‘The Seventh Curse’ or — Pure Cinematic Dopamine?
You don’t really need to know the story of ‘The Seventh Curse’ (1986) but I’ll briefly outline it anyway. After rescuing a young woman from ritual sacrifice by the terrible Worm Tribe Dr Yuen becomes inflicted with the seven deadly “blood curses”. He’s given a year’s breathing time to find a cure, a cure that can only be found in a cave in Thailand where evil forces and monsters dwell. Mayhem ensues and you need know nothing more than that.
What you do need to know, however, is that it was made by Lam Ngai Kai, director of ‘Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky’ (1991), one of the most bat-shit crazy, hyper-violent movies you’ll ever see, and ‘The Seventh Curse’ might be even more off the scale on the bat-shittery-o-meter because this movie consists of nothing other than constant and relentless berserk variation, blood-soaked invention (what this film does to small children is horrifically hilarious) and unbridled insanity.
What powers this furious momentum is that Kai never lets the movie stop to breathe for a single second: when it’s not being an action film it’s a horror film and when it’s not being horror it’s martial arts or Indiana Jones or slapstick comedy or ‘The Evil Dead’ (1987), and when it’s not being any of those it’s all the above rolled into one.
This frantic pace is further enhanced by the fact that Kai doesn’t so much stage singular set-pieces where the action can settle into a certain rhythm (although there are a few brief ones such as the opening police-raid or the fight on the statue of Buddha scattered throughout) but, instead, Kai is all about making sure the film never settles into any form of predictable tempo outside that of continuous novelty. So a car chase becomes a demon battle which then turns into a fist fight fight before exploding into a firearms shoot-out until morphing into a monster battle… and it is so much fun!
Yet the film’s biggest appeal is that it does something in particular I absolutely adore, and that’s people fighting puppets.
If you’re a fan of early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi where obviously crude (in the best possible sense) puppetry is used to bring creatures, skeletons and other monstrosities to life which then proceed to eat, kill and/or kick the shit out of everyone in sight then you’ll be in a state of rhapsodic bliss here. There’s a kung-fu fight between our protagonists and the undead that’s a deliriously ultra-violent mixture of Jim Henson and The Three Stooges that’ll leave you rolling about on the floor like an overly tickled toddler. It’s indescribably ecstatic.
If you’re ever feeling blue, downcast or simply miserable at the state of the world then put on ‘The Seventh Curse’ and feel that negativity blasted away. It might be a curse but it’s also a cure for any and all despondency.
