DEVIL FETUS (Hong Kong, 1983)



Directed by: Lau Hung-chuen
Starring: Ngai Dik, Lui Sau-ling, Liu Pui-pui
88 minutes, 35mm, in Cantonese with English subtitles

Do not buy ugly things, even if they are antiques, even if they are bargains. Especially if they're bargains. Tsang Man-wah, who wrote DEVIL FETUS and went on to produce THE RAPE AFTER, must have once purchased a very ugly piece of bric-a-brac and received a lot of grief about it. It's too late to go back in time and tell him it was just good-natured ribbing, saying that his little vase wasn't ugly, it was just unusual. No, the damage has been done. Tsang Man-wah has an axe to grind with ugly antiques at bargain prices, and he grinds them with grue and gore aplenty in DEVIL FETUS, a movie about a little vase that causes big trouble. Finding he still had pus to drain, he went on to make THE RAPE AFTER about an ugly religious curio (that looks like a shrunken Buddhist monkey) and its bloody search for a soul mate one year later.

Bargain hunters beware! DEVIL FETUS starts with the seemingly fortuitous purchase of an extremely unattractive vase at a night market auction. Shu-ching is as attractive as the vase she buys is ugly and, even worse, when she gets it home the vase turns out to house the skinless spirit of a monk which slithers out and humps her while she's sleeping. Plus, when the vase is broken it sprays blister-inducing gas in the nearest person's face and then makes them go crazy and die. This vase sucks!

The vase gets broken, and that seems like the end of the movie, but Tsang Man-wah knows the true price of ugly antiques. Their ugliness infects your home long after you've sold the horrible thing on Ebay. All the family can do is block off the room that the vase was in, pretend that everything is normal, and NEVER LOOK IN THERE AGAIN. Well, wouldn't you know it, someone looks in there again and soon folks are eating
intestines, worms are coming out of pastries, the maid gets killed, and a couple of bodies get buried in the back yard. On top of that, the titular Devil Fetus makes a cameo appearance, and grosses everyone out in its brief screen time. The movie climaxes in a high-pressure shower of pus, and trembling audiences make their way down the aisles as the lights go up, vowing to just move out of their apartments rather than face the possible consequences of their hideous furniture and antiques trying to kill them when they get home.

A bargain basement budget doesn't keep the filmmakers from deploying a battery of cheap and sleazy special effects that hurt you. No CGI monster, or fake, latex wound can horrify one's sensibilities as much as a poorly-paid actor chewing on a mouthful of long, squirming, black worms. Tsang Man-wah has so much hate for his ugly antiques that he wants to bludgeon the viewers' eyeballs with gore until they are bruised. The film is littered with gleefully gross setpieces, and half-finished optical effects that indicate what the special effects director was going for, but don't quite get there. The whole thing zips along like a spooky car with a big skull on the front and a horn that plays the TWILIGHT ZONE theme, careening up on the sidewalk and taking out as many pedestrians as possible on its way to drive off a cliff.

Completely rare, and completely slimy, DEVIL FETUS is a warning to all those who look to fill their apartment up with hip toys and knick knacks, not knowing that those ugly knick knacks may want to mate with them and give birth to...the Devil Fetus.