Once upon a time, in a small town called Crystalville, there lived a young boy named Zack. Zack was a curious and adventurous kid, always on the lookout for exciting and extraordinary things. One sunny summer day, as he was exploring his grandfather's attic, he stumbled upon an old and dusty skateboard. This skateboard, however, was no ordinary skateboard. It had peculiar symbols and magical inscriptions carved into its surface. Zack was immediately intrigued and couldn't resist the urge to try it out.
"Bring the Demon!" - Horror Hunt #31 (Jan 2020): boxd.it/aya9m "Category III Horror" Worms. GAH this film rules. I love movies that never let up for the whole film. This is horror, comedy, action, witchcraft, blood and gore. all in a tight 78 minutes that feels even shorter. The special effects are super fun and I laughed at this a lot. Finding movies like The Seventh Curse is one of the main reasons I do scavenger hunts. Yes.
For our final 20th-anniversary roundtable, to which this review belongs, we re looking forward instead of back, to write up some movies of types that we intend to cover more frequently in the years to come. There is one thing, however, that it s useful for a gwailo to know going into The Seventh Curse the film s heroes are the brainchildren of hugely prolific, Shanghai-born and Hong Kong-based pulp novelist Ni Kuang.
Zack was immediately intrigued and couldn't resist the urge to try it out. Little did he know that this skateboard had a mind of its own. As soon as Zack stepped onto the skateboard, it started to levitate off the ground, defying the laws of gravity.
The seventj curse 1986
The Seventh Curse / Dr. Yuen and Wisely / Yuen Chun Hap yu Wai See Lee (1986) ***
Along with peplum and oddball TV flicks, another hitherto-neglected corner of the cinematic cosmos where I�d like to spend more of my time going forward is the realm of Asian� and especially Hong Kong� fantasy and horror films. I don�t mean martial arts movies here, although I�m sure there�ll end up being plenty of overlap. Rather, I�m looking to explore the world of hopping vampires, Chinese witchcraft, Malay and Indochinese cryptids, yokai , and that sort of thing. For a Westerner, this remains even now a cinema of steep learning curves, regarding which reliable information can be difficult to come by. That, more than anything, is what�s kept me merely nibbling around the edges of Asian fantasy and horror all these years, but now I�m sorely in need of a challenge to rekindle my enthusiasm for this website. Forcing myself to become a clueless neophyte again by charging headlong into unfamiliar territory seems like just the thing. The Seventh Curse , meanwhile, seems like a good place to start, since its horrors are purely the products of modern Chinese imaginations, neither requiring nor particularly rewarding hours of preliminary research into traditional Asiatic bogeymen or ideas about the supernatural. The film nevertheless features plenty of wild shit of a kind that you�re simply not going to find in any comparable production from Europe or the Americas.
There is one thing, however, that it�s useful for a gwailo to know going into The Seventh Curse : the film�s heroes are the brainchildren of hugely prolific, Shanghai-born and Hong Kong-based pulp novelist Ni Kuang. The principal protagonist, Dr. Yuen Chan Hsieh, figures in 32 of Ni�s books, while the savant whom Yuen calls in for backup� whose name is variously transliterated as Wesley or Wisely� figures in an incredible 145 (plus several more books by other authors writing with Ni�s blessing, but without his direct participation). I�ve not read a word of any of them� indeed, I can find no indication that any are even available in English translation� but from what little I�ve been able to piece together, the Yuen stories are mostly adventure yarns in which the doctor gets himself into various sorts of trouble with isolated cultures and forgotten holdovers of ancient civilizations, while the Wisely stories tend to be paranormal mysteries in something like the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle�s Professor Challenger and Seabury Quinn�s Jules de Grandin. I wish I could tell you whether or not Ni was actually influenced by those characters (or others like them), but like I said, this is a field in which reliable information is hard to find if you can�t read Chinese. Nor have I been able to ascertain whether The Seventh Curse was adapted from some specific, previously published Ni Kuang story, or whether screenwriters Wong Jing and Yuen Kai Chi merely threw together ideas plucked willy-nilly from Ni�s back catalog. Either way, Ni was directly involved in the production at least to the extent of playing a fictionalized version of himself in a framing sequence that presents the two heroes as real-life friends of his.
