BLACK MAGIC 2 (1976) (88 Films Blu-ray Review)

BLACK MAGIC 2  (1976) 

Label: 88 Films
Region Code: B
Duration: 88 Minutes 
Rating: 18 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Audio: English and Chinse LPCM Dual Mono 2.0 with Optional English and Chinese Subtitles 
Director: Ho Meng Hua
Cast: Ti Lung, Lo Lieh, Liu Hui-Ju, Lily Li, Lin Wei-Tu

The Shaw Bros supernatural kung-fu opus Black Magic 2 (1976) is (surprise!) a sequel to Black Magic (1975), both film were directed by Ho Meng Hua (The Flying Guillotine), who must have been something special because I know some of his film, and spoiler alert, I'm not all well that well versed in kung fu cinema. While it might be a sequel but it has little do do with the first film other than the evil magic premise, opening  quite pleasurably with a a gaggle of young Asian women swimming nude in a muddy river. They're having fun until one of them swims off alone and is attacked and killed by a alligator! In the aftermath a white magician captures the killer gator and cuts it him open on a dock, pulling a bracelet out of its stomach and returning it to the victim's friends... and cue the opening credits! This tasty bit of hybrid exploitation is merely an introduction to the good magician who will turn up much later in the film to battle evil.

Evil comes to us by way of a black magician (black meaning bad, not African American) named  Kang Cong (Lieh Lo),a sorcerer who loves the ladies, and his Siamese cat, he reminded me of Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, or Austin Powers nemesis Dr. Evil for you youngins, the way his cat was ever-present. Cong cruises bars and grocery stores looking for a women with a bloody finger or an open wound, hoping to mix their blood with his voodoo-style wax figures, thereby ensnaring them in his black magic wackiness. The magician sells his dark skills to lonely men who want him to cast love spells on women they adore, which has some unintended side effects, like the rapid aging of a gorgeous woman into a hideous old hag with festering sores while he's having sex with her. The magician also has some unorthodox methods, making an elixir whose main ingredient seems to be burnt pubic hair, and drinking fresh titty-milk to maintain his youth, and that's just the beginning of the strangeness. 

His black magic ways are causing an epidemic of puss-oozing illnesses around the city, enter three goodly doctors who are looking to get to the bottom of the strange illnesses, with symptoms that include oddly worm-infested wounds! The docs begin by looking for legit medical causes but when faced with the inescapable truth they come to believe in the local black magic superstitions. 

This one goes way over-the-top with gore for the period, it might seem old-hat watching it now but for '76 (pre-Dawn of the Dead) this was powerful stuff! Gore and grossness comes by way of the docs desecrating graves, dead cats, a magician plucking out his own eyes and gifting them to one of the docs who later eats them to gain his power, and the black magician drives nine-inch spikes into the skulls of cadavers to reanimate them as his zombie minions, also using his sorcery to make people faces melt and their fingernails fall off, which never fails to make me cringe, even when it looks cheesy as Hell like it does here. 

The gore is gooey and gross and comes at a steady clip, but not all of it looks great onscreen, but the festering puss-filled sores, blood-spitting, melting faces and worm-infested wounds are pretty great, a few optical effects like a fight on top of a cable car above the city not so great. The kung-fu elements don't show up till the final few minutes, which suited me just fine, I'm just not that big into martial arts films and I more than enjoyed the supernatural oddity of this one, a real WTF slive of kung-fu cinema that has a lot for horror fans to gorge their eyes on. 

The one is plenty creepy with some odd sexual situations and leering looks, all the characters seem to have inherent bizarreness, and watching the bad magician follow women around and pricking them with rose thorns and broken glass to get a sample of their blood is voyeuristic fun. This Shaw Bros. production has plenty of good atmosphere and production values, with a fun score that makes it a good watch, even if the middle half slows down a bit, it all comes back around in the final third with a sprint of supernatural weirdness and sorcerer battle-action.  

