31 Days of Halloween, Day 1- Mr. Vampire (1985)

Directed by: Ricky Lau

MVP’s: Lam Ching-ying, Ricky Hui, Pauline Wong, Chin Sui-ho, Billy Lau, Yuen Wah, Huang Ha, Moon Lee

Plot: A Taoist priest is trying to keep up his business but one of his disciples is bitten by a vampire and another is possessed by a lovelorn ghost!

Response: Mr. Vampire awakens each morning, puts his suit and tie on, his best face forward. Rice can be used to pull water out of electronics and to leech vampire toxins from the infected. Gotta be sticky though. In what other ways is vampirism like water? The blue press-on nails of the vampire's curse. Don't you dare breathe for the undead are out a'hopping and lonely ghosts wanna fuck. The precise sepulchral magic of Mr. Vampire.

Review: Mr. Vampire might be the epitome of Halloween-tinged cinema. A top-to-bottom banger. Fucken' 25 bags of popcorn. Stateside we've got Army of Darkness. Ernest Scared Stupid. But Hong Kong shows us how it's done with the verviest horror-action-comedy of all.

I don't know about Republic-era China enough (or at all) to say what this film could be commenting on. There's an extended riff lampooning British tea ceremonies. There's a fascist cop whose a sexualized wimp. There's something too, here, about the past holding sway on the present as all the vamps are dressed in Qing dynasty regalia. Mostly it's the magic, the folklore, and the sheer artistry which carry you. Every fight scene is filled with balletic, gymnastic, wire-work. Cinematic craft oozes from every frame. The score fucks, the goopy monster make-up is rad. The actors are all triple-threats creating emotionally-attached, rich characters; doing incredible physical comedy clown work; and flipping and fighting with the zazzle of great cinematic martial artists and stuntmen.

It's mellowly-paced too. For a film as rife in incident as this one (lotta stuff happens) it never wears you out. So while it's far from slow cinema it's also a balm to soothe our ADD rattled brains and a counter to more manic recent monster-mashes.

I think the secret sauce of the film is its lore. There are rules to these ghosts, vamps, and wizards, and while they ain't the Bram Stoker rules they are as richly lived, informed, and felt as any of the Hungarian legends utilized by that auld Irish barrister, Grandpa Stokes. This means that the movie accesses Fairy Land. And that the magick is authentic.

Background: The jiang-shi, or "hopping vampire" is a bogey of Chinese legend. In popular culture and world cinema they differ from the western or sexy vampire* in both appearance and behavior. Often rigor-mortic (it's been postulated that the hopping is the result of stiff joints and tendons), they're more rotten than pasty and in this way more akin to what we might consider a zombie. Like a Speilbergian T-Rex, they can't see you if you don't breathe. They can also be stopped by placing a yellow parchment inscribed with Taoist magic (or fulu) on the forehead. What they share, at least cinematically, with our sexy vamps (and additionally, with our post-Richard-Matheson, Romero-esque, apocalyptic zombies) is a monstrosity spread by infection and contagion.

Wikipedia has the folklore originating in the corpse-driving practices in the Xiangshi prefecture (now western Hunan) of the Qing Dynasty. With the massive construction of covered bridges, clan estate compounds and towering pagodas drawing laborers from across China; and with that the attendant high-mortality rate; a grim industry arose to transport the remains of the workers back to their home villages across the great expanse of China. Legend has it that families who couldn't afford to hire regular corpse-transporters could employ Taoist sorcerers who would reanimate their loved ones using fulu magic and escort them hopping through the night home to their final resting places.

It should be noted (from my scant research [American here, could be getting a lot of this wrong]) that the jiangshi is not a ghoul exclusive to China but found in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese folklore as well. Also, and perhaps counter to their cinematic depictions, descriptions like the Wikipedia one of hill-dwelling, baby-chomping, soaring undead beasties remind me of the Filipino aswang** and the Indonesian leyak***.

Vampires, hopping or no, have long been a part of Hong Kong cinema. An early example is 1939's The Three-Thousand Year Old Vampire. A popular precursor is the Hammer horror and Shaw Bros. co-production The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) featuring cinema's favorite Van Helsing, Peter Cushing, as well as Norwegian super-model, Julie Ege and martial artist David Chiang. The jiansghi as we know and love them first appeared in Sammo Hung's Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) and Sammo*** is producer and stunt choreographer here. 1983's The Trail by Ronny Yu (yes, Freddy v.s Jason's own Ronny Yu) also predates Mr. Vampire and features Mr. Vampire stars Anthony Chan and Ricky Hui. But it's Mr. Vampire that captures and steers the popular imagination, setting the template, codifying the subgenre, and supplying the tropes for countless (and I do mean countless) hopping vampire movies to come.

The movie was nominated for 13 Hong Kong Film Awards and took home one for Best Original Score. It was a huge hit across Asia, coming in just a little behind Police Story (also from 1985) for box-office gross. A sequel set in modern-day was rushed within a year and a spate of imitators (notably from Taiwan whose own Hello Dracula, hopping-vamp, series ran for six installments!) was cropping up like wildflowers! Story goes you couldn't visit the cinemas anywhere in Asia in 1986 without being greeted by a jiangshi hopeful.*****

The heyday of jiangshi cinema was mostly from 1985-1993 but these movies are still being made today!

