You've Got Fucking Talent
I've seen a lot of crazyass bugfuck movies in my day, but very few of them can stand up next to SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, an Asian action/horror movie that carries a 1985 copyright date, but who knows exactly when the damn thing was shot or released.

SCORPION THUNDERBOLT is a ridiculous supernatural mishmash that's pretty outrageous even by Godfrey Ho’s standards. Here's what you need to know about Ho. During the 1980's, Ho and producer Joseph Lai hired American actor Richard Harrison to star in a couple of action movies about ninjas. Harrison had been living in Europe and Asia for at least twenty years at that point. He had gone to Italy in the early '60s to star in dozens of films: westerns, spy movies, sword-and-sandal adventures, etc. When his star began to wane in Italy, he did films all over the world from Turkey to Hong Kong to the Philippines. His name carried a certain cachet in international theaters, although I'm not sure how well known he was in the U.S.

What Lai and Ho did was take that Harrison footage and splice it into dozens of no-budget crapfests, in effect creating a bunch of "Richard Harrison" movies, but paying the actor for only a couple. These films are usually the result of finding an unfinished or unreleaseable genre movie and cutting into it 10-15 minutes of Harrison footage that has nothing to do with anything else in the movie. Sometimes, crude "conversations" between Harrison and an actor in the "other" film are created using closeups of the actors "talking" to each other. All of them are terrible and cheap, even though some are oddly watchable.

I don't know if I understand SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, yet it's a good idea not to think too much about the plots of these Ho films anyway. The main plot involves some kind of snake queen who lives in a red castle and is able to transform Helen, a pretty photographer (Juliet Chan), into a flying snake monster with arms and legs and force her to kill. Whom she’s killing and why, I have no idea. Helen manages to temporarily keep her awful secret from Jackie (Benny Tsui), the cop investigating the murders. When he finds out, he tries to stop the police from gunning her down.

Meanwhile, we first see Richard (Harrison) picking up a sexy hitchhiker who flashes her breasts at him (“I hate to see people standing out in the rain,” he says to her, even though he's driving with all his car windows open!). She tells him she’s an actress and takes him to a screening room, where they watch a ridiculous film in which she’s tied up naked while a Chinese artist paints psychedelic designs on her body (“I have to admit, you’ve got fucking talent.”). She does a striptease for him, and tries to stab him in the back during sex. Every time we see Richard after that, somebody is jumping out of the shadows, trying to kick his ass and steal his ring. A priest finally gives him a hilariously complicated formula for destroying the snake queen, which can apparently only be accomplished on the 15th day of the month.

After being prostituted by Ho and Lai, Harrison eventually left the business and returned to California in the '80s, where he began acting in Fred Olen Ray movies. Nothing Ray ever made could be as insane as SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, which contains neither a scorpion nor a thunderbolt. But it does have a flying snake woman with arms, legs and a tail.

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