AniInterview
Sorry, this movie sucks
Tedfoldol
everything you have heard about this movie is true.
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Leofwine_draca
Following on from the apparent success of their cut-and-paste "ninja" movies starring Richard Harrison, Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai re-teamed for this incredible piece of gory trash. Once again we have a Hong Kong film intercut with totally unrelated scenes of hardman Richard engaging in all sorts of fisticuffs and martial arts escapades which makes for one extreme, confusing movie. One of the worst films ever made is perversely one of the most hilariously enjoyable to watch! The film starts off well for bad movie buffs with a chase through the dark streets of Hong Kong, ending in a pretty young girl getting messily shredded by a barely-seen slimy creature with lots of tentacles. The local police are soon investigating and become convinced that the killer is a snake monster after discovering some kind of larvae under a desk at their HQ! They pursue an escaped madman up a tree - whose fancy is eating cats - and subdue him, only for the gore murders to continue. The investigating cop, Inspector Ko, finds things even more troubled when he's attacked and held hostage by an ex-con who strips his girlfriend naked before being beaten black and blue in a sudden bout of martial arts from the escaped Ko.After some disco-dancing padding, the monster commits more bloody crimes in the local baths, the heroine is attacked by a spring-loaded cat (™), there are some exceptionally cheesy scenes of a romantic couple running in slow-mo down a beach, and later the same said couple are attacked by an unexplained invasion of snakes in their own car! It doesn't make any sense but it's still kind of enthralling. Later we see a girl making love to a huge snake-monster in the woods via some dodgy but cool-looking special effects, and learn that the resulting offspring is now the snake monster terrorising Hong Kong.After shots of people jumping through windows for no reason and a girl warding off a creature attack with a handy aerosol and lighter, we witness a very cheesy transformation scene of the possessed girl turning into the monster, which then hilariously begins flying through the air and some bushes before being gunned down by the intrepid police force. Although very cheesy, this (unreleased) horror yarn is actually pretty good for what it's worth, with a plot that keeps you on your toes by throwing in all manner of unexplained weirdness, some very graphic murder scenes with blood being splashed about and a low-budget shooting style which gives it a hard-edged realism. The only cheesy thing about it is the snake monster itself, which looks like a cross between the menace in ALIEN and the rubber-suited antics of a cheapo GODZILLA flick.Somehow deciding that an Asian movie populated by unrecognised foreign actors and actresses wouldn't be of interest to movie fans in the West (although I'd sure buy it for a dollar!), Godfrey Ho decided to direct some extra additional scenes which come across as more like a second film tacked on to the first despite some strong efforts to tie the two together, and hoped that you don't notice the absurdity of it all.Genre stalwart Richard Harrison (playing...you guessed it...a character named Richard!) is the ageing but powerful hero whom we first meet driving around in a car and getting flashed by a blue-vested woman. Taking her to some bizarre porno cinema, Richard begins to make love to the lady until she attempts to kill him and starts spitting orange goo from her mouth. The reason being that her employer is an evil witch who supposedly controls the snake monster terrorising Hong Kong using black magic and a crystal ball (powered by - gosh! - a flashing light-bulb!). The witch sends out more blue-vested thugs to kill Richard, who is interrupted from his strongman training by a guy pretending to be the plumber! Much cheesy martial arts action ensues with dubbed in sound-effects and reliance on silly slow-motion scenes of people flying through the air and props like towels (causing the villain to drool uncontrollably) and umbrellas (!) becoming deadly weapons.Finally, Richard gets sick of all the slaughter and decides to visit a fortune teller in his local park, who informs him that his ring is magical and the only thing that can destroy the witch. To aid him on his quest, the fortune teller gives Richard a golden sword and mystical mirror (!) and tells him to visit the witch's castle on the fifteenth of the month (why?) to destroy the ring, which will then in turn kill her. He does the deed and the film ends. Bear in mind that these tacked-on scenes are clumsily inserted THROUGHOUT the rest of the movie and the result is one confusing escapade as you try and make sense of two bizarre films running concurrently! The tacked-on scenes with Harrison are by far the funniest things and side-splittingly good, with Harrison shining brightly amid all the chaos going on around him and keeping an admirably straight face about it all too.SCORPION THUNDERBOLT is a one-of-a-kind movie-going experience, a unique mish-mash of horror and action themes bundled together in one huge disjointed package designed to offend all those with good taste and a low tolerance for trash. While the production values are low, originality non-existent, and no talent evident from either the cast or crew, this remains a highly amusing film thanks to the sheer inanity and craziness of it all. An impossible-to-track-down gem which has now acquired the status of a cult classic for all those (un)fortunate enough to have seen it!
sean-diamond2
Well, what can be said ? A literally indescribable film, even weirder than it sounds ! "Plot" involves a female journalist who turns into a rubber snake monster every time a blind man plays a flute, a series of bizarre events happening to Richard Harrison instigated by a witch, whom he has to destroy using a magic ring, some completely unrelated footage which involves some bloke tossing a cat's torso from the top of a tree, and, and ..... it just gets weirder ! It apparently features scenes from some old far eastern horror film, spliced together with footage of Harrison in an attempt to hang some kind of narrative together. The result is kind of like a martial arts film directed by Ed Wood, only more inept, and a lot funnier. For serious connoisseurs of bad movies only. A joy from start to finish !
