Devil Returns—or as it should have been called, The Ghost of Poor Plot Decisions Strikes Again. This 1982 Taiwanese-Hong Kong horror outing is like someone dumped a bag of haunted ideas on the floor, set it on fire, and decided to film whatever crawled out. If you want subtlety, look elsewhere: here, nightmares, revenge ghosts, homicidal rapists, spinning heads, and supernatural babies all collide in a delirious symphony of “what the hell am I watching?”
Our heroine, Mei-hsun Fang, is introduced to a taxicab ride from hell that somehow turns into an impromptu torture catalog. She survives sexual assault, somehow produces a demonic infant (because, of course, trauma is never enough on its own), and tries every conceivable method to off the baby or herself—all with the kind of plot elasticity usually reserved for comic books. The supernatural is less “scary” than “weirdly busy,” as objects fly, heads spin, and family members are killed in a style that alternates between over-the-top slasher and low-budget exorcism special effects.
The film is heroic in its lack of subtlety. The villain is a revenant rapist who apparently didn’t get the memo that death should slow you down. He flings bodies, impales lovers, and apparently moonlights as a home decorator with a fixation on door hooks. Meanwhile, Mei-hsun’s attempts at normalcy—raising a baby, visiting temples, having friends over—collapse under the weight of spectral violence. By the end, wine and bullets solve everything, because why bother with nuance when you can just drown the ghost in Chardonnay and pepper him with ammo?
Devil Returns is a chaotic buffet of horror tropes, narrative inconsistencies, and moral panics, served lukewarm and sprinkled with extra gore for taste. It’s the cinematic equivalent of finding a haunted taxicab in your driveway and wondering why it won’t go away. You don’t watch this for plot coherence—you watch it for the sheer, gleeful audacity of a film that somehow manages to juggle exorcisms, demonic infants, and ghostly revenge without once pausing to breathe. A masterpiece of “holy crap, what did I just see?” horror.
Cast Alan Tam as Lo Yu-ching Emily Cheung Ying-Chan as Mei-hsun Fang Wong Moon-Giu Joan Lin as Hsiao-ling Shen Don Wong Tao as Chief Inspector Tu Chang Ouyang Sha-fei as Mrs. Chou Tsai Hung Ngok Ling Richard Cui Shou-Ping as Lin Haui-teh Chan Chi-Jan as Ms. Kuo Lin Tzay-peir Lee Ying as The Exorcist Wong Bei-Dak Chan Wai-Lau Mang Yuen as Doctor Cheng Chuen-Man as Chou Hsiao-kang
