SHAW-SHOCK: SHAW BROTHERS HORROR COLLECTION - VOLUME 4 (1981 - 1982)
Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Hardbox Edition
HELL HAS NO BOUNDARY (1982) 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
BEWITCHED (1981) Blu-ray
HUMAN LANTERS (1982) Blu-ray
Shaw-Shock is back with Volume Four, a journey through cinema beyond belief across three 80s horrors that ooze with disturbing visuals, graphic violence, and outrageous plots ready to take you to a Shaw Brothers extreme!
Packaged together in a Limited Edition 4-disc Hardbox, strictly limited to 1500 copies only.
HELL HAS NO BOUNDARY (1982) Imprint Asia #77
Label: Imprint Asia
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 96 Minutes
Audio: Cantonese 2.0 LPCM Dual-Mono with Optional English Subtitles
Video: Dolby Vision HDR10 2160p Ultra HD Widescreen (1.85:1), 1080p HD Widescreen (1:85:1)
Director: Yang Chuan
Cast: Liu Hsueh-Hua, Derek H
Yee Tung-Sing, Yueh Hua, Ken Ton Chun-Yip
Wild possession flick Hell Has No Boundary (1981) is directed by Yang Chuan (Seeding of a Ghost) starts off with cop-couple May (Leanne Lau Suet-Wah, The Lady Assassin) and Cheung (Derek Yee Tung-Sing, Descendant of the Sun) on island camping excursion, after arriving on the island May thinks she hears a ghostly voice calling her name, and later that night she awakens and wonders into the forest, where she encounters a mysterious glowing green light, and becomes possessed by a rage-filled spirit that inhabits her body and occasionally extorts control over her. He boyfriends notices she is acting strange right away, because she tries to drowned a little kid on the beach the next day. Returning to work we find that may struggles to be seen as an equal to her male peers, but while investigating a serial killer she makes a name for herself by killing the suspect with an impossible shot that sees the magic bullet make a 90 degree turn to, which is caught on camera by reporter (Kent Tong, Police Story) who begins to suspect that the lady cop has super powers of some sort. Back at work despite saving the day she is nearly passed over for a promotion because of her erratic behavior, that is until the evil spirit clears the board of competition, by killing two female officers in a horrific elevator accident. As the spirit takes more and more control the bodies start piling up, causing one person to get hideous boils all over their body, her pervy superior is dispatched through a crab-inflicted castration death that is lifted straight out I Spit on Your Grave, plus we get a spiritualist Ban Xian (Wong Ching-Ho, Black Magic) who gets his eyesight back before erupting in boils and falling to his death, plus an ill-fated exorcism attempt by Madam Chi (Teresa Ha Ping, The Spiritual Boxer), who proves no match for the angry spirit. Eventually we get to the root of the possession, who the angry spirit is and why she's out for revenge, which adds another layer of horror tot he proceeding, a young girl sold to a smuggler who is murders her and uses her body to smuggle contraband across the border!
It's honestly quite a disjointed flick, but it's so dang entertaining with a hideous green-faced ghoul and Lucio Fulci-level amounts of gross-out gags, including maggots, gore and vomit-drinking, all of it bathed in eerie green lighting, plus a we get a blood-covered car and magic circles of fire, so perhaps not the most coherent of flicks, but it's fast-moving, phantasmagoric, and I fucking had a blast with it.
Special Features:
Disc One - 4K UHD
- 2160p Ultra high-definition NEW Dolby Vision / HDR10 presentation on 4K UHD, restored from the original 35mm negative
- NEW! Audio commentary by Asian film experts Mike Leeder and George Clarke
BEWITCHED (1981)
Imprint Asia #78
Label: Imprint Asia
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 106 Minutes 17 Seconds
Audio: Cantonese LPCM 2.0 Dual-Mono with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1)
Director: Kuei Chih-Hung
Cast: Ai Fei, Huang Chin-Shen, Fanny Fen-Ni, Chen Li-Li
In Bewitched (1981), directed by Chih-Hung Kuei (Corpse Mania) the corpse of a young girl is found with a nail driven into her skull her father Stephen Lam (Ai Fei, To Kill a Mastermind) is arrested for the crime,. He is found guilty and sentenced to death, however, he pleads with the investigating officer Detective Bobby Wong (Melvin Wong, Ghost Nursing), saying that he was was cursed by beauty Bon Brown (Li Li Chen, Hex After hex) whom he met while on vacation in Thailand, he courts her and she fell in love with him, but it turns out he was only interested in a fling, and after being jilted the scorned lover put a powerful dual-curse of "corpse oil" and a "coffin spell" on him. A necklace Bon gifted him leaks oil onto his chest, and he grows hair in the spot where it leaked, he becomes sexually impotent with his wife, and that's when the bad stuff starts happening, leading to him and his young daughter both being possessed by an evil spirit. The young girl eating raw meat and coming at him with a knife while he sleeps. He seeks help from a witch who tells him the only way to break the curs is to drive a nail into his daughter's skull, which is exactly what he does. Hearing the story the sympathetic cop investigates and travels to Thailand looking for answers, and for his troubles ends up possessed himself. He seeks the help of Taoist monk master (Choi Kwok-Hing, Godfather from Canton) who is able to point to the original hexer, Makusu (Hussein Hassan, Seeding of a Ghost), and attempts to remove the curse, with some fun remote battling between the practitioner of witchcraft and the Taoist monk, which offers some wonderfully macabre effects of green ooze leaking from faces and nails being pulled up from beneath a hand up through the skin, good stuff. The effects are not quite as stomach churning as Hell Has No Boundary, but the colored-gel light shows and a good amount of grotesquerie to be sure, including a cool scene of someone getting all melty before crumbling to dust, it's wild stuff with some very cool visual flourishes that keep this supernatural terror pretty interesting from start to finish, despite a few lulls during the unnecessarily extended 106-minute duration, there's still enough black magic thrills, trashy exploitation and gooey ickiness to survive it.
