Scorpion Thunderbolt (1984)

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Following on from the apparent success of their cut-and-paste "ninja" movies starring Richard Harrison, Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai re-teamed for this incredible piece of gory trash. Once again we have a Hong Kong film intercut with totally unrelated scenes of hardman Richard engaging in all sorts of fisticuffs and martial arts escapades which makes for one extreme, confusing movie. One of the worst films ever made is perversely one of the most hilariously enjoyable to watch! The film starts off well for bad movie buffs with a chase through the dark streets of Hong Kong, ending in a pretty young girl getting messily shredded by a barely-seen slimy creature with lots of tentacles. The local police are soon investigating and become convinced that the killer is a snake monster after discovering some kind of larvae under a desk at their HQ! They pursue an escaped madman up a tree - whose fancy is eating cats - and subdue him, only for the gore murders to continue. The investigating cop, Inspector Ko, finds things even more troubled when he's attacked and held hostage by an ex-con who strips his girlfriend naked before being beaten black and blue in a sudden bout of martial arts from the escaped Ko.After some disco-dancing padding, the monster commits more bloody crimes in the local baths, the heroine is attacked by a spring-loaded cat (™), there are some exceptionally cheesy scenes of a romantic couple running in slow-mo down a beach, and later the same said couple are attacked by an unexplained invasion of snakes in their own car! It doesn't make any sense but it's still kind of enthralling. Later we see a girl making love to a huge snake-monster in the woods via some dodgy but cool-looking special effects, and learn that the resulting offspring is now the snake monster terrorising Hong Kong.After shots of people jumping through windows for no reason and a girl warding off a creature attack with a handy aerosol and lighter, we witness a very cheesy transformation scene of the possessed girl turning into the monster, which then hilariously begins flying through the air and some bushes before being gunned down by the intrepid police force. Although very cheesy, this (unreleased) horror yarn is actually pretty good for what it's worth, with a plot that keeps you on your toes by throwing in all manner of unexplained weirdness, some very graphic murder scenes with blood being splashed about and a low-budget shooting style which gives it a hard-edged realism. The only cheesy thing about it is the snake monster itself, which looks like a cross between the menace in ALIEN and the rubber-suited antics of a cheapo GODZILLA flick.Somehow deciding that an Asian movie populated by unrecognised foreign actors and actresses wouldn't be of interest to movie fans in the West (although I'd sure buy it for a dollar!), Godfrey Ho decided to direct some extra additional scenes which come across as more like a second film tacked on to the first despite some strong efforts to tie the two together, and hoped that you don't notice the absurdity of it all.Genre stalwart Richard Harrison (playing...you guessed it...a character named Richard!) is the ageing but powerful hero whom we first meet driving around in a car and getting flashed by a blue-vested woman. Taking her to some bizarre porno cinema, Richard begins to make love to the lady until she attempts to kill him and starts spitting orange goo from her mouth. The reason being that her employer is an evil witch who supposedly controls the snake monster terrorising Hong Kong using black magic and a crystal ball (powered by - gosh! - a flashing light-bulb!). The witch sends out more blue-vested thugs to kill Richard, who is interrupted from his strongman training by a guy pretending to be the plumber! Much cheesy martial arts action ensues with dubbed in sound-effects and reliance on silly slow-motion scenes of people flying through the air and props like towels (causing the villain to drool uncontrollably) and umbrellas (!) becoming deadly weapons.Finally, Richard gets sick of all the slaughter and decides to visit a fortune teller in his local park, who informs him that his ring is magical and the only thing that can destroy the witch. To aid him on his quest, the fortune teller gives Richard a golden sword and mystical mirror (!) and tells him to visit the witch's castle on the fifteenth of the month (why?) to destroy the ring, which will then in turn kill her. He does the deed and the film ends. Bear in mind that these tacked-on scenes are clumsily inserted THROUGHOUT the rest of the movie and the result is one confusing escapade as you try and make sense of two bizarre films running concurrently! The tacked-on scenes with Harrison are by far the funniest things and side-splittingly good, with Harrison shining brightly amid all the chaos going on around him and keeping an admirably straight face about it all too.SCORPION THUNDERBOLT is a one-of-a-kind movie-going experience, a unique mish-mash of horror and action themes bundled together in one huge disjointed package designed to offend all those with good taste and a low tolerance for trash. While the production values are low, originality non-existent, and no talent evident from either the cast or crew, this remains a highly amusing film thanks to the sheer inanity and craziness of it all. An impossible-to-track-down gem which has now acquired the status of a cult classic for all those (un)fortunate enough to have seen it!

