The Seventh Curse (1986): Seriously stupid genre-bending from the 1980s

Lam Ngai Kai's grotesque genre mash-up is made with real earnestness by its cast and crew.

If you were to ask the question “what genre is The Seventh Curse?” the most accurate answer would be “all of them”. Lam Ngai Kai’s movie combines horror, action, comedy, romance, martial arts and adventure, and does it all in under 80 minutes. The movie is largely set in Thailand where Dr. Yuen is cursed by an evil sorcerer after he saves a girl from being sacrificed. Upon returning to Hong Kong, the curse slowly causes parts of his body to erupt, so Yuen must embark on a dangerous voyage back to Thailand to find a permanent cure. Imagine if Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom was written by John Landis and directed by John Carpenter, then remade as a Hong Kong action movie. You’d be along the right lines.

The story, based on the Dr. Yuen novels by Ni Kuang, is completely absurd as our hero and his allies confront everything from reincarnated skeletons to a bloodthirtsy foetus in their quest to lift the curse. And boy does it know how silly it is. However, what is remarkable about The Seventh Curse is that it executes its lunacy with total sincerity. Across every department, there is a commitment to making The Seventh Curse the best version of itself it can be. It has no right to boast filmmaking as effective as it has with impressive action choreography and hauntingly gorgeous photography of the Thai countryside. And no matter how preposterous the situations are that these characters find themselves in, every performance is delivered with a real earnestness by its ensemble which includes Chow Yun-fat, Chin Siu-ho, Dick Wei and a young Maggie Cheung.

Take the special effects by Keizô Murase, in tandem with the work of special makeup effects artist Hon-Wan Tung. They are a perfect example of how serious The Seventh Curse is about its own silliness. The duo are tasked with creating some truly ludicrous imagery: Bodies being ripped in half, a villain transforming into a monster, even a chest-bursting homage to Alien. But despite working with sparse resources, the word “no” simply does not appear in their vocabulary. They approach each wild scene in The Seventh Curse as a creative challenge, and come up with genius ways to depict the grotesquery that are extremely effective.

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Directed by Lam Ngai Kai. Written by Wong Jing and Yuen Gai-chi. Produced by Wong Jing and Chua Lam. Starring Chow Yun-fat, Chin Siu-ho, Dick Wei and Maggie Cheung. A Paragon Films production. Distributed by Golden Harvest. 81 minutes. Hong Kong.