If we disregard the frame, then The Seventh Curse begins on an unexpected note, with a SWAT team (or whatever the Hong Kong police call their local equivalent) under the command of Captain Ho (Yasuaki Kurata, from Call Me Dragon and Unicorn Fist ) responding to a hostage situation. After an exchange of gunfire, one of the criminals announces that the cops have managed to wound a hostage, sending him into a heart attack or a seizure or some such thing. Ho gets the bad guys� permission to send in a doctor, and then summons Yuen Chan Hsieh (Chin Siu Ho, of Mr. Vampire and Demon of the Lute ), a physician whom the captain rather bizarrely identifies as being renowned for his courage. Ho has an ulterior motive in securing medical attention for the injured hostage. He intends for his subordinate, Inspector Chiang (Kara Hui Ying Hung, from The Brave Archer and The Peacock King ), to accompany Yuen disguised as a nurse, and bearing a first-aid kit stuffed with flash-bang grenades. When the grenades go off, Ho�s men will exploit the ensuing confusion by storming the building. Unfortunately, Ho hasn�t figured on dimwit heiress photojournalist Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, of Hero and Flying Dagger ). Rebuffed by the officers maintaining Ho�s perimeter, she sneaks in, waylays Chiang while the latter is changing into her nurse�s uniform, and takes the inspector�s place. Unsurprisingly, her substitution throws a huge spanner into the works, and while it�s difficult to blame Tsui Hung specifically for the needlessly massive body count in the forthcoming raid, we can�t really say she has nothing to do with it, either.
Over the next several days, Tsui Hung makes an enormous nuisance of herself for Dr. Yuen. That�s because her interaction with him at the scene of the hostage crisis convinced her that he was a big news story just waiting to happen, and she figures a beefcake pictorial in the society pages of one of the papers for which she freelances would be the perfect way to introduce him to the media-consuming public. (I�ve often wondered, by the way, if journalism in the Sinosphere is really anywhere near as screwy as movies from that region make it out to be.) The reporter may actually be the least troublesome pest following Yuen around right now, though. One night, just as he�s settling into a romantic evening in with his English-speaking gwailo girlfriend (Fairlie Ruth Kodrick), a Thai bruiser (Dick Wei, from The Kid with the Golden Arm and Zu: The Warriors from Magic Mountain ) who calls himself Hak Lung� �Black Dragon�� breaks into Yuen�s luxurious flat. Yuen punches first and asks questions later (for a doctor, his kung fu isn�t half bad), but he�s ultimately no match for Hak Lung. Instead of delivering the expected finishing blow once Yuen is down, however, Hak Lung merely immobilizes the doctor and tells him that his blood curse is now a year old. No, Yuen doesn�t understand what that means, either. Hak Lung also tells Yuen that somebody named Bachu (hilariously transliterated as �Betsy� in the English-language subtitles) has been placed under a ghost spell, and badly needs his help. Yuen must come to Thailand for the sake of both her life and his. Finally, Hak Lung warns Yuen to abstain from sex until this whole business is sorted out; arousal will only exacerbate the relapse of his curse. Naturally, the doctor doesn�t listen to any of that. He just climbs right into bed with his girlfriend as soon as Hak Lung leaves, and no sooner is the deed done than Yuen suffers an explosive hemorrhage in his left thigh. Blood curse, you say?
The following evening, Yuen goes to see not Hak Lung, but an old mentor of his who is well versed in the mysteries of the occult and the paranormal. Yeah, that would be Wisely (Chow Yun Fat, from Bed for Day, Bed for Night , and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ). Naturally, Wisely will need the full background if he�s to be able to help his younger friend, and the telling of Yuen�s tale triggers a flashback that consumes roughly a quarter of the film. It seems that exactly one year ago, Yuen was in Thailand as part of an expedition led by a Western botanist (Ken Boyle, of Twisted Love and The Ghost Snatchers ). They were seeking a cure for AIDS within the cornucopia of the Southeast Asian jungle, but what they found was an isolated people known as the Worm Tribe. Yuen met and fell in lust with a girl of the Worm Tribe� the aforementioned Bachu/Betsy ( Return of the Demon �s Chui Sau Lai)� and thereby became embroiled in a tribal power struggle when the shaman Aquala (Elvis Tsui Kam Kong, from Sex and Zen and Holy Flame of the Martial World ) chose her for sacrifice to a malevolent undead being called Old Ancestor. Yuen tried to rescue Bachu, and succeeded exactly as far as enabling the girl to escape from both Old Ancestor and Aquala. Unfortunately, he also got every other member of the expedition killed, and himself put under a magical curse that ought to have slain him, too, in seven days. The only reason why Yuen is alive to tell his story now is because Bachu caught up with him on the sixth day, and transferred to his body her specimen of the supernatural parasite that gives her people their name. As we now know, however, the power of Bachu�s magic tapeworm sufficed only to drive Aquala�s blood curse into remission for a single year. Now that it�s active again, Yuen will surely die unless he can find recourse to stronger magic. Wisely informs him that there�s nothing he can do there in Hong Kong. He will have to accompany Yuen and Hak Lung to the Thai jungle to see what counter-spells might be available from the Worm Tribe�s hostile neighbors. Oh� and Tsui Hung will be coming, too, on account of she�s Wisely�s cousin. You won�t like that any more than Yuen does, I promise you.