Woodyanders
An evil, clawed, cackling witch woman unleashes a savage humanoid snake monster that embarks on a brutal killing spree in a major city. The ever-suave Richard Harrison has to fend off several assassins who want his magic ring and must find the witch in order to stop her. Meanwhile, fetching lady reporter Helen fears that she might be the snake monster. Once again singularly all-thumbs writer/director Godfrey Ho does his customary slipshod cut'n'paste hackjob of haphazardly combining two separate films together with a flagrant disregard for both cinematic artistry and narrative coherence. For example, take the totally nonsensical sequence with Harrison picking up an attractive American hitch-hiker (she naturally flashes her breasts in order to get a ride from Richard). Harrison takes the lass to a movie theater, she performs a striptease for Richard, they proceed to make love, and the chick even attempts to kill him while they're in the middle of doing just what you think. Moreover, we've also got a constant swift pace, lots of graphic, yet cheesy gore, a few pulsating disco tunes blaring away on the soundtrack (one gal gets attacked by the monster while dancing in her living room to a pounding disco tune!), gaudy cinematography, sleazy soft-core sex, ineptly staged martial arts fights, laughably lousy dubbing (an Asian police officer sports an utterly incongruous plummy British accent!), tasty gratuitous female nudity, plenty of slithery snakes, a mysterious blind flute player, a riotously pathetic rubbery beast, and a fiery over-the-top conclusion. All these choice cruddy ingredients add up to produce one hilariously awful, but still hugely entertaining mess of a gut-busting schlock howler.
gavcrimson
'What the Hell's this all about?'- remarks Richard Harrison to his dead porno star girlfriend after shes tried to kill him and vomited orange liquid during their back row nookie in a sex cinema. Its a question you may be asking yourself after experiencing this slice of random cut and paste filmmaking. The backbone of Scorpion Thunderbolt is an unreleased (at lea st to the west) asian horror movie- which in the age old tradition has been fleshed out with new footage featuring an american star to sell it to western territories. In its original incarnation Scorpion tells the tale of Helen Yu- a journalist who hides a dreadful secret- shes a snake monster! In flashback we witness Helen's mother to be being lead astray by a handsome young man. During an outdoor quickie with the strapping lad the girl discovers he is really a human sized snake. The whole encounter was revenge motivated on his/its part since the girl's father sells dead snakes and boils them down for soup. The girl gives birth to Helen but the apparently normal child is a monster who turns on its mother during breast feeding. A bloodbath ensues with the girl's father trying to take an axe to the infant, only to have his eyes pulled out by snakes, blinded he inadvertently murders his daughter with the axe. In present day Hong Kong- Helen is transformed against her will into the snake monster by a sinister blind night-watchman and his mysterious flute playing (which can also make dogs walk backwards). The film begins with one such gore murder as a nubile girl is chased by a weirdo only to end up eviscerated by the monster. The police, lead by Inspector Jackie Ko- initially suspect this bald limping loony of the killings and track him down to a mental hospital where he's in the process of eating a cat- he reacts to attempts at capture by beating the cops with the dead pussy and hiding up a tree. In the process of the investigation Helen falls in love with Ko- who has his own problems in the form of a revenge crazed ex-con he helped put away. Breaking into Ko's home the masked criminal handcuffs Ko to a table forcing him to watch as the man ties up and strips a pretty female police office in one of the films more censor troubling scenes. Ko breaks free and fights the madman, while in a neighbouring apartment block the monster goes bonkers mutilating some disco chicks- the monster's speciality being mashing girls faces in with its giant claws. Ko and Helen go on a date but its a disaster, the masked man shoots up their picnic and an attack by snakes causes Ko to crash the car. Finally they end up in a hotel where Helen again turns into the snake monster snuffing out a couple in a sauna. When Helen tells him the ghastly truth Ko remarks 'Does that mean... I'm in love with a vampire?'- of course it'll all end in tears. The 'new' plotline which is at best clumsily interwoven into this narrative concerns some nonsense about Richard Harrison and the 'hypnotising power of a woman's witchery'. Under the orders of a witch everyones out to stomp Richard, whether its the plumber or the aforementioned sex actress who hitches rides by flashing her attributes at passing motorists. With one of his worst films recently under his belt (Eurocine's kiddie movie Get Up Kiko and Run) getting flashed by bimbos and breaking bones must have been a blessed relief to Harrison. Scorpion Thunderbolt slithered out from the studios of Joseph Lai's IFD films- in the mid- Eighties Joe's niche was to have the ubiquitous Godfrey Ho shoot footage of Harrison to pad out the rottenest of Kung-Fu films (never did it matter that the new footage didn't remotely fit in with the rest of the film). The commercial surface of this enterprise is best illustrated in titles like Ninja Commandments, Ninja Dragon, Ninja Hunt, Ninja Kill, Ninja Show-down, Ninja Terminator, Ninja The Protector, Ninja Thunderbolt and Ninja Operation parts 1 to 8. A rare nugget in this cinematic rough- Scorpion Thunderbolt has all the unpredictability of a hard core mental patient- even in its original version the tone catapults from slapstick farce to heavy duty gore. A Shocking Asia-esque feel also looms over the film with its 'amour' of settings like red light districts and tacky discos. Add to this the fact that you are just never quite sure what's meant to be funny and what's unintentional and you have a film butchered of what sense it may have once possessed but retaining a power to take you off guard. If the idea of a blind night-watchman is absurd the film ups the ante by having him appear on a TV chatshow at one point 'a most talented man he's a blind night-watchman who has overcome gout and arthritis- he also plays the flute'. The highlight though belongs to the Jerry Lewis impersonator who learns the hard way that its not wise to kick an irate snake monster's tail. Remarkably there is way too much to savour in this true grab bag of a film for one single viewing- for moments of unguarded lunacy only filter out with each viewing. Scorpion Thunderbolt will provide a weeks worth of late night viewing fuel for tired eyes- the stunningly inappropriate use of Jean- Michel Jarre's Oxygene is worth the price of admission alone.
