Hell Has No Boundary

There are movies that test you and movies that test your limits. Hell Has No Boundary does both, and it does them with the calm assurance of a film that knows exactly how far it intends to go.

The setup is simple enough. A young policewoman named May goes camping with her boyfriend on a small island. Strange lights in the night. By morning she’s changed. How changed? She chases down a child and tries to drown him. We are perhaps ten minutes in.

I should note that the island was established as a distant speck off the coast, and the children who appear have no plausible way of getting there. They were too small to row. I mention this not as a complaint but as a signpost: this is a film operating on nightmare logic, and the sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.

May returns to her job on the police force, where she dispatches two colleagues named Bimbo and Lady Killer. These are not nicknames. Their boss calls them that too. Nobody blinks. Between this and the Rubik’s Cube on someone’s desk and the aggressive Coca-Cola product placement, we are unmistakably in 1982.

The boyfriend, Ah Chung, takes May to a bone feeler—a kind of psychic—who senses something’s wrong and throws them out. For his trouble, the bone feeler is rewarded with a hallucination that ends in his death. May is not a woman who tolerates loose ends.

Her boss passes her over for a promotion. This proves to be a career-limiting decision, though not in the way he imagined. A snake and a Doberman are involved. I will leave the specifics to your imagination, which will almost certainly fall short.

The boss’s older sister, sensing dark forces, works some protective charms. Across town, May stumbles to her bathroom and vomits into the toilet. What comes up appears to be a combination of organs, insects, and bile. She then dips a cup into the bowl, pours it over her head, fills the cup again, and drinks.

The film is still, I would argue, warming up.

May retaliates against the older sister with spells of her own. These shots are staged with vivid color gels—greens and reds against black—that give them an otherworldly beauty reminiscent of Italian horror at its most delirious. It does not end well for the older sister.

Next, a department head takes May to a disco, then invites himself back to her apartment. She insists he take a bath. Not a shower. A bath. He’s happily scrubbing away when blood blooms in the water and he staggers out to discover a crab the size of a football in the tub. His final indignity involves a roll of toilet paper with murderous intentions.

Then the film goes somewhere I did not expect. We learn the spirit possessing May is a child from a past life during the Second Sino-Japanese War—a little girl sold by her own mother for twenty-five dollars, torn from her older brother’s loving arms. Her new family pays a hundred and cheerfully offers to buy more children. She is shown to a room. She sits down. She is smothered to death. Her body is gutted and stuffed with drugs so her new “father” can smuggle them through Japanese checkpoints, pretending the corpse is his sleeping daughter.

It gets worse after that, but I am not going to tell you how.

I will tell you that none of it feels cheap. Cynical, absolutely, but not cheap. The film earns these horrors because they transform the story. You understand why this spirit will not rest. You understand the rage. And somewhere beneath the possession and the gore, you’re aware that you’re watching the fury of a murdered child, which is a more devastating thing than any amount of green light and flying maggots.

The third act involves a sequence where the actress playing May eats live maggots. No camera tricks. In most films this would be the scene people talk about. Here it’s barely a footnote.

Leanne Lau Suet-Wah gives a performance as May that deserves some kind of award. I’m inventing it now. It’s called “The Anthony Wong Commitment Award” recognizing her willingness to follow her director into territory most performers would flee. She holds the screen through every escalation, which is no small feat when the escalations include toilet water and live insects.

You could argue this is the best Fulci possession film of the 1980s. An odd thing to say about a Hong Kong production he had nothing to do with, but between the nightmare-logic, cynical themes, and color-drenched atmosphere, it feels like a Fulci picture. More so than either of Fulci’s own possession pictures from the same decade. Manhattan Baby and Aenigma share plot elements and even a set piece or two, but this picture goes where they merely gestured. Fulci fans should love it.

That said, Hell Has No Boundary is not a film for everyone. It is a film for the people who know they want it, and it gives them more than they bargained for. The difference is that it earns the right to go there, with a real story, real performances, and a wounded heart beating underneath all that gore.