A NIGHT AT BASTARDPIECE THEATER: THE SEVENTH CURSE

The plot of The Seventh Curse, summarized in one still.

It's titties and B movies time again! My dear friend Bastard Keith, in his tireless quest to share disreputable cinema with the world, has taken his act to Under St. Marks. This past Thursday marked the second installment of Bastardpiece Theater (the first, where we suffered through Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Gore Gore Girls, passed without comment on these pages just because godfuckingdammit that movie was terrible), with go-go dancing by the lovely and talented Madame Rosebud (not to mention the vegan brownies she baked), and commentary by BK, Rosebud, and burlesque luminary Miss Astrid to the Hong Kong horror picture The Seventh Curse.

Now, some movies don't necessarily lend themselves to this format—which also includes drinking games—but The Seventh Curse is enhanced greatly by it. An earlyish effort by prolific Hong Kong writer-producer Wong Jing (whose 1992 Naked Killer I wrote about a few months ago, screened at another one of BK's debauches), The Seventh Curse is in his typically out-of-its-fucking-mind style of exploitation, featuring a cameo as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women (I'm told by the Bastard, a far greater Wong Jing authority than I, that just about every Wong Jing cameo features him as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women). The cast features Chow Yun-Fat and Maggie Cheung, but note that said “features” rather than stars, as Chow Yun-Fat is a supporting character and Maggie Cheung apparently was in this before she went to acting school (though to be fair, her character would be annoying no matter what).

The lead is Chin Siu-ho, who played the limpdick who takes over the martial arts school in Fist of Legend after the Japanese kill Master Huo, and who is no more tumescent in The Seventh Curse. He's either a doctor or a cop or a cop/doctor (the movie doesn't seem to give a fuck, why should we?) and doesn't do much except run around being less charismatic than Chow Yun-Fat, who pops up every twenty minutes or so smoking a pipe and being awesome and, more often than not, explaining the bizarre shit that happened since his previous appearance. One wonders why he couldn't have just been the lead, until one realizes that Chow Yun-Fat would never have been a big enough yutz to end up getting the “blood curse” in the first place, thus rendering the whole movie about how he's going to cure it moot.

Things kick off with the author of the book the movie's based on sitting around a well-appointed drawing room with Chow Yun-Fat and Chin Siu-Ho, asking them to tell him a story over some (presumably excellent) brandy. And what a fuckin story they tell. It starts with a random, 80s Hong Kong cop movie sequence involving a hostage situation, that for some reason Chin Siu-Ho is in the middle of. Maggie Cheung shows up shrieking about being a reporter except no one gives a fuck, so she (possibly) murks a cop with a brick; I mean goddamn, she crunches the lady cop/nurse (cop nurse?) pretty goddamn hard. But never mind that shit, there's business to attend to. Random kung fu (which is pretty well staged and edited) and explosions (which are hilarious and nearly always completely unmotivated) ensue, and Maggie Cheung almost gets everybody killed, and machine guns a guy. (Talk about taking the Hunter S. Thompson “place yourself in the middle of the story” school of journalism too far . . .)

After everything stops blowing up, Chin Siu-Ho goes home, and there's a wicked-hot mid-80s vintage permed white (Jewish, according to Bastard Keith, an authority on that subject as well) chick there who wants the sex. Chin Siu-Ho thinks this is a good idea but first he has to do some more kung fu with some dude. I think this is where the Black Dragon (who is fucking AWESOME) shows up and tells him never to fuck because the “blood curse” will kick in if he ever fucks. But he's unable to resist his lady friend's sexhortations (she was hot, and calculated risk is the life of kings) and, mid-shtup, some nasty thing on his leg explodes.

Chin Siu-Ho does the logical thing and goes to Chow Yun-Fat at this point, telling him what happened. Chow Yun-Fat—who swaggers through this whole picture like he's just getting blown constantly—rattles off some suavely incoherent talk about blood curses, which leads to a flashback to how Chin Siu-Ho came down with the blood curse. He goes to Thailand to research a cure for AIDS (“Going to Thailand to find a cure for AIDS?” --an incredulous Bastard Keith) with some guy who looks like a cross between late-period Amitabh Bachchan and shuffling-around-his-vineyards-period Francis Coppola, and ends up wandering off into the jungle and meeting a native girl named Betsy (who's Chinese too, just because why not fully embrace the implausibility) who because of a shitty subtitling job at one point, we all ended up calling “Besty” for the whole picture, which was especially apt because she was infinitely preferable to Maggie “I swear to fuck in like 15 years I'm going to be one of the greatest movie stars who ever lived, I just haven't gotten there yet” Cheung. She also, after Chin Siu-Ho comes down with the blood curse by doing something really fucking stupid, takes off her clothes to reveal a specfuckingtacular pair of tits that the audience is only allowed to bask in for like a second before she hacks open her left tit and feeds Chin Siu-Ho a golf-ball sized tumor. (Dude, seriously, don't ask.) Also, they can't fuck because she's the Black Dragon's girlfriend.

