Black Magic (1975) User Reviews

The film that ushered in a new wave of exploitative Hong Kong horror.

[BA_Harrison · 7/10 · 19 October 2012]

Ti Lung stars as construction worker Xu Nuo, who is the object of desire for his sexy millionaire boss Luo Yin (Ni Tien); however, despite the obvious attractions (horny woman hot for his body and bags of cash into the bargain), Xu Nuo remains faithful to his fiancé, teacher Quming (Lily Li)—at least until the desperate Luo visits evil sorcerer Sha Jianmai and pays him to whip her up a love potion...

Legendary Hong Kong martial arts studio Shaw Brothers had dabbled in supernatural horror before, producing spiritual romance movies, but it wasn't until 1975 that they started to embrace their trashier side, with Ho Meng Hua's Black Magic, a tale of evil sorcery and sex that introduced some of the more exploitative elements that would become staples of the genre in the years to come.

With Sha Jianmai's magic requiring such bizarre ingredients as a severed head, snake venom, a freshly exhumed corpse, rice that has been applied to a woman's vagina, severed fingers, centipedes, human breast milk, blood, hair and footprints trapped in mud, and the result of his spells being uncontrollable lust or sudden death, viewers can rest assured that this entertaining slice of wackiness delivers plenty of blood, gore, nudity and other assorted deviancy.

This being the first of its kind, it might not be quite as relentlessly nutzoid or as extreme as later, similarly themed films like Seeding of a Ghost, Corpse Mania or The Boxer's Omen, but it definitely has enough moments of madness to make it worthwhile, the action culminating with a particularly funny magical battle on a building site between Sha Jianmai and a benevolent magician, whose weapons include a skull emblazoned laser mirror, a shrunken head, and magical blue streaks of lightning.

Okay HK production,but nothing really impressive.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 7/10 · 16 April 2007]

Martial arts hero Ti Lung plays Hsu Lo,who runs up against an evil black magic practitioner San Kan-Mi.San Kan-Mi wants to seduce Hsu's fiancée Wang Chu-Ying and places a death spell on him and a love spell on her,hoping to kill two birds with one stone.Another veteran witch doctor comes to the rescue of the spellbound lovers...Slightly gruesome horror flick from the legendary Shaw Brothers.There is self-mutilation ,grisly black magic ritual involving freshly buried corpse and finally some people are disintegrating into masses of putrid flesh,maggots and bones in a matter of seconds.I haven't seen "Black Magic II",but it's supposedly even more gruesome.If you liked this check out also hysterically funny "Oily Maniac".7 out of 10.

Pales in comparison to its successor, but still a fun time.

[yourmotheratemydog715 · 5/10 · 7 January 2014]

While the Shaw Brothers are definitely best-known for their martial arts flicks (as evidenced by a couple peeved reviews on this website), they did dip their fingers in other genres here and there. BLACK MAGIC was one of their forays into the horror sub-genre, telling the tale of a black magician and his various customers looking for love, murder or both.

BLACK MAGIC contains some nastiness and some awesome here and there: we've got rice given magical qualities by female genitalia, breast-milking, dead folks dissolving into maggot-infested skeletons and laser beam-shooting skulls. The problem, however, is that in between a few awesome scenes, the movie does really drag and gets quite repetitive (the black magician sets a curse, the good magician reverses the curse, then the black magician reverses it again, etc., etc.). It's all watchable, but it gets pretty run-of-the-mill near the middle. Luckily, the last 5-10 minutes are fantastic and worth wading through the mediocrity.

Overall, this is worth a look for Hong Kong horror fans, but you could do better if you looked around. For example, just a year later, the Shaw Bros. put out a (name-and-theme-only) sequel, BLACK MAGIC 2, which cranks the crazy factor up a couple notches and is basically an improvement in every way.

Move over Cheech & Chong!

[jessicacoco2005 · 7/10 · 5 October 2017]

This film is so essence of B. It has it all: voodoo, old hags, centipede eating, breast milk and the clichéd good versus evil battle at the end. It's so B, you can't help, but laugh through it all. No matter how much you criticize the film for its cheesy plot and sets as you're watching it, you're sure to watch it to the end!

A working class guy tired of working for a living has his sights on the wealth of a very spoiled rich woman who won't have anything to do with him. She in turn has it all, but as a rich,spoiled woman that's not enough. She wants the man she can't have, an honest working class man in love with the good working class girl. Enter evil magician who specialized in both love and death spells.

