The Princess and Toxicant (1977)

not as good as all the hype

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

SUCCUBARE is one of those bizarre little black-magic themed Asian films that were all the rage in the early 1980s. It's stylised as a kung fu film and even features a role for kung fu star Carter Wong who shows up as a bodyguard. However, it's more like DEVIL WOMAN in terms of plot, with a number of witches holding sway over the locality and casting curses on the menfolk. There are some gruesome moments, typically involving the vomiting of worms and the like as in the various Shaw Brothers horror flicks, but the worst moments of the film are those involving real-life animal cruelty. One supporting character merely shows up to devour living creatures - mice, toads, etc. - and incredibly these moments seem to be played for laughs. There's also an ox execution reminiscent of APOCALYPSE NOW. It's rather unpalatable, and otherwise the film is too cheap and derivative to enjoy.

"Succubare" was recognized by Wai-Yip Wong himself as his most important film of his late period along with "Shaolin Head Waiter" (1982). While generally the later is accepted as his masterpiece "Succubare" is misunderstood as Wong's "misfire", as a "flop", an opinion toward which I tend to gravitate. What we have here is a good drama whose story is totally overshadowed by a certain scene-stealing extra whose diet consists chiefly of live animals, usually small rodents or finches, which he consumes by the jarful. Before the opening credits roll we are treated to the sight of his character eating boxes of headless canary torsos and sea-cucumbers, and washing them down with yak's blood. Sometimes during the film he tries to hold back, proclaiming that henceforth he will bite the heads off no living creature, but then he loses his willpower, and eats huge breakfasts consisting of badgers, partridges, shrews, cuttlefish, duckbill-platipusses, baby spiney anteater eggs, and spoonfulls of lice, and a huge stack of skates drenched in kelp. Wai-Yip Wong himself was detailed by producers to drag this fellow out of pet shops. He claimed that, during the first day of shooting Cho King (for such is his name) devoured two octopusses, some gerbils, two horse shoe crabs, and a pile of sanddollars for brunch, necessitating constant altering of his costumes.During his birthday party on the set, Wai-Yip Wong gave him a belt with a card reading "Hope it fits." A sign was placed below the birthday cake saying: "No Mammels Were Harmed." He reportedly ate at least fourteen live tape worms that day. His second wife who had a lock put on their incubator to stop pilfering by what she thought was the household staff, awoke one morning to find the lock broken and teeth marks on a baby chick's remains. The house maid told her that her husband nightly raided the incubator. She also related how He often drove down to the local pound late at night, wolfing down as many as six kittens at a time. Costumer Chiang Hung claimed that this fellow split the seat on 34 pairs of pants during the shooting of the film, necessitating that stretch fabric be sewn into his replacement duds. He split those too. Animal fat was the culprit: This guy would purloin a 10-gallon tub of the fattening desert, row himself out into the lagoon, and indulge. On the set his double often had to be used for shooting after lunch, and filming could only proceed in long shots, as this poor sap could no longer fit into his costumes. Dick Carter Wong, who was married to this guy's sister Fanny, said that he used to eat five wildebeests at a sitting, and (go) through bags of gila monsters." It was reported that during filming that, being environmentally sensitive, this guy fished a frog out of a pond, took a huge bite out of the hapless amphibian, and threw it back into the drink. He also created what he called "real-life peeps" by cracking open a baby hen's skull, melting some snail hides in the sun, then stirring them in with the brains for a tasty treat. By the end of shooting, there were reports that his wife had left him because he failed to keep his promise of losing weight. He seemed to be dieting, but to her astonishment, he never lost weight. She found out that his buddies had been throwing bags containing anethesized weasels over the gates of his Macau Drive estate late at night to relieve the hunger pangs of their famished friend. Furthermore, he was spotted regularly buying lard from a Hong Kong butchers shop: ten gallons at a time. He supposedly confessed that he was eating it all himself. Finally, a reported favorite snack was a living spider monkey and some raw bacon shoved into a Portugese Man-O-War Jellyfish. When he became ill, he seriously cut back and lost 70 lbs. on a vegetable diet, but he never lost his love of living tissues and especially those of rodents and primates.Animal rights activists will object to the butchering of a full grown ox on screen, (which goes uneaten) and, indeed, the unnecessary consumption of so many animals can get very distracting at times, as it has no bearing on the script. While not in the top ranks of 80's gross-out horror, SUCCUBARE remains, however, revolting yet diverting and boasts a mainly dependable cast.

The animal-eating (geek) scenes were not as bad as you would think. After having watched Mondo Cane and Mondo Magic, these scenes are average. The grossest one was when the guy ate the head off the mouse. But they were so fast and few that they didn't bother me.Otherwise, the film was just sort of interesting. I always like hearing the silly voice-overs. They never sound like what you think the actor/actress would sound like in real life. I liked the bright colors worn by the princesses. The shots of weird looking bugs were cool too. The youngest princess looked REALLY young, almost 14 or something. The fight scenes were not as long and boring as most fight scenes, so that was good.3/10.

I was permanently scarred by this terrible film.The main action of the movie is nothing special. It seems there's a tribe of snake-worshipping people in a remote mountain region of Northern China, where women rather than men are the leaders and decision makers. I suppose among some men, this is enough to make "Succubare" a horror movie... Anyway, occasionally Chinese men would wander into the village, take a fancy to the local girls, seduce them and then abandon them. Unfortunately for the men, the women had put them under a spell, derived from snake venom, which would make them die horribly in 100 days -- their bellies swollen like a pregnant woman's with live worms and snakes -- if they did not return.Forget the cover of the US video. This has nothing to do with vampires, though there is one inept blood-drinking scene. The title itself is only marginally appropriate: "Succubare" is the Latin verb meaning "to lie beneath", and it's the root of the word Succubus, a female demon who would seduce men in their sleep. Actually, it's the MEN who are the seducers here.But it's not the main action of this ludicrous film that's so objectionable. It's the little side-incidents. I'll overlook the slaughter and butchery of an ox that's performed on-screen. The participants seem very experienced, as though this is an unpleasant duty they actually do in real life; and I'm sure they really ate the animal afterwards... though I resent having the act thrust in my face as "entertainment".What I WISH I could overlook (or HAD overlooked) are the numerous, totally extraneous shots of an unidentified man, who from time to time interrupts the story by eating living animals. He starts the movie by tearing apart a live snake with his teeth. In the course of the movie, he devours a bug, a lizard, a toad (I had to leave the room after this), and a whole mouse (I stopped watching at this point, and lost my appetite for days). Let me stress that this was totally unexpected, and had nothing to do with the movie... unless it's a cynical reference to love as it's portrayed in the film: a blind, selfish, predatory survival mechanism that tears apart the helpless... but then again, I'm probably just rationalizing to get the vileness out of my head...