Audio/Video: Black Magic 2 (1976) arrives on Blu-ray from 88 Films as part of their 88 Asia Collection, presented in 1080p HD and framed in 2.35:1 widescreen, advertised as being remastered from the original negative. The image looks quite nice with some good fine detail and saturated colors, occasionally it can look a tiny bit soft but the black levels are good and the abundance of nude skin look natural. Audio comes by way of uncompressed Mandarin or dubbed-English with optional Chinese and English subtitles. 

The only extra on the disc is a great commentary from Ian Jane of Rock! Shock! Pop! review site who offers up a wealth of knowledge about the production, touching on the locations, which rappers sampled which songs on the soundtrack, and the cast and crew. As I don't know a ton about the the Shaw Bros, or kung fu cinema in general, the commentary was a serious bit of schooling for me, which I appreciated.

The single-disc release comes housed in a clear oversized Blu-ray keepcase with a sleeve of reversible artwork that offers three artwork options. The initial limited edition release also includes a matte finish slipcover featuring the artwork that I know from the American alternate title of Revenge of the Zombies, but with the Black Magic 2 logo, the LE version also comes with a booklet with new writings from Dr. Calum Waddell, speaking about it's American distribution and re titling, espousing the under sung legacy of distributor Albert Schwartz and noting the over-the-top gore which pre-dated Fulci and Romero. The disc itself features a scene from the film. 

Special Features: 
- Limited Edition First Pressing Matt Finish Slipcase and Booklet Notes by Dr. Calum Waddell
- Remastered in 2.35:1 from the Original Negative
- Uncompressed English Soundtrack
- Uncompressed Mandarin Soundtrack with English Subtitles
- Audio Commentary by Film Journalist and webmaster at Rock! Shock! Pop!, Ian Jane 
- Reverse Sleeve featuring Original Hong Kong Poster Art

Black Magic 2 (1976) is an insane kunf-fu horror sequel loaded with sorcery, nudity, cloaked minions, phantoms and voodoo-controlled zombies - what's not to love? The presentation from 88 Films is top-notch and the new commentary from Ian Jane was a great listen, and this is coming from someone who's just not that into kung-fu cinema, I had a blast with this one. 

BRUCE'S DEADLY FINGERS (1976) (VCI Blu-ray Review)

BRUCE'S DEADLY FINGERS (1976) 

Label: VCI Entertainment 
Region Code: A
Rating: R
Duration: 91 Minutes
Audio: English Uncompressed PCM Mono with Optional English Subtitles 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1) 
Director: Joseph Kong 
Cast: Bruce Le, Chen Wai-man, Lo Lieh, Nora Miao


In the past I have found kung-fu martial arts films to be something of a mind-numbing experience, while I've always been drawn to a variety of exploitation cinema genres the kung fu films have always kind of bored me if I'm being honest. The whole "bruceploitation" thing is brand new to me as well, I've known of them for quite a long time, but I've never sat through one, till this one. Bruce's Deadly Fingers stars Bruce Lee knock-off Bruce Le, who I know from the bonkers 80's slasher Pieces (1982), he appears in that one as a non-sequitur character known only as "karate professor" who shows up for about a minute of complete what-the-fuckery.

The plot of this one is a bit of a scramble to me, I think I'd need to watch it a few more time to get it completely right, but the gist of it is that a bad-guy gangster (Lo Lieh, Black Magic) is obsessed with owning the late Bruce Lee's fictional 'Kung Fu Finger Book', a book that he wrote shortly before he died detailing a series of deadly take-downs you can perform with one-finger... I shit you not, this is the impetus of the movie. To that end he sends his kung-fu cronies to kidnap Bruce Lee's ex-girlfriend who somehow knows the whereabouts of said lethal literature. Enter Bruce Lee lookalike Bruce Le as Bruce Wong (that's a lot of Bruces!), a kung-fu master who somehow gets caught up in the action, and who also wants to gain the knowledge of from the coveted 'Kung Fu Finger Book', also setting out to rescue his sister who has fallen under the diabolical control of the nefarious gangster. 

That's about the most plot I could extract from this one on the first go round, it's overlong at an hour and half, the bad dialogue is mind-numbing, but there's plenty of Kung-fu action and enough WTF-ery throughout that I kept plugged in, right on through to the eye-plucking/role credit finale. 

