‘The Oily Maniac’ or — A Crude Substance?
Light sp-oil-ers.
Meng Hua Ho’s ‘The Oily Maniac’ (1976) tells the story of Shen Yuan, a young legal assistant, who feels helpless witnessing all the crime surrounding him. If only he hadn’t had polio as a child and could throw away his crutches and sort out these bad guys himself. An old dude on death-row tells Shen of a black-magic spell he has tattooed on his back, one that will turn Shen into an unstoppable creature. All Shen has to do is trace the spell off the old guy’s back and — voila! However, Shen must only use this power for good. So Shen digs a hole in his garden, sits in it as it magically fills with oil and emerges as… the Oily Maniac!
The Oily Maniac is impervious to bullets and swords; the Oily Maniac can turn into a puddle of liquid and chase speeding cars or pour itself into closed rooms; the Oily Maniac can grow back severed limbs; the Oily Maniac can leap great heights using the power of reversing the footage. And all Shen has to do to turn himself into the Oily Maniac is to simply and discreetly cover himself in burning hot oil, usually on busy construction sites although there seems to be a lot of readily available burning oil everywhere in Hong Kong, and — BLAM! — he’s the Oily Maniac!
‘The Oily Maniac’ has a plot that might seem like a simple revenge tale on its weirdly glistening surface but is actually downright bonkers (surprise!) at its core as ‘The Oily Maniac’ involves everything from a ‘Rashomon’ style court-case, a boob-job gone wrong, an attack on an illegal hymen reconstruction and vaginal restoration racket, a sub-plot revolving around a coconut oil refinery, a man being attacked with his own bicycle and an awful lot of Oily Maniac action as Shen goes about cleaning up society’s mess by causing an even bigger mess and, basically, attacking everyone in sight. I think he might have neglected the guy’s advice at the start of the film. It’s all pretty baffling.
Meanwhile the police are equally baffled by the excessive appearance of oil at all the crime scenes leading them to deduce that the criminal smothers himself in oil to make himself harder to grab hold of and to make his slippery escape quicker and you have to admit that that is some spectacular piece of police movie logic right there. Will they capture the Oily Maniac? Will the coconut oil refinery get taken over? Will the boobs get fixed? Can Shen exact his revenge for… for… for whatever it was he was out for revenge for as it sort of keeps changing all the time? Watch ‘The Oily Maniac’ and find out!
So it’s sort of a mash-up of ‘Daredevil’ meets ‘The Wolf Man’ meets ‘Swamp Thing’ meets ‘The Toxic Avenger’ meets ‘The Blob’ and with a soundtrack that is such a blatant theft of Jaws’ that I’m sure The Shaw Brothers would have been sued if anyone involved in ‘Jaws’ had ever even heard of this movie. Yet what is oddest about ‘The Oily Maniac’ is that despite (or maybe because) of its sleazy crudeness, shoddy effects work, woeful storytelling and just plain downright stupidity is that it kinda works. There’s not a lot of gratuitous violence, so gore-hounds might want to look elsewhere, and the fight choreography is pretty uninspired and very clunky but there is a lot of mayhem and the movie rattles along at such a pace, taking so many screeching and lurching turns into batshit territory that it has a decent amount of captivating energy to it all. There’s also a lot of Oily Maniac action with the creature appearing in the movie almost as much, if not more, than his human counterpart.
If you like your movies well made, tight scripted, with decent effects work or are one of those elitist sticklers who demand that their films make sense then you might want to give this one a miss. If you’re a fan of lurid, Hong Kong exploitation cinema then this might fall into the “essential viewing” category.
