Saturday, February 19, 2011

JIANG TOU - Yung-Yu Chen - "Black Magic" (1975)

"Black Magic" It's not a love triangle, it's a Love Pentagon!!

Lordy, Lordy, I do hope that's true!! Roll the intro!

"So........Am I supposed to think there is something weird about that?"

The music for "Jiang Tou" was composed by Yung-Yu Chen, a man with an amazing 175 composing credits including everything from "The Five Fingers Of Death" to "Tang Lang Zui Hu Wu Ying Jiao!"

Here's where the story really starts! Introducing Lung Ti as Xu Nuo, just a regular, every day, construction worker guy whose life is about to become very complicated because of.........

....this vixen, Ni Tien, aka Tanny, as Luo Yin, who just can't get Xu out from underneath her skin!

Filmed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where it no longer looks anything close to this!

Lily Li as Quming is Xu's fiancee! Lily was also in "The Oily Maniac" and a Shaw Bros/Hammer crossover spy flick we'll be doing soon entitled "Shatter" with fellow co-star in this film, Lung Ti! Lily was the go to girl, when they needed somebody who looked very innocent, and had a great pout!

Right about here is where it starts getting really complex. The guy who thinks he looks cool in really loud patterned shirts is Lieh Lo as Lang Jiajie, a great actor who had 215 career films! Lang wants Luo Yin just as much as she wants Xu Nuo, who really only loves Quming, and Lang and Luo both end up going to see this magician, the guy with the longer gray hair, Feng Ku as Shan Jianmi to get spells to make the other person fall in love with them!

The love spells are very expensive, and require gathering all kinds of strange objects, that then in turn have to be placed in odd places or ingested, but when it all gets done, the spells do work!

There's only one problem, the spells aren't permanent, and now it's time for Lang Jiajie to pay up! It's not good news when a magician of this calibre tells you good-bye, because unlike the spell, good-bye is permanent!

Lang quickly finds out that love ain't worth the high price, and that it would have been much cheaper to just find a prostiture. The end results would have been the same except that he wouldn't have suffered a slow and miserable death!

In the meantime, Luo Yin is getting her own spell together. Part of the woman's love spell is that she has to give some milk, a task Shan Jianmi always seems to relish!

Luo Yin's spell works perfectly after she gets everything in place, and is waiting for Xu Nuo in his aprtment! She seduces him, but just like when Lang did the same thing to Luo, the spell is not permanent, and actually wears off quite rapido!

Umbrellas in graveyard scenes always look cool!

In a big turnaround Shan Jianmi decides he now wants Luo Yin, and he puts his own spell on her!

Shan Jianmi shows up at Luo's pad all cleaned up and spiffy looking like a big pimp daddy, and with all his spells in place, he then seduces her!

Unlike most other Shaw Brothers features, there's no Kung Fu or much real fighting at all, but there is this big shonuff showdown between Shan Jianmi and Wen Chung Ku as the Shaman Fu-Yung in the end! Wen went on to have his own failed Krispy Kreme franchise!

It's all enough to make anybody's head spin like Linda Blair, and Xu Nuo is a blithering idiot by the time it's all over!

The moral of the story is, as so eloquently stated and sung by The Blenders, "Don't Fuck Around With Love!"

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