Never officially released on home video before in North America, The Boxer's Omen has been a staple of the grey market circles for years but never received a proper release... until now. Although (at the time of this writing at least) Celestial only released the title on VCD format in Hong Kong, Image Entertainment has opted to make the film available on DVD for discerning North American fans, and the world is a better place for it. If your only experience with the Shaw Brothers library is the martial arts films that they're best known for, this twisted and gory little tale of good versus evil might just take you by surprise.

When the movie begins, a Chinese boxer gets his ass handed to him by his opponent (played by Bolo Yeung of Enter The Dragon) and winds up laying in a hospital bed, unable to see. He asks his brother, Chan Hung, to travel to Thailand and get revenge for what happened to him. Along the way, he's summoned to a Buddhist temple where his life becomes intertwined with that of a dead monk. It turns out that there's a curse on his family and that he and the dead monk will have to take on an evil wizard, the same wizard who killed the monk just as he was on the cusp of becoming an immortal. From there, Chan Hung travels around parts of Asia tracking down the evil wizard and getting into scraps with all manner of strange and evil opponents.

The plot for The Boxer's Omen is fairly straightforward in that it is more or less a simple tale of good versus evil. The way that the story unfolds, however, is a completely different story. Through the use of some truly bizarre flashbacks we learn the back-story of the evil wizard and the dead monk who is helping out our hero from the spirit realm, and once we're up to speed on that and the groundwork has been laid, the movie is off like a rocket. Fast paced and full of strange gross-out scenes, the movie is completely entertaining and a whole lot of fun.

The first of the key elements that makes the movie so entertaining is the effects work. If you've seen Black Magic you know what kind of effects work and what kind of set pieces to expect but this film takes all of that to the next level by upping the quantity and the quality of the work. We witness potions being made out of brain goop, stop-motion animated bat skeletons rising from the dead, and in a very 'Lucio Fulci' moment a scene where two magic tarantulas inject some poor sap's eyeballs with their venom. There's a particularly nasty scene involving the (real) dead corpse of a crocodile, a flying decapitated head that looks like it was lifted from Mystics In Bali and even a sultry clawed lady zombie. Much of this takes place in and around some interesting international locations as well (the film was shot in Hong Kong, Thailand and Nepal), the evil wizard's lair being one of the more interesting with it's primary colored lighting effects and strange, giant statues.

If the flying head and skeleton bats weren't enough, the film also features some pretty decent fight scenes. While not a martial arts film in the same sense as something like Shaolin Master Killer or Eight Diagram Pole Fighter the film does have its share of impressive hand to hand combat scenes, the opening match in particular where Bolo and his opponent get rough and bloody one another up pretty severely. Phillip Ko and Bolo Yeung make for great leads and they both get a fair amount of screen time here as well. On top of all the schlock, the fight scenes and effects work, the movie is quite well shot and it makes great use of its location footage and sets to really pull you into the film.

The whole film is genuinely bizarre but completely enjoyable. It's interesting to see how director Chih-Hung Kwei (who did Killer Snakes and Bamboo House Of Dolls) takes hints from European horror films of the same era and mixes them with some uniquely Asian traits mixing everything up. The film is a bit of a hodge-podge in that it plays around with all sorts of ideas but the end result is truly unique and, even if the effects show their age, genuinely engrossing (with an emphasis on 'gross'!). As a horror movie, well, it's not particularly scary and as a martial arts film it's certainly not at the top of anyone's list but as one of the more unusual efforts to come out of the Shaw Brothers studio it deserves its place as one of those truly manic films that needs to be seen to be fully appreciated.