Bewitched
It is a tragic event but a fortuitous chain of coincidence and evidence, the body of a girl, around six or seven years old, found in the bushes by a family enjoying a picnic; the cause of death a nine inch nail hammered into her head, a taxi driver recalls taking a man from the Shing Mun reservoir to a Buddhist temple about ten days before where another witness recalls that man made a substantial offering and left a photograph of a young girl on the shrine.
A fragment of school uniform visible, it is enough to identify the establishment as the Mok Kong School and the identity of the child, Lau Yan Lam, Inspector Bobby Wong investigating and arresting her father who confesses but claims that he was possessed, that a curse was put on him by a girl he met in Bangkok, Wong disbelieving but seeing there are oddities about the case.
Another sinister film of the supernatural from the prolific Shaw Brothers Studio, released in 1981 Bewitched (Gu, 蠱) was directed by Chih-Hung Kuei from a script by On Szeto, starring Chin Shen Huang as Bobby Wong King-Sun and Fanny Fen-Ni as his wife Mary, and Fei Ai as Stephen Lam Wai, sentenced to death by hanging but his body already deteriorating.
A strangely structured film, the opening scenes indicate it is to be a police investigation, yet the suspect is located with overly convenient alacrity, his story leading Wong to depart Hong Kong for Thailand and Bon Brown (Li Li Chen) who turned to extreme measures to take revenge on the holidaying man who wronged her, even though there is nothing to indicate he did any such thing.
Lam‘s regret at murdering his daughter only manifesting after the fact, that it was wrong presumably not having occurred to him at the time, and having sought no other advice for his physical changes or compulsions he was experiencing, Wong is forewarned not to eat anything lest he also be cursed, yet inevitably his travelogue brings the very outcome he wished to avoid.
Switching to a series of escalating dark incantations (Coffin curse! Worm curse! Lemon curse! Head splitting curse!) it is disappointing that only the initial Corpse Oil Curse receives a step-by-step breakdown to allow it to be recreated at home, but while the effects are good, particularly the bat demon, and the temples of white marble look magnificent under blue skies and in candlelight, Bewitched loses itself in the duel between sorcerer and Dharma Master, narrative sacrificed for battles of psychic will.
Bewitched is streaming on the Arrow platform now
