This Bonkers 1980s Sports Movie With Wizards Is Unlike Anything You've Ever Seen

The setup for Kuei Chih-Hung's 1983 supernatural horror/sports/action movie "The Boxer's Omen" is straightforward enough. A boxer named Wing (Lung-Wei Wang) has a devastating boxing match with a vicious Thai fighter named Bu Bo (the awesome Bolo Yeung from "Blooodsport") that leaves him grievously injured. Wing contacts his brother Hung (Phillip Ko), a low-level gangster, to go to Thailand and fight Bu Bo to get revenge. 

But there's nothing straightforward about "The Boxer's Omen," and it spins off into insanity pretty quickly. Hung, for instance, is kidnapped by rival gangsters, but is saved by the eerie ghost of a Buddhist monk. This ghostly monk appears incessantly to Hung and also begins to implore him to go to Thailand. The ghost reveals that he and Hung are connected through their past lives, and that Hung must train to become a warrior monk himself to battle an incoming cadre of mysterious evil sorcerers. Killing the sorcerers will allow the monk Qing Zhao to attain immortality. As it stands, his spirit is currently trapped in his long-rotting corpse. 

Don't worry, Hung hasn't forgotten about getting revenge in the boxing ring, even though he will eventually change his name to Baluo Kaidi and become a demon-fighting sorcerer. This will lead to a fight in the boxing ring, undone by the machinations of distant dark wizards hurling curses.

This movie is wild to behold, and my description of the plot doesn't capture the truly crazy, swirling, insane visuals that fill every frame. A character is killed by a magic spell that causes enormous flesh bubbles to pop from his flesh and then coughs up a live bat. There are glowing temples, bodily transformation, vomiting, vomit-eating, rotting skulls, and everything in between. "The Boxer's Omen" is madness. You must watch it.

Many of the magical spells in "The Boxer's Omen" are all realized through some pretty disgusting means. In one scene, an evil wizard bites into a live rat and spits its chewed-up guts onto a bat skeleton, turning the bat skeleton into his servant. In another, he retrieves a rotting human head from a basket he keeps on a shelf. Specially trained spiders are instructed to stab a monk through his eyelids. A man pukes a snake. An army of crocodile skeletons marches along to battle. The wizards summon a series of demons and creatures to do their bidding, including a large-headed, green-skinned creature that looks positively extraterrestrial. One wizard casts a spell on his own head, causing it to rip from his own shoulders, fly through the air, and strangle a foe using the dripping, bloody viscera hanging from his neck. 

Yeah, this movie is awesome. It's like a caffeine-addicted teen, after studying deep-cut tomes of Buddhist mythology, and then watching too many martial arts flicks, passed out after a four-day cola bender and wrote down the dream he had. 

And the above things are only a small handful of the bizarre happenstances in "The Boxer's Omen." The plot takes a backseat for extended periods to allow wizards to do slimy magic at one another. In the film's grossest sequence, some dark monks sew a dead body into the corpse of a dead crocodile, and the ritual also involved eating ... and throwing up ... Look, it must be seen to be believed. Eyeball monsters, skin-flaying spells, and bodily fluids abound. To describe the litany of slimy, strange things in "The Boxer's Omen" would take too long. 

"The Boxer's Omen" is kooky and full of creature effects and a lot of goop and gore, but it's also very up front about its religious intentions. The finale is a battle between magical monks standing on either side of a large, blackened space, hurling attacks at one another, but this is clearly a battle of the holy and the unholy, the enlightened and the wrathful. The Hung character is punished for violating his vow of chastity. This is about the importance of holy figures in a world lousy with earthy, smelly, bloody sub-deities. 

"The Boxer's Omen" was produced by the Shaw Brothers studio, known for their outsize drama and martial arts movies. They did make plenty of horror movies, too, and "The Boxer's Omen" falls in with the studio's tendency to highlight images and monsters from Eastern folklore. Look up the 1975 movie "Black Magic" to see the precedent for "Omen." Director Kuei Chih-Hung had already made a few notable horror flicks for the studio in the early 1980s, including "Hex," "Bewitched," and "Curse of Evil," and they, too, were effects-heavy nightmares filled with monsters and glop. 

Kuei is an energetic, imaginative director who has the blood-soaked verve of Sam Raimi or a young Peter Jackson (whose "Meet the Feebles" we ranked far too low), just without either filmmaker's winking humor. These films are wholly earnest, making the wild scenes of magic seem that much more surreal. "The Boxer's Omen," the filmmaker's magnum opus, is unlike anything you've ever seen. 

Luckily, "The Boxer's Omen" is currently available on AMC+, Shudder, and Eternal Family, the latter two of which are carefully curated for people with discerning taste in horror and cult movies. Watch it today.