No one should be terribly surprised to discover that The Seventh Curse is bugshit bonkers, at least not if they�ve ever seen more than two or three other genre movies of Chinese origin from approximately the 1970�s through the early 1990�s. What might be a tad surprising, though, is how well made this movie is at the same time. If I had to identify a single scene from The Seventh Curse as indicative of its essence, I�d point to the first clash between Yuen and Old Ancestor, before the latter transforms into a cross between Gyaos and a Giger alien. What we have there is a kung fu fight between a man and a full-sized marionette mummy, which isn�t the least bit shy about looking exactly like what it is, and yet the scene works anyway. That�s partly because Old Ancestor is just a really terrific puppet, comparable in both design and build quality to the ones that sometimes represent the Knights Templar zombies in Tombs of the Blind Dead and its sequels, but with the looser articulation needed to punch, kick, and leap with sufficient speed and agility to pose a credible-seeming threat to Chin Siu Ho. But it�s also a matter of cunning editing, judicious lighting design, and inventive choreography. I�m not sure how Hong Kong movies handle the division of labor between directors and action directors, so I�m also not sure how to divvy up the credit between Lam Nai Choi and Yuen Bun (who held the two positions respectively on The Seventh Curse ), or between the staffs of artists and technicians working under each of them. What I am sure of is that their work amply compensates for whatever limitations Old Ancestor possessed, and gave that wired-together bundle of fake bones an illusion of life and personality fit to rival many of the far more sophisticated puppet characters in contemporary Hollywood productions.
More generally, but on a related note, I�m very impressed with The Seventh Curse �s illusory visual sumptuousness. True, Golden Harvest was a major studio by Hong Kong standards, but I�m nevertheless used to their movies from this era (at least the ones made without overseas financing) looking cheap and shoddy. The Seventh Curse rarely does. Whether it�s flaunting Yuen and Wisely�s jet-set lifestyle or trying to spook us with a haunted tomb, this movie displays a level of craftsmanship and even taste that is wildly disproportionate to its actual production cost. It�s an almost Bava-esque feat of budget-stretching. There may be some substance to that comparison, too, because Lam Nai Choi turns out to have something important in common with Mario Bava: they were both cinematographers before they took up directing, and they both remained cinematographers even after they graduated to the folding canvas chair. I�ve often noticed that directors who got their start as cameramen tend to have a knack for squeezing the maximum possible visual flair out of whatever pittance their producers saw fit to grant them. On the other hand, it�s also worth pointing out that Lam had some help during the envy-porn segments of the film, insofar as The Seventh Curse enjoyed an impressive assemblage of high-end product placement. I�ve never seen a movie with so many brand logos in its closing credits! At the very least, all those endorsements must have spared the production considerable expense when outfitting the various rich-dude apartment sets, freeing up commensurate amounts of cash for monster suits, ambulatory crypts, and gore effects.
Speaking of which, the last thing I want to mention about The Seventh Curse is its exuberance in the field of blood and guts. It isn�t just the amount, the explicitness, or the effectiveness of the carnage in this movie that stands out, but the cracked imagination that went into devising new ways to sicken the audience. Dr. Yuen�s daily explosive hemorrhages are just the beginning, too. Old Ancestor turns out to eat the spinal cords of the people offered to him in sacrifice. Aquala keeps a sort of supernatural attack dog called the Little Ghost, which somewhat resembles a large, deformed fetus, and which kills by chewing its way into, out of, and through its victims� bodies. And the creation of the Little Ghost requires the blood of 100 children, which Aquala and his lackeys harvest by tossing kids into a granite squishing machine! Of course, Lam�s final film was the infamous The Story of Ricky , so arguably that sort of thing is only to be expected from him. Still, the kid-squisher is a hell of a thing to have sprung on you without warning. I approve wholeheartedly.
