Red Spell Spells Red (Scorpion Black Magic Hong Kong Horror)
Being a fan of Hong Kong horror from the 1980s has always required a certain amount of effort. The footprint is small, everything’s been relegated to expensive video tapes, 480p YouTube videos, bootlegs and/or DVD’s that went OOP when HKflix.com was still a thing. Thank God for this current wave of boutique Blu-ray labels putting in work on these. Red Spell Spells Red (and its release mate, Centipede Horror) seemed like movies that would forever be buried in the annals of “man, there’s no way you’re ever gonna be able to watch that legitimately,” but like the terracotta armies of old, Error 4444 has dug them outta whatever grave they were buried in and cleaned them up real nice. Our main character, a sorta Zak Bagans cum Rick Steves (no not that way), produces a show about haunted locations around Asia (or something like that). They go visit the tomb of the red dwarf sorcerer and before you can say “just like that British sci-fi sitcom they used to play on Saturday nights on PBS,” they’re kicking that coffin open and the main lady’s got a death curse on her. All her friends (and a few natives and a good guy sorcerer) are about to have a really bad time.
This movie is a whole lotta gory fun. Amongst many other interesting deaths, one guy gets stabbed in the throat with a possessed bamboo tree and flung across the woods (one might say he gets bamboozled). There’s a shit ton of scorpions too, like a lot of scorpions, and these actors get covered in them. It’s pretty insane to see really. Like on the level of other HK films from this era when you see some guy bite the head off of a living chicken or snort a baby snake up his nose or something. And like all good things like this should do, it ends with a crazed exorcist battle. Our main actress is strapped to a spinning waterwheel for this ritual and you just hope they paid her a lot of money for that. To be honest, I dozed off a few times during my original watch and thought I missed a few things, but while watching it again for this review, I eventually realized I didn’t actually miss any important plot points, they just start cramming stuff in towards the end and you just gotta go with it. But if you’ve watched one of these things before, you know the details of Red Spell Spells Red don’t matter that much, and the story just exists to string along a few insane set pieces, which it does, so there you go. Go have fun.
Written by Grant of the Corn
In A Violent Nature (1983, 2022)
Director: Titus Ho
Distributor: Error 4444
4 / 5