That was weird, doesn't even cover it.

[dafrosts · 6/10 · 21 March 2018]

The plot given if off the mark and needs corrected. Mrs. Zhou/Luo Yin (Tanny Tien Ni) is an affluent woman who thinks money can buy her everything. What it cannot buy her, is Xu Nuo (Ti Lung), who has absolutely no interest in her. His plans to marry his fiance Wang Chu Ying (Lily Li Li-Li) irritate Lu Yin, who will stop at nothing to possess him. She gets an idea when her former lover, Liang Chia Chieh (Lieh Lo), uses a love spell on her. The spell only lasts a day, since Chieh has cheated the magician who cast it, Shan Chien Mi (Ku Feng). Luo Yin will pay Shan Chien "anything" to get what she desires.

Luo Yin follows Shan Chien's directions and literally walks out of Xu Nuo and Chu Ying's wedding reception with Xu Nuo on her arm. Other than the obvious problems arise when Shan Chien desires to posses Luo Yin for himself. Chu Ying and Xu Nuo's friends work with another magician to free Xu Nuo from the "love" spell. Luo Yin pays Shan Chien extra to put a death spell on Chu Ying to ensure Xu Nuo never leaves her.

Chu Ying is freed from the death spell by having worms drained from her back by the 2nd magician, who has her snuck out of the hospital to save her. The 2nd magician informs Chu Ying and Xu Nuo's friends the only way to truly free Xu Nuo is to kill Shan Chien. No one seems to have a problem with this. The final battle takes place at a construction site where Xu Nuo works with most of his friends. It gives a nod to 1972's The Angry Guest and 1971's Duel of Fists. Shan chien and Luo Yin die horribly and in a well deserved manner. Xu Nuo is freed from his spell by coughing up worms. Yup, squiggly little suckers are released to end the curses.

Black Magic

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 1 October 2022]

In 1974, Shaw Brothers worked with Hammer to make The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. That ignited a desire to not only make martial arts films, but supernatural ones. And man, as the studio goes on, these movies grow more deranged in the very best of ways.

Ho Meng-Hua (The Mighty Peking Man, Oily Maniac) directed this and it only hints at how far Hong Kong horror would go. Lang Chia Chieh (Lo Lieh) wants to be with Mrs. Zhou (Tanny Tien Ni), but she's in love with Xu Nuo (Ti Lung) who only wants to be with the love of his life, Wang Chu Ying (Lili Li Li-li). In order to win her, Lang Chia Chieh goes to magician Shan Chen Mi (Ku Feng) and has him cast a spell on Mrs. Zhou. It works, if just for a night, and she soon learns that she too can turn to the spirit world to win over the lover that she wants.

These magic spells are incredibly organic and gross. Like, you need to cut off someone's finger and leave it under your intended person's bed until it turns into a pile of maggots. Or to kill someone, you put worms directly under their skin.

There's a lot of soap opera in this but every time you think it's getting slow, someone gets half naked or makes a possessed rice ball with blood and breast milk, so you can never say it's bad. It's just the first course for how completely out there these movies will get.

Black magic, love potions, voodoo dolls and breast milk

[Groverdox · 7/10 · 31 May 2018]

"Black Magic" is an entertaining bit of Shaw Bros. craziness about witchcraft and breast milk.

The plot, as is often the case with Hongkongese flicks, feels like it was made up while the movie was made. For example, it concerns a battle between a good and a bad magician, but the good magician isn't introduced until the end of the movie. Wouldn't it have made sense to establish him as a good guy earlier on?

Characters also come and go without rhyme or reason. You get used to seeing certain people and expect they'll stick around, but oftentimes, they don't.

However, if you're a fan of weird Asian movies - and there are no weirder movies than those from Asia - you'll probably think that that adds to the film's bizarre, off the wall charm, which it has in spades.

The plot concerns several people visiting an evil magician in Malaysia to produce love potions and occasionally, to have people killed. These potions require hair torn from the person's head, and sometimes also breast milk taken straight from the source. I read some rubbish online about this movie being softcore, but that is ridiculous. There's no sex, and the only nudity shows a bare breast while the milk is extracted.

Anyway, assorted people visit the bad magician to get potions and put curses on each other, until the good magician is introduced and they have a fight in a construction yard.

Apparently (according to Wikipedia) the bad magician fell in love himself with one of the girls, but I don't remember that.

