GOUHUN JIANG TOU
(“Erotic Degeneration”)
Production: Hong Kong, 1982
Director: Meng Hua Ho
English title (Hong Kong): Black Magic 2
US release title: Revenge Of The Zombies
Category: Horror
Gouhun Jiang Tou opens with swamp scenes of a topless woman devoured alive by a crocodile, followed swiftly by the reptile’s capture and evisceration. Over in the big city, two doctors and their wives are trying to solve the mystery of patients seemingly poisoned by sorcery, their skin riddled with worms or ruptured by pulsating, venomous ulcers. Meanwhile, we see a black magician pulling a six-inch nail from the skull of a nude girl; she turns into an old hag and falls lifeless. This sorcerer is a master of zombies, and is also addicted to drinking breast milk to keep himself young; he bewitches one of the doctors’ wives and lures her to his mansion, shaves her pubic hair and makes it into an oil, then rapes her after sucking milk from her nipples. She returns home only to wake up heavily pregnant the very next morning; at the hospital, doctors cut a freak baby from her belly. When another man is cursed and turns into a dead effigy, the doctors decide to investigate further by digging up his worm-filled corpse for a graveyard autopsy, but the evidence is judged inconclusive. Only one option remains to test if the sorcerer’s powers are genuine – the other wife will submit to one of his spells. When she duly becomes possessed, only the intervention of a white magician – who exorcises her by whipping her with a dead cat – saves the day. The magician is eventually killed by the evil sorcerer, but not before gouging out his own eyes and instructing the doctor to eat them for power. This sets up a climactic show-down in the black magician’s mansion, where the doctor and his newly-acquired X-ray vision are pitted against a horde of hooded zombies, reactivated by hammering nails into their skulls. Using the white magician’s amulet, the doctor is able to reduce many of them to slime or burning ashes, but then loses the talisman; just when it seems the sorcerer will yet gain the upper hand, his arm is hacked off with an axe. As the mansion of evil burns to the ground, the film comes to an abrupt end. Tamer than its reputation and this plot outline suggests, Gouhun Jiang Tou is nonetheless an extremely weird cinematic experience, with a couple of physically disgusting scenes, a fair amount of nudity, and some very perverse ritualistic activities to sustain it.
Posted by Moonchild Zero
