alone late at night when ruffians are about. She is confronted by two young hooligans who chase her down, one rapes her and ultimately she gets killed (why she runs into an abandoned house I do not know, why there would be an abandoned house in an abandoned area Hong Kong I also do not know).When Chow finds out she is dead, he is ultimately a suspect for about 15 seconds. Fong is another suspect and despondent Chow finds out about the affair. He gets bad ideas in his head and wants revenge at all costs for those involved and goes to the black magic priest (still dressed like a shirtless jungle native; I wonder if he goes to the store like that) to seek revenge. This requires that they dig out his wife's corpse and he is warned that his monomaniacal revenge will likely result in his demise as well. The corpse is used quite effectively and it is creepy, the most scary aspect of the film. You can see it on the cover of the DVD and poster.Fans of horror could do worse by seeking this out. I do not think it is as unique/interesting/gratuitous as Black Magic or The Boxer's Omen out of the Shaw Brothers horror oeuvre and I would suggest seeking those out first. This film overdoes the sleazy exploitation aspect of it, elongates the nudity and the film comes off more as a voyeuristic exercise especially in the beginning which starts to drag on. The slow motion topless running scene becomes almost absurd in its length and its use of the zoom lens. But you do get the benefit of a few fight scenes decently done involving Phillip Ko (still mad about the outcome with Norman Chu) who proves once again that you should not mess with taxi drivers or Phillip Ko. You also get a variety of gross out moments, Taoist priests, scares all done better in a variety of Hong Kong films. However, when the ghost is seeded there are plenty of horror elements, while keeping the exploitation element alive, especially towards the finale that will be of interest to viewers. There you get to witness a creature that seems inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing while a segment from the soundtrack from Alien is played.I have the R1 Image release and it has English and Spanish subtitles. It comes with the Mandarin mono dub only. The R3 IVL release comes with both the Cantonese and Mandarin dub. At the time of the Hong Kong audience would have heard the Cantonese soundtrack, but most of the transnational audience would have heard it in Mandarin. Since at the time post dubbing was the norm and multiple dialects were often used on set it does not matter as much to me. However, this is a controversial topic where some have to have the "preferred" dub. I personally would like a release from this time period to have both the Cantonese and Mandarin language, but I will take what I can get. There are plenty of the Image released Shaw Brothers trailers (not the original trailers) on this release, but no trailer for the movie.

EVOL666 SEEDING OF A GHOST is a pretty bizarre HK horror film about infidelity and revenge. Although the film is pretty decent as a whole, I didn't find it quite as gory or intense as many other reviewers.A cab driver is out doing his thing one night and accidentally runs down a sorcerer (talk about bad luck...). The sorcerer talks about a curse on the cab drivers family and the driver ain't really buyin' it...until his wife is raped and murdered, that is. The cab driver goes back to the sorcerer to try and enlist his help in exacting a little black-magic revenge on the thugs responsible for his wife's death, and things start to go downhill from there. The sorcerer and the cabbie dig up the cabbie's dead wife to use in a ritual to bring vengeance down on those involved with her death. The resulting payback sure is a bitch...SEEDING has some pretty decent scenes and a few gross-out moments, but not quite as many as I was expecting. The pace is pretty slow at first and the "cool parts" don't really happen until pretty close to the end. The creature that bursts from the pregnant woman towards the very end is pretty cool looking and is rightly compared to some of the creature FX used in Carpenter's THE THING. Not a bad film overall, could have used a little more gore and a little more action towards the first half of the film. Recommended for those into strange Asian horror. 6.5/10