I won his video at a raffle 2 years ago. After going through my video collection, I finally got the chance to watch the film. OK! It's another one of those 'Joseph Lai's cheap action fluke'. But this one has got to be one of the weirdest.This film tells the story about a serial killer snake (which some guy must've been dressed in a humanoid snake costume) goes round killing women. Although the police are trying desperately hard to find the killer. They do believe it's not human.As the film goes, we run into Richard Harrison who plays himself (for some reason). He has a ring which could a stop an evil witch from putting out those weird spells which somehow is responsible for making this woman (Helen) a journalist from turning herself into the snake demon.Another thing about this flick which I had to laugh at, is how comes I watch one of Joseph Lai's movies, they always have music samples from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' or 'The Big Brawl'. Some well known movies and they take the music score from that movie and put it on theirs? It so weird. Anyway, the film may've been good, but not that good! Totally disastrous

An evil, clawed, cackling witch woman unleashes a savage humanoid snake monster that embarks on a brutal killing spree in a major city. The ever-suave Richard Harrison has to fend off several assassins who want his magic ring and must find the witch in order to stop her. Meanwhile, fetching lady reporter Helen fears that she might be the snake monster. Once again singularly all-thumbs writer/director Godfrey Ho does his customary slipshod cut'n'paste hackjob of haphazardly combining two separate films together with a flagrant disregard for both cinematic artistry and narrative coherence. For example, take the totally nonsensical sequence with Harrison picking up an attractive American hitch-hiker (she naturally flashes her breasts in order to get a ride from Richard). Harrison takes the lass to a movie theater, she performs a striptease for Richard, they proceed to make love, and the chick even attempts to kill him while they're in the middle of doing just what you think. Moreover, we've also got a constant swift pace, lots of graphic, yet cheesy gore, a few pulsating disco tunes blaring away on the soundtrack (one gal gets attacked by the monster while dancing in her living room to a pounding disco tune!), gaudy cinematography, sleazy soft-core sex, ineptly staged martial arts fights, laughably lousy dubbing (an Asian police officer sports an utterly incongruous plummy British accent!), tasty gratuitous female nudity, plenty of slithery snakes, a mysterious blind flute player, a riotously pathetic rubbery beast, and a fiery over-the-top conclusion. All these choice cruddy ingredients add up to produce one hilariously awful, but still hugely entertaining mess of a gut-busting schlock howler.

Another film based on a story by AAV Creative Unit This movie walks that fine line between being "one of the absolutely worst films ever made" and "one of the absolutely worst films ever made, yet somehow entertaining". Its a line it crosses and re-crosses frequently with in its 90 minute running time making for a surreal experience. (And don't get me wrong this movie is BAD, but its occasionally as low as you can go in badness and still be enjoyable in a jaw dropping sort of way.) The plot of this film has a witch queen sending off a rubber suited monster thats controlled by a guy playing a magic flute off to kill people while the cops try to stop the mayhem. Meanwhile in unrelated footage Richard Harrison runs around trying to look like he's part of the movie after a girl he picks up on the side of the road (after she flashes him her breasts) dies spewing orange ooze after a failed murder attempt during sex. I wish I was making this up.Dreadful, this is a movie that will tax even the most jaded bad movie lover. Die Hard bad movie fans will eat this up most others will be shaking their head wondering what in the wide wide world of sports is going on how many people actually paid to see it.Avoid.