The Shaw Brothers were famous for producing slightly hysterical, often hallucinatory, over-the-top karate films with frequent mystical overtones. "The Boxer's Omen" is no exception, except that it throws in quite a bit of full-frontal female nudity and a copious amount of vomiting in addition to all the usual SB stuff. A gangster is bewitched by an evil wizard, but he has someone who can help him: a Buddhist monk who has been poisoned by the same evil wizard! But in order to receive that help, the gangster must give up his wanton ways and become a monk himself....
I quite like most of the Shaw Brothers movies that I've seen, but this one seemed a bit.... much, somehow. Perhaps it was the grossness factor (recycled vomit, anyone?), perhaps it was, at 107 minutes, just a little bit too long (I mean, how many times can you show recycled vomit, after all?); in any event, I ended up feeling, not uplifted by the zaniness of the show, but rather just vaguely disgusted.
Review of The Boxer's Omen
