Hell Has No Boundary (1982)

Original title: 魔界

On a camping trip with her brother Cheung (Derek Yee Tung-Sing), Hongkong cop May Wong (Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) has a curious nightly encounter with a mysterious voice, a wind so strong it literally blows her away and green lights. After that incident, the formerly mild-mannered woman changes her behaviour rather quickly: she not only begins to act a lot more confidently than before the encounter but also displays a reckless, cruel and somewhat murderous streak. To wit, she nearly drowns a little boy she believes has stolen a can of coke from her and her brother (a reaction that’ll actually make sense as something apart from its obvious wrongness once we’ve learned the backstory), and is only held back from it by Cheung. Why, you might think May’s possessed by an evil spirit of some sort.

Curious deaths and accidents begin happening around May too. For example, the two female colleagues (going by the most excellent monikers of “Lady Killer” and “Bad Sis”, suggesting how much trust the loving public will have towards them in the wilds) who are competing against her for a sergeant position and are right mobbing bullies about it have a bit of a fall with an elevator; a blind soothsayer specializing in the interpretation of his clients’ bone structures first regains his sight and then grows mad and falls down a flight of stairs while trying to kill his wife.

Her new self and the concurrent reckless behaviour do displease May’s direct superior, Inspector Wong (Yueh Hua), before the change her greatest non-sleazoid fan on the force, so much he’s now trying to block her promotion. Alas, an imaginary Doberman and a just as imaginary snake get in the way of that, as does May’s ability to magically change a written recommendation. On the plus side, Wong doesn’t die from the attack but only has a bit of a minor breakdown that hardly sets him back for more than a day.

Wong also has an aunt, one Madame Chi (Teresa Ha Ping), well-versed in the ways of exorcism and the lore of spirit possession. Madame Chi’s certainly trying to get rid of the troublesome ghost, though it might eventually fall on Cheung and the photographer Koo (Kent Tong Chun-Yip) – who photographed something very strange concerning May and gets a bit obsessed by the whole plot – to solve the spirit trouble.

And at this point, we’re barely halfway through Richard Yueng Kuen’s pretty fantastic Shaw Brothers horror film Hell Has No Boundaries, with a flashback that discloses a pretty horrible back story to the possessing spirit as well as the reason for its killing spree, and many scenes of increasingly heated weirdness still to come.

As you’ll probably know when you’re reading this, at this late point in the history of the Shaw Brothers, sinking commercial success had found the company replacing its typical visual house style of the previous decades with whatever seemed to have potential commercially. Films like Hell do certainly still stand visually in the tradition of the ripped from the headlines exploitation fare that was part of the Shaw Brothers’ output in the 70s, but there’s a very early 80s kind of modernism to Kuen’s approach to the form, as seen in much quicker editing and a direction style that usually seems to go for mix of the documentary and semi-naturalist intensity. Which stands in marked and highly effective contrast to all the wonderfully artificial green lighting, dry ice fog and general peculiarity of the supernatural sequences, and provides Hell with a wonderfully strange mood all of its own, contrasting the strange and the quotidian very well indeed.

Though – and this is certainly not atypical for the way horror throughout various countries in Asia does this in general – most characters here do have at least one foot in a very matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural that treats it as very real indeed. So it is not at all strange for the world of the film that a down to Earth cop like Cheung takes his sister to a bone-reading soothsayer when she’s acting weirdly, or that an Inspector’s aunt just happens to be in the exorcism business. Which sort of grounds the strangeness here in practical reality.

I say “sort of” because the supernatural parts of the film become increasingly insane, the possessed May apparently having a particular fondness of building very complicated murder illusions, including Wong’s ultra-sleazy boss (not surprisingly played by Lo Yuen) getting castrated by a crustacean and then telekinetically wrapped up in blue toilet paper like a very sad mummy, or a fake visit to the very green land of the dead (a place of the ickiest culinary habits) for Koo. Also in the film are an incredible sequence in which a character has MacGyver-ed his car into an exorcism trap, an awesome remote duel between Madame Chi and May, and a pretty incredible doppelganger sequence. The film’s set-pieces certainly never become boring.

There are obviously some rather exploitative elements involved in the film, as well, but Kuen, particularly when you keep in mind that this is the director who also brought us the somewhat infamous Seeding of a Ghost, mostly films the truly nasty (unlike the fun nasty) stuff with a certain distance. So he’s not wallowing in the exploitative possibilities of a backstory that involves the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, a sold little girl, murder, a horrific smuggling operation and cannibalism, but looking at it with a colder eye I wouldn’t exactly call “classy” but certainly more dignified than you’d expect.

The grimness of the backstory – as well as an ending as 70s downer as any film from the 80s had – does stand in marked contrast to the general sense of fun Hell Has No Boundary’s set pieces display, but they’re not overwhelming the film, nor does the fun horror most of the movie is involved in ever seem to be making light of the exploitation version of seriousness of the backstory, leaving this a very fun example of Hong Kong horror indeed. Unless you’re the actor having to eat maggots, of course.