Can you believe the B-Masters Cabal turns 20 this year? I sure don't think any of us can! Given the sheer unlikelihood of this event, we've decided to commemorate it with an entire year's worth of review roundtables� four in all. These are going to be a little different from our usual roundtables, however, because the thing we'll be celebrating is us . That is, we'll each be concentrating on the kind of coverage that's kept all of you coming back to our respective sites for all this time. For our final 20th-anniversary roundtable, to which this review belongs, we're looking forward instead of back, to write up some movies of types that we intend to cover more frequently in the years to come. Click the banner below to peruse the Cabal's combined offerings:
“Yes, it’s made out of 100 children’s blood. “
Chow Yun-Fat and Maggie Cheung?!
be still my beating, throbbing, aching heart. If there’s one thing I know is how over-the-top and batshit Hong Kong action movies can get, but when they’re mixed together for the ultimate genre mashup of adventure, horror, and fantasy then you know you’re in for a no holds barred thrill ride; with martial art fight sequences that are loud and dramatic—just the way I like them! But more importantly they never not deliver on the scuzzy gore and goop with their outlandish practical effects, the kind that will make your eyes beg for mercy! rubber monster suits and flying baby monsters—did that baby just pull an…
Startled yet excited, he held on tight and let the enchanted skateboard take him on a thrilling adventure. The skateboard glided effortlessly through the air, acting as though it had a mind of its own. It zoomed past clouds, flew through dense forests, and soared across mountains. Everywhere Zack went, he was greeted by breathtaking landscapes and magical creatures that seemed to appear out of thin air. With each passing moment, Zack discovered new powers and abilities. He could control the direction of the skateboard with his mind, effortlessly dodging obstacles and performing incredible tricks in mid-air. People from all around Crystalville marveled at his extraordinary skateboarding skills and the skateboard that seemed to possess supernatural powers. Zack soon realized that this magic skateboard, which he named "Backyardugans," had the ability to grant wishes. All he had to do was concentrate on his desire, and the skateboard would grant it. With this newfound power, Zack selflessly used it to bring joy and happiness to everyone in his town. He helped farmers by conjuring rain in times of drought, mended broken bridges with a wave of his hand, and even healed injured animals. The town came to rely on Zack and his magical skateboard for assistance whenever a problem arose. As time passed, Zack grew wiser and more responsible. He realized that while the skateboard was a source of great power, it also carried great responsibility. The better he understood its magic, the more cautious he became in using it. Zack made a promise to himself to only use the skateboard for the greater good, always thinking about the impact his wishes would have on others. Backyardugans became a symbol of hope and unity in Crystalville. It brought people together, inspiring them to believe in the power of magic and the ability to make a difference. Zack's adventures on the magical skateboard taught him valuable lessons about courage, kindness, and the importance of using one's gifts for the betterment of society. In the end, Zack decided it was time to put the skateboard to rest. Having fulfilled its purpose in bringing joy and happiness to Crystalville, the skateboard transformed into a beautiful mural on the town's central square. It served as a reminder of the extraordinary adventures and the power of imagination. Zack continued his life, forever grateful for the incredible experiences he had shared with Backyardugans. And though the skateboard was no longer physically with him, the memories and lessons he had learned would stay with him forever..
Reviews for "Get Ready for Adventure with Backyardigans the Magic Skateboard"
1. John Smith - 2 stars
I found "Backyrduugans the Magic Zkateboard" to be quite disappointing. The storyline was very predictable and lacked originality. The characters were flat and poorly developed, making it hard to connect with them. Additionally, the writing style felt amateurish and lacked depth. Overall, I can't recommend this book to anyone looking for an engaging and well-crafted story.
2. Sarah Thompson - 1 star
"Backyrduugans the Magic Zkateboard" was a complete letdown for me. The plot was incredibly juvenile and lacked any sense of coherence. The dialogue was unrealistic and cringe-worthy, making it painful to read. Furthermore, the pacing was uneven, with unnecessarily dragged-out scenes and sudden rushed conclusions. I was hoping for a magical adventure, but all I got was a poorly written and poorly executed mess.
3. Mark Anderson - 2 stars
I didn't enjoy "Backyrduugans the Magic Zkateboard" as much as I had hoped. The characters felt one-dimensional and clichéd, which made it hard to invest in their journey. The writing style was overly simplistic, lacking any nuance or depth. Additionally, there were several plot holes and inconsistencies that left me confused and frustrated. Overall, I found this book to be underwhelming and would not recommend it.
4. Emily Parker - 2.5 stars
"Backyrduugans the Magic Zkateboard" was a mediocre read for me. While the concept of a magical skateboard sounded intriguing, the execution fell short. The pacing was uneven, with slow and repetitive sections that made the story drag. Additionally, the dialogue felt forced and unnatural, hindering the character development. Although there were some enjoyable moments, they were overshadowed by the overall lackluster writing and plot.