I grew up on a steady diet of Hong Kong cinema focused on the most chop-sockeyest of the genre. Saturday afternoons on Philly UHF were packed with every Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Dragon Lee, Bruce Lai, and Bruce Lo movie you could imagine. But I don’t recall getting a whole lot of the Hong Kong horrors of the era. It wasn’t until the days of video stores and grey market tape trading circles that I saw things like INFRA-MAN (1975), WOLFEN NINJA (1982), or BLACK MAGIC 2 (1976), even in their worst forms.
THE OILY MANIAC (1976) has long been talked about by my friends as one of the wildest flicks of an era where Hong Kong martial arts cinema intersected with the new wave of 70s horror after the success of flicks like THE EXORCIST.
They were not wrong.
Danny Lee (THE KILLER, DR. LAMB, INFRA-MAN) stars as Shen Yuan, a downtrodden, polio-afflicted office worker in a sleazy law firm. His boss makes a fortune working both sides of business deals and pushing clients into pursuing phony cases.
When a coconut oil plantation owner is forced to sell his business AND ends up killing someone, he’s sentenced to death. Yuan visits him before his execution and traces a talisman tattooed on his back. Despite the crippling polio that forces him to walk with crutches, Yuan follows the talisman’s instructions, uses a pickaxe to dig a hole in the middle of his home, chants an incantation, and emerges as The Oily Maniac, a sort of proto-Toxic Avenger who dispenses justice to rapists, would-be rapists, sleazy lawyers and their mistress, kung-fu henchmen, unlicensed plastic surgeons, and more.
It’s as nutty as it sounds, with Yuan hopping into vats of bubbling goo and dousing himself with gasoline to transform into the titular “hero”. Nobody in the flick is all that defensible, the cops are idiots (as usual), and the whole thing is a chaotic mess.
But who cares?! You’ll love the ripped-off JAWS theme, Dollar Tree transformation sequences, Asian Bill Hader, regenerating limbs and head (!), and more T&A than your typical slice of Asian cinema. – Dan Taylor
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