It's the age-old story: Boy Meets Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Lusty Rich Widow wants to bed Boy, Lusty Rich Widow hires mercenary Evil Sorcerer to magically steal Boy's heart, Boy's pals turn to kindly Good Sorcerer to battle Evil Sorcerer in an epic battle of wills...

Think soap opera meets nudie flick with occasional visits to graveyards, appearances by roasted severed heads, zombies, and voodoo dolls with stiff phalluses. Add a wacka-wacka groovy soundtrack and lots of unnecessary zooms, and you've got a bone fide 1970s cult movie classic, Black Magic, by the legendary Shaw Brothers. Known as Gong Tau when it's at home, this 1975 was a happy box office hit and ushered in a wake of followers and wanna-bes-including two sequels.

The Shaws (Run Run, Runme, Runje, and Runde, if you're keeping score) held sway over a cinematic powerhouse that cranked out kung-fu-sploitation hits from facilities in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong that dominated drive-ins across the U.S. while commanding audience attention across Asia. Seeking to imitate the success of popular Malaysian horror flicks (what? You didn't know Malaysian horror flicks were popular? Maybe not here, but boy were they gangbusters in Asia in the middle section of the 20th century), screenwriter Ni Kuang stuck to the proven formula of dueling wizards, supernatural forces versus true love, juxtaposing occult traditions with ordinary everyday settings bordering on the banal. Since this was 1975 rather than the late 50s era when the genre was minted, a healthy dose of juvenile sexuality was grafted on top: plenty of pointless nudity, usually ending in milking the breasts of the various actresses (or their unsung body doubles).

You can be sure that Tien Ni (or "Tanny" as she preferred to be billed) didn't take her own top off-but she's sexier than any of the actresses who do, and her charismatic performance as "lusty rich widow" Lo Yin is the emotional centerpiece of the film. The target of her affections, bland Good Boy Hsu Lo, is played by Ti Lung, an extraordinarily prolific leading man best known to Western viewers for his roles in Jackie Chan's Legend of Drunken Master and John Woo's A Better Tomorrow 2. The role of the Evil Sorcerer Sha Jianmai went to Shaw Brothers' veteran Ku Feng: also to be seen in such Hong Kong classics as Peking Opera Blues, Magnificent Warriors, and New Mr. Vampire.

To keep the whole thing on track, enter director Ho Meng-Hwa (sometimes credited as Horace Meng-Hwa, as if changing Ho to Horace might make him sound, y'know, less foreign). Meng-Hwa was the Shaw Brothers' go-to guy for ludicrous fantasy: his fingerprints are all over such 70s pulp archetypes as Mighty Peking Man and The Flying Guillotine. Meng-Hwa stuffed the film full of diverting and distinctive amusements, from "voodoo rice" fermented in a lovestruck girl's crotch, to an effects-crammed finale staged on the bare girders of a construction site. Sometimes Meng-Hwa opts for the less picturesque-such as a wizard-vs-wizard battle royale played out in the featureless driveway of a suburban home (Runme Shaw's home, to be exact).

Image Entertainment's disc is part of a mini-series of Shaw Brothers releases, including the bigger-budgeted but lower-performing Ultraman rip-off Super Inframan. The anamorphic widescreen DVD suffers slightly from a mild conversion error that "stutters" lateral movement (an effect increased on progressive scan monitors). Purists will be delighted by the original Mandarin soundtrack and optional English subtitles, but there are those of us (ahem) who grew up on these things at the drive-ins of our youth who still nostalgically prefer the English dubbing, no matter how awkward or loopy it sounds. The Image disc thoughtfully preserves that archival dubbing track, albeit with more hiss and warble than the Mandarin original track.

For more information about Black Magic, visit Image Home Entertainment. To order Black Magic, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Kalat