In the middle of all this, there's this cult living in the jungle that worship worms and practice human sacrifice and have skeletons who can do kung fu, whose fabulously dressed and made-up leader (Elvis Tsui) makes Freddie Mercury look like John Wayne. It turns out the only way Chin Siu-Ho can cure his blood curse is by stealing the eyes of the tribe's Buddha statue and eating them. Why exactly he goes back to Hong Kong and tries to ignore the fact that the blood curse is going to kill him is unclear, but Chow Yun-Fat swiftly rectifies this the second the unbelievably long flashback in which Chin Siu-Ho relates this story is over, and they head back to Thailand.

Maggie Cheung comes along because she's still in the movie for some reason, and sneaks into Chin Siu-Ho's hotel room and leaves a gigantic fucking pile of AK-47s there. Torn between the knee-jerk “wow, that is fucking rad” reaction at seeing so many guns sitting there on the piano and the more rational “why the fuck can't Maggie Cheung hurry up and meet Wong Kar Wai” response, Chin Siu-Ho engages Maggie Cheung in conversation and she starts monologuing in this really unhinged fashion that leaves some doubt as to whether she's even really a journalist, and in order to shut her up he agrees to bring her into the jungle with him and the Black Dragon (I know I mentioned him a couple times without explaining who he is, but that's because the movie doesn't really explain who he is, he just shows up and is awesome, even though we only get an extremely faint idea of who he is).

Turns out something nasty as shit happened to Besty's face (which I missed because I was tweeting some non sequitur about Steve Reeves as Hercules; it was that kind of night), which is one of a few thousand good reasons why the Black Dragon, Chow Yun-Fat, and several other competent people have to go along with Chin Siu-Ho and Maggie Cheung and make sure they don't accidentally use grenades as suppositories. Maggie Cheung falls down a trap door in the jungle and for some stupid reason—the whole panel was telling them “Fuck it. LEAVE HER.”—Chin Siu-Ho insists on going back to save her, which means more kung-fu skeletons and flying fetus demons, except now the flying fetus demon is the good guy (this was the part of the movie I was just gaping openmouthed at the screen in utter confusion, also known as about 90% of the movie), and the kung fu skeleton goes all H.R. Giger (h/t to Rosebud for that analogy) on a motherfucker and something happens and the derpiest bunch of monks to ever worship Buddha show up and there's another fun kung fu battle, after which Chin Siu-Ho eats the Buddha's eyes and doesn't leave any for Besty, who remains deformed and is the subject of an epically twatty condescending monologue by Maggie Cheung (who I bet breaks people's kneecaps if they ever mention this movie in her presence). And it all wraps up back in the novelist's brandy and leather armchairs party, with Chin Siu-Ho and Chow Yun-Fat having a good manly chortle and setting up a potential sequel.

The Seventh Curse, while an engagingly insane good time on its own merits, was nonetheless enhanced by the Bastard's brutally hilarious lisping imitation of the cult leader, Rosebud's incisive, effervescent enthusiasm, and Miss Astrid's strategic atomic bon mots. The commentary greatly enhanced the experience, which I must admit, if I were watching the movie by myself, would have consisted almost entirely of me going “what the fuck . . .?” and “When is Chow Yun-Fat going to come back?” A little repetitive, but hey. I leave certain things to the experts.

I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but Bastardpiece Theater is not just fun because these are my friends and Rosebud's vegan brownies are so ridonkulously fucking good. It's fun because the movies are terrible in an entertaining way, there's plenty of beer, and genuinely funny people are cracking jokes out of love, and in a shared sense of “Yeah, we're all watching The Seventh Curse voluntarily, no one here is superior.” Also, next month they're showing a Filipino midgetsploitation movie starring the legendary Weng Weng as Agent 00 entitled For Y'ur Height Only. The whole trailer is Weng Weng fucking tall people's shit up and jumping off tall buildings and using umbrellas as parachutes. It looks amazing.