Corpse Mania 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

1930s. A man named Li, hiding his face under a hat, white scarf and dark glasses, shows up in Guangzhou. He rents a vacant building that used to be a brothel, moves his sick wife there and disappears from the sight of the neighbors. They remember him when a suspicious odor begins to spread around Lee's house. The police discover the corpse of a strangled woman who has been victimized by a necrophiliac.

Review 4K Movie

Strictly speaking, the subgenre of racial Italian horror films, called giallo and nurtured first of all by Bava the Father and Dario Argento, practically never went beyond its native Apennine lands due to its extreme authenticity, canonicity and uniqueness, even though the visual aesthetics of jallo was used in the same 'Razor' by the absolute postmodernist De Palma, but that was rather an exception to the general rules of existence of jallo, whose popularity by the early eighties began to wane altogether. Of course, with the onset of the noughties, the so-called neogiallo, associated primarily with the names of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, made itself known, but the more remarkable is the fact that the elements of neogiallo began to slip into horror, thrillers and detectives of the South Korean 'new wave', such as 'Aran', 'Death Cartoon' or 'Looking Glass' (in total, there have been three dozen such jallo-like South Korean films since the mid-1990s). ). However, among the first countries in the Asian region to turn to the aesthetic film forms of yellow-percha Freudian cinema was Hong Kong, whose autonomous existence from China had already by the mid-sixties given birth to its own (multi)cultural aesthetic with an adequate fusion of Eastern philosophy of being and Western boundless audacity, which in the context of, say, Hong Kong cinema was most often expressed in the complete denial of any self-restraint.

The 1981 film 'Corpomania', the first and, in fact, the last really famous Chinese giallo (although almost all Chinese thrillers about maniacs of the 80s could be attributed to it not without success), directed by Roger Corman's Chin Hung Kuei from his own script, begins as physiologically repulsive, nauseatingly unpleasant horror film that opens the veil on such a fascinating sexual perversion as necrophilia, to become a skillful pastiche of traditional Apennine giallo with all its main attributes, transferred to Hong Kong soil with the utmost care and yet unrestrained frankness. The film is notable for its detective intrigue with an unexpected twist, colorful visual palette that rhymes with the best examples of the genre, canonical pretentiousness, aesthetic theatricality together with the postulation of the notorious unity of Eros and Thanatos. The film is not to be denied its exceptional originality; there is no sense of secondary character, as if Chin Hung Kuei has made more than one jallo in his lifetime. The cinematic linguistic functionality is devoid of copyist mechanistic: the richness of colors and visual solutions here adds more sophistication to the cinematic palette of the film. Much is resolved in stark contrast: The sinister nighttime city, covered in the blue of mists and the dead silence of moonlight, is contrasted with the hedonistic, perverse, decadent rampage of Madame Tan's brothel, where Detective Zheng often finds himself entering, and the subjectively irrealistic murder scenes are replaced by the stylish psychosexual frustrations of Li's maniac, presented in the manner of visions or fantasies - with real corpses in the end, though. And the fact that the serial maniac has an irresistible sexual attraction to dead bodies blurs the boundaries of acceptability for the viewer, especially since the director constantly changes the focus of the camera, then depicting the scene of Mr. Lee's intercourse with another victim, then looking into the repulsive nature of everything that happened through the eyes of investigator Zheng, who is pursuing the maniac, respectively, the face of death and eros is bifurcated. From deliberately aestheticized, attractive to physically disgusting unbearable swarming of fat, brown parasites on naked female corpses, covered with traces of passionate kisses, dewy sweat and clots of semen.

Madame Tan's brothel itself looks like a timeless asylum that a necrophiliac maniac, driven not so much by irrational psychopathy as by reason, seeks to turn into reality. Taking into account that two years earlier Joe D'Amato's 'Beyond Darkness' was released in Italy, Chin Hung Kuei's 'Corpomania' enters into a discussion with the Italian thrashdel, substituting the motive of the main antagonist's necrophilic mania for the elementary logic of cognition, the phenomenological overcoming of the fear of death itself. Necrophilic discourse in turn is perceived as a deliberate author's desire to finally go beyond the forbidden, especially since the viewer in the film is traditionally likened to the maniac himself, who for a long time seems even a purely mythical creature, a kind of chthonic force of inevitable destruction of the usual existence of Guangzhou Canton against the background of the coming great historical changes. A long black cloak, a white scarf fluttering in the wind, sunglasses and the gleaming steel of a knife cutting through the darkness of the night - who are you? What are you? Familiar questions to which the director will give very ambiguous answers, which nevertheless will not be final. The director leaves room for doubt, but not so much in the identity of the killer as in the reality of what is shown. A pure movie that celebrates absolute horror.