The Witch With The Flying Head

The Witch With The Flying Head Directed By Ren-chieh Chang. Starring the flying witch as herself. (1982).

Cigarette burns, surface scratches and record needle fuzz, litter the picture and soundtrack for this seriously rare Chinese horror film. Skunkape found this in a bombed out dumpster and painstakingly resurrected it for mp4 viewing (my life would be so incomplete without that fucking ape)! Most versions available are missing subtitles (come on Mondo Macabro! release this one already, its featured in the Pete Tombs book for crying out loud)! The storyline is hard to decipher (one version I watched had no subs and the other subs that went out of focus)!! I know one thing though, there is no witch, just a decapitated vampire that shoots out laser beams and fire! 

    At a Buddhist temple, prayers are frantically recited, but nothing can stop an evil prince from sending his magical snake to crawl through her vagina and straight up her organs, transforming Yu Chen into a snaggle toothed Krasue (or this time a Penanggalan, these Eastern monsters have so many names that its hard to get them straight)!      

   This floating severed head attached to dribbling guts from Asian folklore is vastly different than the ones depicted in Ghost Of Guts Eater or Mystics In Bali, but they're all distant cousins. There's no hunger that drives the creature to kill, it just bites anyone in sight.

An homage to Deep Red

   The princess possessed by an unholy snake flies around biting villagers lost in the woods. The effects are a lot better than the chromakeyed "Clutch Cargo" head superimposed over backdrop footage. You see the witch head float around with latex bladders and guts pulsating, then it actually snaps back onto it's neck with a loud pop!

Don't bother me, I'm taking a nap

   There's some ganked Basil Poledouris music from Conan The Barbarian played during the credits and soon after music from Death Wish 2. The princess is in debt to the snakeman because he caused this vampire curse. In order to fix the problem, they visit a Monastery doctor who helps her purge up snakes that are slithering in her organs (we are treated to an inside view). 

   Two chubby monks with backwards swastikas on their chests battle the flying witch and the snakeman (who may be Satan in human form). I swear I heard Hanna Barbara cartoon sound effects as the monks fight. 

   Yu Chen the Krasue flips around, bites chunks out of the priests neck and vomits up flames! But when she's in human form, she regrets everything and is suicidal. Late at night, when she's able to kill potential rapists, her demonic powers come in handy! 

   In the Deep Red Catalog they sold this one without subtitles (you don't really need them to figure out what's going on). It's basically a spectacle of different monks battling a floating severed head that breaks out crazy weapons like mini disco balls and multicolored lasers. The second act would possibly make sense, if for one thing, I could read the subs or they did a little re-writing (because not many reviews can explain what's really going on) I was lost! I still enjoyed the film and the effects are top shelf quality!

Heil Hitler!

   A Taoist priest places a Bagua Octagon on the door of their temple to protect them from evil outside, which does temporarily stop her head from popping off. The recent characters (who don't really fit into the first half of the story) are searching for Mr. Tang, an escaped character with a snake symbol on his forehead who thinks he's safe with Yu Chen. They actually fall in love and have a child (the snakes must have dodged the womb)! As far as I can tell, he's connected to the snake man from the beginning and there's a feud between kingdoms, because more snake people show up seeking vengeance. Witch makes it seem that snakes are mortal enemies against floating severed heads.

Take that SnakeWoman!

   It's annoying how the subs go under the frame or the video line slices them in half (get a head-cleaner)! I couldn't read one word toward the end as they play the nazi face melting music from Raiders of the lost ark. I demand an explanation and a proper release for this oddity.      

This blog does a good job of figuring out what's going on, if you're still confused like I was!

http://www.braineater.com/witchhead.html
It's available without subtitles on Youtube (for a limited time).

Rock and Roll is dead, long live Disco!

Mouth Saber