While I've currently placed The Beheaded 1000 in the black magic category, it is not really in the same category as lots of the other films I have labeled as such. Where the usual black magic stuff from Hong Kong has an unhealthy obsession with curses, The Beheaded 1000 is mainly a story about ghosts. Notorious real-life asshole, Jimmy Wang Yu, stars as an executioner nearing his retirement/1000th execution, when things go awry and a gang of pissed off ghosts decides the time for vengeance has come. There is quite a lot of stuff going on in The Beheaded 1000, and the film features a plethora of sub-plots and plot derailments. At times it is a neat film, at others it is painfully boring. Eg. an hour in or so, the director suddenly ventures into the territory of tragic, Chinese melodrama, even though his sub par actors clearly were not up for the task. It is a truly awful and seemingly everlasting 30 minutes. While I usually prefer to watch the most complete editions of films, The Beheaded 1000 is a film that begs to be cut. I realized in retrospect that I ended up watching the long Taiwanese version of the movie, and that there also exists a far shorter Hong Kong version. On the other hand, the Hong Kong cut is supposed to have been cut too much and cut badly. The film in general is (sort of) worth a look though - it does feature lots of wacky special effects, beheadings, haunts and the guardian of hell chasing mischievous ghosts - but be warned about its bad pacing.
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