The movie is really just a collection of nifty set pieces involving black magic and its supernatural effects on people. There's not enough of a plot to string parts of the movie together, so I felt my attention waning. Either way, there's enough weirdness to please fans of Asian cult flicks, and the movie is generally entertaining.

Classic Hong Kong Cinema

[JoeB131 · 5/10 · 18 April 2009]

This is actually a lot better than most films of the genre. It also has ample amounts of sex, violence and nudity.

The story is about a rich woman who wants to seduce an architect. After she is seduced by a Lothario using a charm from a Black Magic magician, she contacts the magician herself for a more permanent charm for the one she desires. What follows is a battle of the shaman including some gross special effects.

I guess that people in China are a lot more superstitious than westerners and believe in this kind of stuff. Still, it isn't a bad little film, and the narrative makes sense.

Love and Death Spells

[Uriah43 · 6/10 · 8 November 2018]

This film concerns a rich widow by the name of "Luo Yin" (Tanny Tien) who has set her sights on a young man by the name of "Xu Nuo" (Ti Lung). The problem is that Xu Nuo is in love with another woman named "Wang Chu-ying" (Lilly Li) who also loves him very much. So unable to accept the fact that she cannot get what she wants Luo Yin goes to an evil sorcerer by the name of "Shan Chien-mi" (Ku Feng) to have him cast a love spell on Xu Nuo. Yet even though the love spell works quite well she worries that Wang Chu-ying might somehow disrupt her plans so she subsequently asks Shan Chien-mi to put a death spell on this person as well. Naturally, being as evil as he is Shan Chien-mi has no problems concocting a death spell on Wang Chu-yin. But what Luo Yin doesn't realize, however, is that Shan Chien-mi has his own interests in mind and he has decided to have the rich widow for his own. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a pretty good horror film which was somewhat flawed by the special effects at the end. Of course, technology has developed quite a bit since then and so in spite of this weakness I still enjoyed this movie and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

Not an original Shaw Brothers Production.

[BenCock69 · 3/10 · 25 January 2004]

I bought this movie in a record store for like 1 Euro, because I'm a fan of Hong Kong movies and on the back of the video it said "an original Shaw Brothers Production". What do you expect from an original Shaw Brothers Production? At least some Kung Fu, right? Well there isn't any in this flick. The story deals with black magic from a "witchmaster", who should make a man (Ti Lung), fall in love with a rich widow. Anyway there's no gore in it, hardly blood, while the Fx looks like "Evil Dead 1" with less(!!!) money and I must insist again: NO KUNG FU!!! This movie is boring, silly and as scaring as a commercial for..."Haribo Fledermäuse" for example. The only good I can say is, that sometimes this movie's so silly that it gets almost funny (especially in the end) and it has a cool funky soundtrack, which evokes the mood of exploitation movies. So I rate this movie 3 out of 10.

Good Movie

[CMRKeyboadist · 8/10 · 17 October 2006]

Black Magic is a Shaw Bros. film made back in 1975. Some think it is their first horror film but it is not. The movie is basically a modern story (modern of '75) of old Asian folklore. This movie spawned many films that were similar but none were quite on par with this. Usually, the others were far more violent and that is what they relied on. This movie didn't need to be gory in-order for it to be good.

The story is about a very selfish rich woman. She can have anything she wants. Anything except a certain man who wants nothing to do with her. So she goes and finds the help of a Black Magic Magician to put a love spell on him. The spell works until the mans wife and friends find the help of another magician to break the spell and kill the Black Magic Magician.

That is the storyline for the most part. You would have to watch the film because there is a lot more going on than just that.

This film is certainly not as violent as some of the Shaw Bros. films that I have seen, but, it is a nice change from all of their Martial Arts films, which are excellent as well. The story is well done and you actually start caring for some of the characters. So when bad things happen to them you start getting really frustrated.

For fans of Asian Cinema everywhere, this movie comes highly recommend from me and from many others. Check out the nice DVD that was released not to long ago, it's worth the money. 8/10

Crazed HK classic

[jameselliot-1 · 7/10 · 31 March 2019]

Excellent cinematography, well-lit and razor sharp. Insane black magic rituals loaded with gore and offal. A creepy, well-directed classic from the Shaw Group, Black Magic is packed with sickness and perversity. The Saturday morning kids' TV show optical effects at the end was a poor way to end it.

Hilarious....too bad it wasn't meant to be!

