Black Magic
Love is a dangerous obsession and those who crave it will do anything to have it reciprocated; a bored and wealthy widow now controlling the construction empire of her late husband, Zhou Luo Yin is determined that Xu Luo, the lead engineer working on one of her sites, will leave his fiancée for her even though his wedding to Wang Juying is only days away, scheming and attempting to seduce him to no avail.
But Mrs Zhou is also beautiful, desired by the repeatedly spurned Liang Jiaje who is even less scrupulous, promising gold to the sorcerer Shan Chien-mi who lives in the Wanloa Forest if he can make a potion to cause her to fall in love with him; learning of the ploy, Luo-Yin demands an audience with the sorcerer and promises him even more if he will turn Xu Luo’s head to her, and cause the death of Juying.
“Poisoned are the minds of men who tarry in women’s rooms,” warns the introduction to Ho Meng Nua’s 1975 horror fantasy, “and such poison is called Black Magic (降頭, Jiàng Tóu) in South East Asia,” the film shot in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia but produced by the prolific Shaw Brothers of Hong Kong, starring Ti Lung as Xu Luo, Lo Lieh as Liang Jiaje, Tien Lie as Luo Yin and Lily Li as Juying, an innocent who knows nothing of the plot against her.
The film somewhat manic and the plotting direct, Black Magic is also on the whole entertaining and surprisingly coherent past the opening scene which establishes the malicious power of Shan Chien-mi (Ku Feng) and his craving for gold, and his opposite number, the benevolent Master Fu Tong (Ku Wen-Chung), which has no relevance other than to establish the template the rest of the film will embellish upon with shenanigans and entanglements.
A fascinating corollary to the American films of the same era, shot in the same glossy style, with big cars and colourful fashions and the conspicuous opulence of the upmarket hotel where the wedding takes place, it is a reflection of the same themes in a different culture, contrasted with the demands for hair follicles and muddy footprints and the endemic belief in magic and spells, and of course with a car chase before the final showdown between the opposing occultists
Consciously playing to a commercial audience, Black Magic is oddly matter-of-fact in presenting the requirements of the spells, corpses dug up, decapitated and the dead head thrown on fire, as well as bodily fluids and secondary curses to ensure compliance from those who would default on their agreed payments, and it was considered sufficiently successful to warrant a sequel the following year, featuring some of the same cast though in different roles.
Black Magic will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 5th December