Special Features:
- NEW! Audio commentary by Asian film expert Arne Venema and author Stefan Hammond
- Trailer (In Mandarin) (1:25)
HUMAN LANTERNS (1982)
Imprint Asia #79
Label: Imprint Asia
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 98 Minutes 31 Seconds
Audio: Cantonese 2.0 Stere0 with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Sun Chung
Cast: Liu Yung, Chen Kuan-Tai, Lo Lieh, Tanny Tien Ti
Human Lanterns (1982) is another bizarre supernatural 80's Shaw Bros. flick that taps into early 80s slasher craze with a well executed martial arts/horror approach, the period set film is well directed by Sun Chung (Revenge of the Corpse) and should appeal to both Wuxia-style martial arts film fans and the horror kind. In it a pair of wealthy socialites Tan Fu (Kuan Tai Chen, Bloody Monkey Master) and Lung (Tony Liu, The Big Boss) are established to have a long-running rivalry, their latest competition is the upcoming annual lantern festival, and whomever displays the most elaborate and spectacular lantern will be crowned the winner and receive much coveted public accolades. Tan Fu has already revealed his magnificent lantern entry, which leads to the younger Lung approaching a reclusive lantern craftsman named Chun Fang (Lo Lieh, The Chinese Boxer) to construct a very special lantern to out-do that of his socialite nemesis. It turns out that lantern maker Fang is a former warrior who Lung disfigured with his blade years earlier, but despite this the lantern maker accepts the offer, with one condition, that Lung not return to see the lantern until it is finished and he is summoned.
Not long after decapitated heads and skinned corpses of the socialites lovers start showing up around the village, and the competitive pair accuse each other of the heinous crimes. However, it's the cunning and psychotic Fang who is the one playing them against each other, often while disguised as an eerie skull-faced monster with seemingly supernatural fighting skills. The balletic Wuxia-style martial arts choreography is fun stuff for sure, but the real centerpiece here is how gruesome it is, as the sadistic Fang sets about kidnapping women victims and taking them to his remote mill, where he then flays the skin from their tortured bodies. It's a crazy film, chock full of some very cool fight choreography and grisly "human lantern" carnage, and I especially loved the skull-faced disguise that Fang wears while prowling for the women, it's wild stuff.
Special Features:
- NEW! Audio Commentary by cult film critic Ian Jane
- An Awful Beauty - film scholar Dr Luke White on Human Lanterns (2026, 18:20)
- A Fairy in Hell - Interview with actress Linda Chu (14:45)
- A Shaw Story - Interview with Actress Susan Shaw YamYan by Freddie Ambroisine (13:48)
- Trailer (In Mandarin, 1:02)
Audio/Video: Bewitched and Human Lanterns both get 1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray, it's Hell Has No Boundary that gets both a 1080p presentation, and a 2160p Ultra HD upgrade with Dolby Vision/HDR10, and it looks terrific, those eerie glowing green sequences are nice and vibrant, blacks are deep and the image has a nice crispness to it. Bewitched and Human Lanterns get 1080p Blu-ray edition framed in 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 widescreen, and look solid as well, but slightly less so, the sources showcase some minor scratches and speckling but colors fare well, especially the reds if bloods and green gel-lighting, though black levels can occasionally struggle and get a bit murky and less defined during the darker scenes, but overall still quite an impressive presentation. Audio for all three film come by way of PCM 2.0 with optional English subtitles, with Hell Has No Boundary and Bewitched getting Cantonese and Human lanterns in Mandarin. The tracks are clean and properly balanced, I detected no issues with hiss, distortion or sibilance during my viewing, dialogue, effects and score all fare well in the mixes. .
The sole extras for Hell Has No Boundary is a brand new Audio commentary by Asian film experts Mike Leeder and George Clarke. Bewitched gets a new Audio commentary by Asian film expert Arne Venema and author Stefan Hammond, plus the 1-min Trailer in mandarin. Human Lanterns has the most significant set of extras, we get a terrific new Audio Commentary by cult film critic Ian Jane, plus a selection of interviews, including the 18-min An Awful Beauty - film scholar Dr Luke White on Human Lanterns (2026), 15-min A Fairy in Hell - Interview with actress Linda Chu, 14-min A Shaw Story - Interview with Actress Susa. Shaw YamYan by Freddie Ambroisine, plus the Trailer in Mandarin,
The 3-film, 4-disc UHD/Blu-ray limited edition set arrives in a top-loading Rigid Hardbox adorned with images from the three films, I love how striking the extra-large Shaw-Shock branding is on the spines and top cover are, very cool-looking and eye-catching on the shelf. Lifting the top off the hardbox reveals a three keepcases housing the feature-films, the wraps are 2-sided but non reversible, both featuring different theatrical artworks with images from the film on the reverse side. The discs inside some of the same art as the wraps.
This is a killer set of Shaw Brother early '80s horror flicks, chock full of outrageous gore and bat-shit supernatural happenings, all with excellent transfers and some tasty extras, plus the packaging presentation is top-notch, Shaw-Shock Vol. 4 gets a solid recommend from me.
Screenshots from the Imprint Asia Blu-rays:
HELL HAS NO BOUNDARY (1982)
BEWITCHED (1981) Blu-ray
HUMAN LANTERS (1982)
