Nine Demons Blu-ray Review

Visual Vengeance

Blu-ray Release: July 28, 2026

Video: 2.35:1/1080p/Color

Audio: English and Mandarin Dolby Digital 2.0 mono

Subtitles: English SDH

Run Time: 98:44

Director: Chang Cheh

After striking a Faustian deal with the devil, fighter Zou Qi gains the power to summon nine demon spirits to do his bidding. Armed with new supernatural abilities and bound to a chain of skulls that unleashes the flesh-hungry minions, he sets out to settle a bloody score between rival families and save his childhood friend. But he quickly finds himself losing control as the demons consume everything and everyone around him. (From Visual Vengeance’s official synopsis)

Note: I am recycling text from previous reviews about Chang Cheh and the Venom Mob throughout the opening paragraphs of this review.

No other director had a bigger impact on Hong Kong action cinema than Chang Cheh, who directed and/or wrote around 100 movies across six decades. His films were steeped in a formula now known as ‘heroic bloodshed,’ which emphasized brotherhood, redemption, and violent sacrifice, but his style evolved with the times and helped usher in the Hong Kong New Wave styles that, in turn, took Hollywood by storm in the mid-to-late ‘90s. While he was not the first filmmaker of his kind and borrowed from other great filmmakers, Chang might still be the single most influential Hong Kong film director of all time.

Some might say his crowning achievement was cultivating the team of actors and choreographers known as The Venom Mob. The Venom Mob was so-named, because its members – Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang, and Wei Pai – appeared in the massive 1978 hit Five Venoms (aka: Five Deadly Venoms). According to fan/critic estimates, Chang made 32 movies featuring at least two Venom Mobbers. Most of these were released through Shaw Bros.

But Shaw wasn’t long for this world and the studio closed film production in 1986. Even before the official closure, Chang and his actors were forced to find work with the competition. Three unofficial Venom Mob films featuring Lu Feng and Chiang Sheng were released between 1983 & 1984, two of which, Attack of the Joyful Goddess (1983) and, the subject of this review, The Nine Demons (1984), were released through Chang’s own studio, Hong Kong Chang He Motion Picture Co. For good measure, Chang brought along perpetual collaborator, Venom Mob co-creator, and Shaw legend Ni Kuang to write Nine Demons’ screenplay.

Many of the Venom Mob films have at least a vague fantasy slant, but Nine Demons stands apart as a fully supernatural, horror-themed entry in the series. It’s also Chang’s only real horror film outside of Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1977), which he co-directed with Hammer’s Roy Ward Baker. Ni, on the other hand, was well-versed in horror and fantasy. While at Shaw, he had a hand in writing Kuei Chih-Hung’s Killer Snakes (1974), Ghost Eyes (1974), and Spirit of the Raped (1976), Lau Kar-leung’s The Spiritual Boxer (1975) and The Shadow Boxing (1979), Ho Meng-Huathe’s two Black Magic films (1975, ‘76), and Sun Chung’s Human Lanterns (1982). Beyond that, he was a novelist known for wuxia fantasies and the Wisley and Dr. Yuen series, which were the basis for Lam Nai-Choi’s The Seventh Curse (1986) and The Cat (1991). 

Chang is thriving as director, even without the Shaw infrastructure at his back. The sets and costumes look a bit cheaper, but the fantasy vibe and spooky photography sell the illusion and make a good backdrop for the action. Chang’s style, which emphasizes acrobatics and simple, in-camera special effects, does feel old-fashioned compared to modernized supernatural fantasies of the early 1980s, like Yuen Woo-ping’s The Miracle Fighters (1982) and Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), and miles away from something as gonzo as The Seventh Curse.

As long as you aren’t comparing it to the genre’s most cutting-edge entries, though, Nine Demons is still a relentlessly rollicking adventure and a decent sample platter of the different eras in both Chang and Ni’s careers, from bog-standard wuxia melodramas, to Peking Opera-inspired fantasies, and late-stage gorefests, like Five Elements Ninjas (1982). The combination of eras with goofball antics, manic gore sequences, spinning rainbow gel effects, and full-bore horror tomfoolery – flying skulls, blood-drinking child demons, and gushing wounds – qualifies Nine Demons a must-see for Chang and Venom Mob completists.

Video

Nine Demons had some iffy-looking VHS releases in the US, the last one being from N.S. Video in 2000, and hit DVD from an iffy-looking studio called Ground Zero in 2001. I also found evidence that a digital HD version streamed somewhere, somehow and was bootlegged for download (I did not check its quality). Visual Vengeance’s Blu-ray sports a new 2K scan of original film elements, supervised by archivist Toby Russell. 

The overall look is pretty soft, in part due to cinematographer Wu Kuo-Ren’s use of diffusion, but also the condition of the materials, which I’m guessing were print elements, not negatives. The most consistent artifacts are related to this softness, including clumpy noise in place of grain and some lumpy shapes. Notable print damage artifacts include wobbly stains on the right side of the frame, small scratches, and some pretty substantial stains wiggling throughout the finale. It is also a very dark film at times and the darkness has a habit of eating up finer details, but works well wherever blazing red, green, and purple gels are concerned. It actually feels quite natural and intentional whenever searing colors bloom or bleed into each other. 

Audio

Nine Demons is presented with Mandarin and English mono dubs and both are, unfortunately, in lossy Dolby Digital, as tends to happen with Visual Vengeance Blu-rays. The Mandarin track is a lot louder and arguably crisper, but is weirdly balanced. Music and effects regularly outweigh the dialogue. The English dub is low energy and quite silly (all of the characters are given English-friendly names, like Gary and Joey), but the bigger issue here is that the captions are of the dubtitle and SDH variety, so you’re going to have to deal with a lot of dubious translations and on-screen descriptions (like “magical blooping”) if you watch the Mandarin version. There are also some instances of crackling drop-out at the beginning of the Mandarin track.

The score is credited to Huang Mou-Shan, but I caught a few samples from the De Wolfe library and assume the bulk (if not all) of the track is made up of similar samples and swipes from other motion pictures.

Extras

• Commentary with Justin Decloux and Dylan Cheung – The two genre enthusiasts offer up a good rundown of the Venom films, Chang’s career, the careers of other cast & crew members, Chinese/Hong Kong culture, Nine Demons’ production and release, and related/similar films.

• The Discovery of James Wu Kuo-Ren (10:27, HD) – Decloux returns to discuss the career of the film’s cinematographer, who worked with Chang after he left Shaw and directed z-grade ninjasploitation films, including The Super Ninja (1984), Ninja Hunter (1984), Ninja in the USA (1985), and Ninja Condors (1988), all starring Alexander Rei Lo. 

• The Late Period Chang Cheh (20:29, HD) – Decloux returns again to talk about the director’s legacy and the end of his career, post-Shaw Bros. 

• Yu Tai-Ping interview (10:02, SD) – The actor discusses his training, learning the ropes at Shaw, and his broader filmography.

• Unsung Horrors Podcast: The Nine Demons episode (53:41, still frame HD) – Co-hosts Lance Schibi and Erica Shultz explore and critique the film.

• Dirty VHS version of the film (93:06, SD) – A ratty, fullframe video version of the film under the alternate title Nine Venoms. 

• Image gallery

• Trailer

• Visual Vengeance trailer reel

The images on this page are taken from the Blu-ray and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.