The Oily Maniac Blu-ray Review

Arrow Video

Blu-ray Release: December 9, 2025 (as part of Shawscope: Volume 4)

Video: 2.35:1/1080p/Color 

Audio: Mandarin LPCM 1.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 90:32

Director: Ho Meng-Huathe

A Polio-stricken underdog named Shen Yuan (Danny Lee) discovers the tomb of an ancient demon in his own basement and takes the power for himself, becoming the vigilante monster known as the Oily Maniac!

Between groundbreaking gross-outs Black Magic (1974) and Black Magic Part 2 (1976), director Ho Meng-Huathe made a different brand of horror film called The Oily Maniac (1976). Like the Black Magic movies, it was shot outside of Hong Kong on the Malay Peninsula, based on local folklore (that of the Oily Man or Orang Minyak), and was brimming with exploitative sex and violence, but gone were the elaborate rituals, love potions, and wizard battles. These would be replaced by creature feature and revenge fantasy motifs that owed more to Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Killer Snakes (1974).

The Oily Maniac is basically a variation of a werewolf story, down to its monstrous transformations, tragic main character, and the theme of ancient myths afflicting modern people. Structurally speaking, especially in terms of its title character’s vigilantism, it has more in common with monstrous superhero stories, like DC’s Swamp Thing, though with a meanspirited edge that makes it feel like the predecessor to Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’ The Toxic Avenger (1984). However, unlike Alec Holland and Toxie, who remain heroes in spite of their frightening appearance, the Oily Maniac quickly devolves into a jealous, wrathful misogynist, again, in the spirit of his Killer Snakes predecessor (who was, in turn, a reference to the title character of Daniel Mann’s Willard [1971]).

Remarkably, of the three Ho Meng-Huathe horror movies included with Shawscope: Vol. 4, The Oily Maniac may be the sleaziest. It isn’t the goriest or grossest, but it is full of sexual assault, attempted sexual assault, lechery, and bothced plastic surgery, which is one of the stranger excuses for nudity I’ve seen from a horror film. Most of it is in good fun – like a scene where the Maniac uses his oily powers to ooze through the plumbing and into a victim’s bathtub, where he kills her to a facsimile of the Jaws theme – but there’s also an icky incel fantasy to the whole thing. This is an issue shared across a spectrum of Shaw Bros. films, though, not just their horror and exploitation output, so try not to hold The Oily Maniac’s lack of morals against it. Try to enjoy it for what it is: a unique and oddly contradictory spin on a well-worn formula.

Ho followed The Oily Maniac up with a different kind of creature feature, The Mighty Peking Man, in 1977. Also known as Goliathon, it is better remembered as Shaw’s bargain basement attempt to cash-in on John Guillermin’s 1976 King Kong remake. After that, he continued making exploitation/horror films for the studio, including The Psychopath (1978) and Black Magic throwback Evil Black Magic (1992), which would be his final film. It wasn’t the final film for the orang minyak, though. There was already a trilogy of Singaporean films (directed by L. Krishnan and P. Ramlee) released between 1956 & ‘58 before the Shaw version and the monster had a mini Malaysian renaissance in the last 20 years, appearing in C.K. Karan & Jamal Maarif’s Orang Minyak (2007), Afdlin Shauki’s Pontianak vs Orang Minyak (2012), and Liew Seng Tat’s Men Who Save the World (2014).

If you’d like to hear more about The Oily Maniac, along with other films available as part of Arrow’s Shawscope: Vol. 4, check out the Shaw Bros. Horror episode of the Genre Grinder podcast, which I recorded with Stefan Hammond, the author of Sex & Zen and a Bullet in the Head (with Mike Wilkins; Touchstone, 1996), Hollywood East (Contemporary Books, 2000), and More Sex, Better Zen, Faster Bullets (Headpress, 2020).

Video

It doesn’t appear that The Oily Maniac ever made it to official US VHS or DVD. Celestial Pictures released their own DVD in Hong Kong, then the film made its Blu-ray debut in the UK via 88 Films in 2017. Like all the films in Arrow’s Shawscope: Vol. 4, The Oily Maniac has been remastered from a new 2K scan of the original negative, which gives this transfer a leg up on the 88 Films disc and its older Celestial remaster. This isn’t as big of an upgrade as the two Black Magic movies, but it still has advantages in terms of overall texture, including fine grain, and dynamic range. This is a particularly dark and dingy film and the darkest scenes are going to be a little muddy, no matter what you do. I think Arrow found a nice balance between cleaning up the deep shadows and maintaining the gloomy look. Colors are consistent and edges are only slightly feathered, often due to the purposefully diffused photography.

Audio

The Oily Maniac is presented in its original Mandarin mono in uncompressed LPCM 1.0. Either it was never dubbed into English or those tracks have gone missing. Regardless, the sound quality is fine, about as good as we can expect for a film of this age made for little money in 1970s Hong Kong. The Mandarin track is typical in that the incidental effects are minimal, the dialogue is a bit thin, but not too muffled, and music is both the loudest and best mixed element. As per usual, the soundtrack is credited to Yung-Yu Chen, but most of the music is taken from either the De Wolfe library or swiped from other movies without credit. In this case, we have the aforementioned Jaws theme and pieces from Ennio Morricone’s Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) score. The title theme is actually “Fabulous Feeling” by Anthony Mawer.

Extras

Commentary with Ian Jane – The Rock! Shock! Pop! critic excitedly explores the film’s production and release, Ho Meng-Huathe’s career, the folk history of the Orang Minyak, an officially licensed Oily Man action figure, musical tributes to the titular creature, the wider work of the cast & crew, the consumer history of coconut oil, and Shaw’s expansion into Singapore and Malaysia.

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