I thought Bruce Le was a decent stand-in for the late Bruce Lee, he certainly has a passing resemblance to the fists of fury legend, often wearing familiar looking track suits and eye-wear to reinforce  that similarity, aping the masters moves, but not with the supernatural grace of Lee, but the fight choreography is fun to watch, from the kicks and punches that seem to send opponents hurling through the air as if there was a tiny explosive charge on the appendage delivering the blows, to the constant nose-thumbing of our sinewy shirtless hero, it's got all the stuff you're looking for in a low-budget Kung-fu film, I was certainly entertained. 

Audio/Video: Bruce's Deadly Fingers (1976) arrives on dual-format DVD/Blu-ray from VCI Entertainment, in 1080p HD framed in 2.35:1 widescreen. This is advertised as being a new 2K scan from the original 35mm negative, but the image has been good and scrubbed of fine detail and textures with some excessive DNR, so textures and facial features are waxy and lack definition, sadly. There's some speckling, scratches and print damage evident throughout, nothing to egregious, and a frame or two missing from certain scenes, plus some light fading to the image - it's a grindhouse presentation for sure, but relatively clean, actually a little too clean, the grain has been scrubbed right off the image. Audio comes by way of an English dubbed uncompressed PCM Mono 2.0 track with optional English subtitles, the dialogue sounds appropriately boxy (it is dubbed after all) and thin with some hiss and distortion creeping into it. The score on this one is fun, the title track sounding like a version of a spaghetti western, and music Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' is sampled a few times, which I loved, this movie just straight-up steals music from Pink Floyd, I'm sure there's no way this was properly licensed, it's rather shocking. 

Onto the extras we get an audio commentary from Michael Worth - author, director, actor, and expert on Bruce Lee, and Bruceploitation films, which I appreciated, being not too familiar with this strange chopsocky sub-genre I appreciated his informative track, he opens with talking about catching the film on a double-feature with teh David Carradine vehicle Circle of Iron (1978) and not knowing it wasn't actually a Bruce Lee film for about ten minutes, as it was deceptively advertised. If you dig his commentary check out his podcast which he co-hosts with Mathew Whitaker, The Clone Cast, which covers bruceploitation films, they're up to nineteen episodes so far and they covered this one on their very first episode. There's also six-minutes of deleted scenes that were cut from the U.S. version. thirteen-minutes of bruceploitation trailers, a trailer for the film, a six-minute gallery of images and lobby cards for the movie,  plus a three-minute montage of bad dubbing featured in the movie. This is a dual format release, the DVD features the same extras and main feature in standard definition.

The 2-disc dual format release comes housed in a clear 2-tray Blu-ray keepcase with a sleeve of reversible artwork, both of which look to be based on home video versions, I din't think the film originally ran in the cinema under this title.  Each disc featuring the same shot of Bruce Le with nun-chucks, the Blu-ray disc with an orange background, the DVD with a yellow background.  

Special Features: 
- Commentary track by Michael Worth - author, director, actor, and expert on Bruce Lee, and 'Bruceploitation films' !
- Deleted Scenes (6 min) HD 
- Brucesploitation Trailers (13 min) HD 
- Original Theatrical Trailer in HD!(4 min) HD 
- Photo and Lobby Card gallery (6 min) HD 
- Bad Kung Fu Dubs (3 min) HD 

Bruce's Deadly Fingers (1976) features loads of kung-fu in addition to a lot of nude women being mistreated by bad men, from being subjected to vaginal tortures involving a lizard to being tied-up and/or gang-raped in a ring of fire, which from the looks of it probably singed a few of the actors in the process, that didn't look safe at all. I had a lot fun with this one, there's plenty of kung-fu action and mayhem to enjoy, my favorite being a training montage of Bruce Le in action, featuring images of the actual Bruce Lee peppered throughout, while Le is training he's finger-punching holes in wood planks and it ends with him five-finger penetrating a fucking rock - A ROCK - it looks like he's holding a five-holed bowling ball, which was hilarious. 

REVERSIBLE SLEEVE OF ARTWORK! 

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