“The Seventh Curse” has something for almost every fan of Hong Kong film. If the thirteen minutes cut from the version we watched was restored it might have hit the target with at least one scene—or even one shot—that would be just the thing for anyone who might stumble across it.

There is very early Maggie Cheung--only her seventh film, and still more a pouting and cute presence than an actress. Her character is an enterprising reporter who hits a nurse with a brick in order to take her place and sneak into a crime scene.

There is Chui Sau-Lai nude in two scenes, one popping out of a lake, the other posing on a rock and for mutilation fans she takes a scary looking knife, slices open the top of a breast and removes a magical talisman that stops the spread of the Worm Curse that has infected Chin Siu-Ho. The Worm Curse comes from the Worm People, a renegade tribe in the wilds of Thailand, the place where citizens of Hong Kong travel and always return worse off than when they left. Sibelle Hu is a nurse who has the magic antidote in a huge syringe she always has nearby to make sure no one dies too early in the story.

It has Elvis Tsui in bright red lipstick; Chow Yun-Fat in full dinner jacketed Cary Grant mode with a touch of Roger Moore as James Bond; a bloodthirsty ghost baby with a long tail that has a fight to the death with a reptilian monster and the Old Ancestor who might be a first cousin to the Crypt Keeper but without the CK’s sardonic sense of humor.

Human sacrifice and 100 children squeezed to death in a giant press round out things for the gorehounds and some very dodgy monks on strings make a poor show of martial arts prowess. There are bits from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Alien”—probably a lot more than I recognized.

Any 20 minute stretch of “The Seventh Curse” is funny and engaging in a mindless way but the entire movie, even with the meat cleaver editing it underwent, is much too long to enjoy. It would be just the thing to cram into a two hour slot with interruptions for commercials.