SEEDING OF A GHOST is another incredibly visceral slice of Hong Kong horror that comes to us courtesy of the Shaw Brothers studio. It's a film that might as well be called BLACK MAGIC 3 as it feels very much like the previous films in that series as opposed to something like HEX or THE BOXER'S OMEN, more contemporary fare. The film's protagonist is the excellent and under-appreciated Phillip Ko, who plays a taxi driver whose life falls apart when he accidentally interrupts a black magic spell by knocking over the wizard busy casting it.The film then slows down a gear to depict Ko's wife, busy having an affair with co-star Norman Chu. This goes on for a while and there's plenty of sex and nudity for those who enjoy that stuff. Eventually, Ko's wife is accidentally killed after being raped by a couple of street thugs, and he brings her back from the dead for revenge. You know the score here: there's a whole bunch of icky ritual scenes with a dead body, some outlandish and pioneering special effects work, and lots of weird deaths and decaying scenes.This film's major sources of inspiration seem to be THE THING, DEATH WISH 2, ALIEN, and THE EVIL DEAD. The FX are wacky and gross in the extreme and also very good. Ko and Chu are seasoned professionals and help to ground the movie; they play off nicely against each other too. There's a little action here and there although the main emphasis is on displaying the female form in its unclothed glory. The usual worm-spewing gross-out scenes are present. Things build to a mini monster movie climax which really does have to be seen to be believed; it's something else, that's for sure.

A grave robber is chased onto the road and accidentally run over by taxi driver, Philip Ko Fei. Ko Fei gets out of the car to check on the man, but he has disappeared, only to reappear in Ko Fei's back seat. He tells Ko Fei that he is a Taoist wizard and he used black magic to save himself from death. He also tell's Ko Fei that he (Ko Fei) is now cursed to a life of misfortune for having crossing paths with him. Sure enough, we soon discover that Ko Fei's wife is having an affair with the married Norman Chu. Roughly 20 minutes of unspectacular nude romping leads up to Chu refusing her offer of the both of them leaving their spouses for one another. She gets angry and jumps out of the car, but not before the pair have an ugly encounter with a couple of cocky young men in a red sports car. Both cars leave, and the woman then makes her way to a phone booth, where she calls her hubby's taxi dispatcher to ask that they send Ko Fei over immediately to fetch her. Before he gets there, however, the guys in the red sports car return. They abduct her and take her to an abandoned mansion, where one of them rapes her and knocks her about a bit, accidentally causing her to fall over a balcony ledge to her death. Upon arriving at the phone booth, Ko Fei receives another call from the taxi dispatcher informing him that his wife is now at the mansion, a message that seems rather curious, given that nobody at the mansion had access to a phone, and – in fact – when questioned later, the dispatcher says she made no such call to Ko Fei. Ko Fei then seeks out the Taoist wizard for help and THAT is when the film really begins to get good. It takes a LONG time to get to this point (maybe 40 minutes), but everything from this point on is great fun involving a reanimated corpse with a need to be "seeded", the demonic possession of Norman Chu's wife, and the bloody, explosive birth of the corpse's revenge-seeking evil seed!

Perhaps the extreme cinema of the Far East simply isn't my cup of tea, but I can't possibly be as praising about "Seeding of a Ghost" as most of my fellow reviewers around here. Moreover, if it hadn't been for the excellent last half hour and the downright brilliant end-sequences, I probably would have rated the film negatively. "Seeding of a Ghost" is a difficult film to get into… It's all very hectic at first, with the introduction of numerous characters and the entire plot synopsis as described on the back of the DVD happening in the first 10 minutes already. Oh yes, the least you can say about this Shaw-brothers production is that it's a spirited and outrageous film! An amiable-looking cab driver accidentally runs over a sorcerer and this uncanny figure promptly informs him that very BAD things will happen to him as from that moment. He sure isn't lying, as the cabbie's wife starts an extramarital relationship with a gambler and shortly after she's raped and killed by a duo of thugs. The heartbroken cab driver, after being suspected of the murder by the police, attempts to get back in contact with the sorcerer and develops a plan to wreak havoc upon everyone who was responsible for his wife's death. The whole building up to the supernatural vengeance (which is, according to me, the actual point of the film) is very incoherent and contains too many redundant moments. Considering the available budget, however, it's an adequately made film with a solid director and fairly stylish camera-work. Even though you sometimes haven't got the slightest idea what's going on, you keep watching because it's intriguing and because you inexplicably know that somehow your patient will be rewarded. And, indeed, then comes the sensational finale that instantly causes you to ignore everything that might or might not had bothered you until then. The gambler's pregnant wife literally SPAWNS a grotesque and hideous monster that repulsively butchers a whole bunch of unrelated party guests. It's a non-stop series of splattering blood and guts and it kind of feels like a crossover between John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Peter Jackson's "Braindead". You don't have to be a horror specialist to realize there are far worse films to get compared with! The make-up effects are deliciously nasty and the smutty monster is a very engaging little creation. It's one of the greatest closures to an average film I ever saw and it forced me to rate the wholesome rather positively after all. Recommended especially to cult-hunters and other sick puppies.

This cab driver hits a man running across the road who turns out to be a warlock who was being chased by an angry mob for robbing graves who then suddenly appears in the cabbie's back seat and then informs him that since their paths have crossed the cabbie's luck will change for the worse which turns out to be pretty prophetic because his wife first cheats on him then is raped and murdered by two thugs which so enrages him that he looks up the warlock to put a curse on the men responsible (not to mention the guy who she was screwing) so together they dig up her body and cast the spell which leads to one of the thugs puking worms and causes his toilet to explode and the boyfriend to be sodomized by his possessed wife with a giant matchstick and the second thug to have his spine grow out of his body and then causes the boyfriend's wife to become pregnant with a monster that explodes out of her at a party and proceeds to rip her doctor's face off and eat the guests. THE END. A must see.