Crew
Director – Yang Chuan, Screenplay – Yee-hung Lam, Story – Kamber Huang, Producer – Mona Fong & Wong Ka Hee, Photography – Hsin-Yeh Li, Music – Chin-Yung Shing & Chen-Hou Su, Art Direction – Ching-Shen Chen. Production Company – Celestial Pictures/Shaw Brothers.
Cast
Shao-Chiang Hsu [Norman Chu] (Anthony Fang), Phillip Ko (Chou Tang), Chih-Hui Hsuan (Irene Chou), Hussein Abu Hassan (Sorcerer), Hsin-Nan Hung (Peter), Ling-Chi Fu (Paul), Yung Wang (Dr Wang), Mi Tien (Mrs Wang)
Plot
Anthony Fang charms Irene Chou, a croupier at the casino he goes to gamble, and the two embark on an affair, despite both being married to other people. They then argue over Anthony not being willing to leave his wife for her and so he drops Irene off on the road. She calls up her taxi driver husband Tang to pick her up. However, she is then pursued into an abandoned building by two no-goods Peter and Paul and raped. Tang arrives to find her dead body. The subsequent police investigation uncovers the involvement of Anthony, Peter and Paul. Tang then goes to a sorcerer and asks to use black magic to take retribution. They dig up Irene’s body and the sorcerer calls upon her spirit to take vengeance against all three men.
Hong Kong cinema between the 1970s and late 1990s was one of the most amazingly creative and fertile genres in the world. (See Hong Kong Cinema). With a population that ranged between 4.5-6.5 million, it was a country batting way above average in terms of its output. The 1970s saw Shaw Brothers and the martial arts film, the 1980s brought the Wu Xia film with a deranged mix of supernatural elements, while the same period also brought a series of insanely over-the-top action films and names like Jackie Chan and John Woo to international prominence.
Seeding of a Ghost was a Shaw Brothers production. It came out of the period in the 1970s where Shaw Brothers developed an interest in black magic and the occult in horror films like Black Magic (1975), Hex (1980), Human Lanterns (1982) and The Boxer’s Omen (1983). They even made a co-production with Hammer Films The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). With Golden Harvest’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), these would marry with the Wu Xia film and become a whole genre to itself.
Seeding of a Ghost is a mix-up of different genres of the day. There is a touch of the Hong Kong gambling film that was huge in this period not long after in films like God of Gamblers (1989) and Casino Raiders (1989). There is something also of the Category III sex film where various of the women in the cast get full frontal naked at various points. Although this is also glossy unreal sex film where a woman’s hair blows on an invisible wind as she rides atop the man. And, being a Shaw Brothers film, there are several furious fast-paced fight sequences.
Things get completely demented once the wife’s body is dug up. (She has been dead a matter of days, perhaps two weeks, yet the body dug up looks like a desiccated mummy). There are also the rather absurd scenes where the guilty men start to experience hallucinations – Ling-Chi Fu vomits up worms; Hsin-Nan Hung finds he is eating what look like miniature brains; Shao-Chiang Hsu finds opens up a drinks cabinet and finds dead girl Chih-Hui Hsuan’s head inside; glasses overflow and Hsu’s wife becomes possessed and develops glowing green eyes.
The most demented part of Seeding of a Ghost is the last quarter of the film. Phillip Ko is brought into the sorcerer’s temple and his spirit is drawn out of his body (represented by animated figures) as the mummy of the dead wife levitates and the two have sex in mid-air (the titular ‘seeding of a ghost’). The climactic scenes are completely madcap with exploding Chinese lanterns and fireballs flying, before the doctor’s pregnant wife gives birth amid splatter everywhere as her belly tears open where the foetus emerges as a creature with writhing tentacles that tries to drag people into its maw, before the face of the baby emerges only to be blown away by a shotgun.
Trailer here