How much credit should you give to a guy who is only responsible for about fifteen percent of the footage you actually see in a film? Who knows, but I'm giving this Godfrey Ho film an eight anyway. I'm not even sure if he's actually seen any of it himself.This one (or two, if you know what I mean), involves a lady who turns into a snake demon every time a blind guy plays a flute which is triggered by a witch demon playing the bongos. In snake form this lady goes out and murders folks in graphic ways. The police are baffled. And crap, but she manages to hook up with one of them anyway (the one that's practically stalked by one of his colleagues).In the film that Godfrey Ho actually bothered doing himself, Richard Harrison is baffled as various people wearing the same t-shirt constantly attack him in order to get a sacred ring off of him. The first person to try this is an actress who puts the moves on Richard while they are both watching a film of the actress being painted (just like Majestic Thunderbolt!).This one is really high on the insane visuals, what with a guy playing pool while firing the balls straight at the crotch of his prisoner, then there's the lunatic with the dead pig hiding up in a tree, or two cobras descending from a ceiling to bite a guy in the eyes at the same time. Utter madness.This is a great Godfrey Ho film and well worth your time - Perhaps not so funny as usual (what with most of the film being stolen wholesale and just played out, although we do get the hilarious cockney accents), it's still highly entertaining and never boring for a minute.It's on YOUTUBE.

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.

By far the best of Godfrey Ho's cut-and-paste movies, SCORPION THUNDERBOLT features tawdry kung fu combat, soft core sex, blood 'n' gore, and a goofy rubber snake-beast! The spliced together elements don't make much sense, but there's something about this weird mishmash of a movie that makes it bizarrely enjoyable!

'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.