THE BOXER'S OMEN! w/ Live Soundtrack by Sunburned Hand of the Man!

THE BOXER’S OMEN (1983). This infamous cult-classic, martial-arts, Buddhist-horror extravaganza from Hong Kong directed by the wildly inventive low-budget horror auteur Chih-Hung Kuei is easily the most notorious film in the entire Shaw Brothers catalogue — imagine THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, ALTERED STATES and ROCKY all rolled into one. It’s the Wizard Battle movie to end all Wizard Battle movies. It’s all of ’70s gonzo kickass cinema compressed into an insane 99 minutes and blasted through a garishly-colored mythic ’80s Hong Kong aesthetic filter. It’s one of the craziest and most original damned things you’ll ever witness on the big screen and will make your inner-child want to jump across the furniture to avoid alligators and lava... This truly incredible piece of cinematic black magic is a guaranteed mind-melter or your money back!

The Live Soundtrack:

"Sunburned Hand of the Man (aka "Sunburned") are a loose knit gang of musical artists from the wilds of Massachusetts. Founded in 1994 as a way to let off steam from years of obsessive weirdo record collecting and perversely decoding the hand jive of wanton talents from the psychedelic and punk rock hardcore scenes in the Boston zone... Sunburned was born to be awesome. The nucleus of the group is a small ragtag contingent of fascinants completely focused on the idea of spontaneous composition within the framework of religious experience: the rock n roll EVENT" - Thurston Moore

The Film's Background:

The Shaw Brothers studio, established in Hong Kong in 1958, is perhaps best known for its association with wuxia and martial arts cinema, but in the late 1970s and ‘80s they turned out some of the queasiest, wildest, and most utterly malign supernatural creepshows in the history of the horror genre. When Ho Meng Hua’s Black Magic became a monstrous hit in the Chinese-speaking world, the Shaws began the overdrive production of a cycle of malicious movies combining folk tradition-inspired sorcery and stern Buddhist sermonizing, viscera-strewn special effects and goofy acts of violence, creating a stew of sex and slime and all things slippery. In our snooty era of highbrow, elevated horror, these are refreshingly low road movies that get down and dirty, squelching in the psychic muck of primal fear and revulsion—. With this semi-sequel to the smash hit Bewitched, horror maestro Kuei upped the ante in gross-out provocation, copious nudity, and shocking sadism, going further than almost any Hong Kong film had gone before. This Thailand-set tale revisits the previous film’s white magic monks while adding eel vomiting, flying heads, crucified bat skeletons, alligator guts, glowing urn power-ups, and more assorted artful insanity than you’re ever likely to find in another single movie.

"We could tell you the plot, but honestly, you could see the film multiple times and still not know what happens in it.” 

– American Genre Film Archive

"Boxer’s Omen has something for everyone. A man vomiting an eel? Absolutely. Crocodile vivisections and the eating of raw entrails in the service of arcane rituals? Check and check. Some kind of frizzy-haired miniature Brontosaurus-looking critters that shoot optically printed lasers from their neck stumps? Uh-huh."-ART FORUM