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 10 December 2010]

Most people buying or renting this DVD will be a bit surprised since there is not one bit of martial arts action in this Shaw Brothers film...none. Instead, it's a totally bizarre and often funny film about the supernatural involving a kinky guy who uses black magic to do evil...if the money is good. Folks come to this scum-bag for various spells, but it seems the most common are death curses and love potions. Later in the film you learn that one of the ways this guy derives all this power is through the power of human breast milk! This occurs in a couple rather creepy scenes that will turn off all but those with weird lactic kinks! In addition, there are lots of worms and maggots and the like to make it even creepier.

The film looks cheap. The effects are cheap. The acting and script are cheap. However, it's near the end where the film really falls off the deep end into the being a truly dumb film. However, I liked this part as it really made me laugh--especially when the good black artist fought against the evil one in one of the funniest scenes I've seen in recent weeks. You just have to see it to believe it--it's THAT funny....and dumb. Really, really dumb!

By the way, you might notice how interesting the city is where this was filmed. It's Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. What neat architecture and sites.

Asian Horror/Drama -Gong Tau (1975)

[phosone · 8/10 · 28 November 2006]

As far as I know this is a shaw bros. film. You can see touches of what I like to call "shaw-gloss". If you have seen many shaw movies you know what I am talking about. Reguardless of what I guy above me said, I enjoyed this film. I found it compelling to be quite honest. The setting being a "modern" urban city and jungle. A morality play or soap if you will, with bits of horror/gore thrown in for good measure. Fans of Asian horror might want to give this a try. It is oldschool. This is not a martial arts film . In one movie you get Ti-lung, Lo-lieh, nudity, breast-milk, potions, human flesh, decapitation, cool cars, crazy colors, Ti-lung with shades, a warlock, the list goes on. I bought the 2002 celestial/image version DVD. Quality was great. Decent sound/subtitle options. Tons of trailers which we all love. Keep an open mind this is an older movie from another country. Try something different!

Insane, trend-setting slice of Chinese mysticism and black magic

[Leofwine_draca · 9/10 · 13 May 2015]

BLACK MAGIC is a wonderful little horror film from the Shaw Brothers stable that proved they were just as adept at making horror films as they were martial arts flicks. The success and ingredients of this production would later lead on to many other infamous movies like THE BOXER'S OMEN or SEEDING OF A GHOST.

BLACK MAGIC is a densely-plotted yarn involving the nefarious adventures of a black wizard who's happy to cast all manner of spells on his victims...for a price. First to visit him is a sleazy guy (Lo Lieh, excelling in his role) who wants to spend the night with a woman who hates him. Later, the same woman decides she wants to cast a love spell on a guy who hates her in turn. Eventually the guy's friends realise what's going on and employ the services of a white wizard to combat the villain.

This is a film that has it all: sleazy rituals (including an obsession with procuring breast milk), violent death, and hints at the kind of grotesque imagery that would later follow in this series. The atmosphere of sleaze and creeping dread is spot on, as are the production values that make this just as colourful an adventure as the many kung fu flicks made by the team. Ti Lung is fine but gets relatively little screen time as the erstwhile hero; it's the women who really shine here, including the evil Ni Tien and the good-natured Lily Li. The various elements combine well and the outcome is one of the coolest of all '70s horror films.

Nifty supernatural horror outing

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 19 June 2013]

Construction worker Xu Nuo (handsome Lung Ti) and his fiancé Quming (pretty and charming Lily Li) are about to get married. However, Xu's selfish and ruthless rich boss Luo Yin (a perfectly bitchy portrayal by slinky minx Ni Tien) wants Xu for herself, so she enlists the assistance of powerful necromancer Sha Jianmia (marvelously played with lip-smacking wicked relish by Feng Ku) to concoct a love potion so Luo can make Xu her main man. Director Meng Hua Ho, working from an involving and imaginative script by Kung Ni, relates the gloriously oddball story at a steady pace, grounds the fantastic premise in a believable everyday world, does a solid job of creating a pleasingly creepy atmosphere, and pulls out all the awesomely loopy stops for the delightfully off the wall climactic showdown between the forces of good and evil that offers loads of priceless cut-rate (not so) special effects. Moreover, this film not only delivers a generous sprinkling of tasty female nudity and some reasonably nasty gore, but also comes through with more than enough tongue slicing, breast milking, hideous old hag cackling, face rotting, worm wriggling, centipede eating, and laser shooting weirdness to appease fans of seriously bizarre cinema. Kudos are also in order for Yung-Yu Chen's crisp widescreen cinematography and Hui-chi Tsao's funky shivery score. A very cool and enjoyable flick.