Official sequels are 2, 3, & 4, with 3 eschewing vampires altogether for surrealist wizard battles (a favorite subgenre of mine). All of these are directed by Ricky Lau who also made the unofficial sequel Mr. Vampire 1992 (a Golden Princess not Golden Harvest production) that, despite not being canon, is the only direct continuation of the characters featuring most of the original cast in an exercise of questionable taste where the vampires are possessed by the souls of aborted fetuses! Poor Ricky Lau can't get off the jiangshi ride also directing films like Romance of the Vampires, Mr. Zombie, and Taoist Priest well into the 2020's.******

Another veteran of the jiangshi genre is star Lam Ching-ying who left us too soon. He reprises a version of his one-eyebrowed taoist priest in Mr. Vampire 2, 3, and '92 as well as gobs of other media. To name a few, Vampire vs. Vampire*******, Magic Cop, Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2, Crazy Safari********, The Ultimate Vampire, Spiritual Trinity, Mad Mad Ghost, Banana Spirit and the TV show Vampire Expert. Whew! Poor typecast son-of-a-gun.

A later entry that gets some love online is 2013's Rigor Mortis, sorta the Evil Dead Rise or Mr. Vampire movies wherein much of the original cast play themselves as washed-up suicidal has-beens in a grim and "serious" version of the material. They are picked off in a towering tenement slum by, of course, hopping vampires.

Suffice to say, for fans of this kinda stuff, there's a whole lot more to discover.*********

Can Kids Watch It? I'd say hell yeah. Showing this to a kid is the way to make a cinephile. My guess is it's perfect for a sensitive 12 year old and a very brave 8 or 9 year old. There's little in the way of gore (a couple stakings here and there). The mood is suspensful, more edge-of-your-seat thrilling than nightmare inducing. And for all the scariness of the zomboid vamps, and the perfect eeriness of the magical night, there is a consistent tone of anything can happen wackiness that keeps things fun and light. Lots of smash 'em up martial arts brawls and slapstick violence though. For an 80's Hong Kong horror film, the animal cruelty is minimal.

Halloween Score:

Autumn Vibes: 3/5

Scares & Chills: 2/5

Cultural & Cinematic Importance: 5/5

Monster Mash: 4/5

Second Opinions:

"I don't really understand why there was a B plot about a hot ghost woman...but it's not like I didnt like it!"-dngdial on Letterboxed

"The result is really quite endearing, funny, and different, although it never gets too spooky, or even ventures anywhere close to scary." - myreviewer.com

"Oh yeah I'm watching this every Halloween now"-Danny on Letterboxed

How Do I Peep it J-Man?

If you can cop a friends password, the first four Mr. Vampires as well as Encounters of the Spooky Kind are all currently streaming on Criterion in glorious high definition. Otherwise, you can watch pan-and-scan VHS rips for free on Internet Archive and chopped up into six bits on Youtube. Too, you might be able to get the DVD on interlibrary loan through your public library. Home video market is looking pretty pricey with out of print Blurays and DVDs from Eureka and Nova (check the regions!). I've been out of cities for awhile so I don't know if this market still exists but once upon a time you could get bootlegs of all sorts of popular Hong Kong titles from vendors at your local Chinatown. Perhaps that's still an option, too.

What did you think? Did you see this one? Got a fave jiangshi flick? Did I get something wrong in my exhaustive scholarship, Mr. Corrections department? Leave a comment below and be sure to mash that like and subscribe button, hoss. JK on that last point, I haven't "like" nor "subscribe" buttons. Comments are nice though. Good to chat spooky cinema with peers.

Hint for Tomorrow's Movie:

It's gonna be a French one. If you can guess it in three tries in either the comments section or my DM’s I vow to purchase a pumpkin-spiced latte for you at the coffee establishment of your choice (so long as it’s under 5 bucks)

Poster cred left to right: Hand-made Ghana movie poster, USA vhs cover, poster by @damntansy for Alberta screening, Fortune Star DVD cover, original Hong Kong poster, Jasper Oliver original

* The sexy vampire, made of strange Carpathian mountain magic, the child of Bela Lugosi and grandchild of Vlad Dracul, you've seen them before. Pointy-toothed suckers, sometimes shimmering, always beckoning with the coital allure of the grave. They gotta be invited in. Allergic to crucifixes. Sunshine makes 'em melt and burn. Familiar. Sinners, Lost Boys, Stephanie Meyer, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Jess Franco, The Halloween Store, Jean Rollin, etc...

**Forest dwelling vamp that feeds on blood and viscera with a long proboscis for a tongue, though there are witch, weredog, werecat, and werepig subspecies that fall under the aswang genus.

***Flying, disembodied-head vamp with dangling guts bits (heart, lungs, liver, entrails) still attached out neck bottom. They suck fetuses out of sleeping pregnant women for sustenance. Black magick practioners. They can sometimes turn into pigs.

****Sammo Hung (Enter the Fat Dragon) went to the same Kowloon Peking Opera School as Jackie Chan where, as young children, they had martial arts, acrobatics, weapons training, dance, and mime literally beaten into them. Chan, Hung, and the eponymous Mr. Vampire himself, Yuen Wah, at 8 or 9 years old respectively toured China as the Seven Little Fortunes (the academy's most capable students) Child abuse is inexcusable and also, the movies, the movies, c'mon, the movies!

*****As a sample from that illustrative year, all six(!) of the following Taiwanese and Hong Kong films came out in '86 to chase that Mr. Vampire magic (and I mighta missed some): Little Master, Kung-fu Wonderchild, New Mr. Vampire, Hello Dracula, Abracadabra, The First Vampire in China

******This despite the fact that mainland China still restricts supernatural depictions of ghouls and ghosties meaning that these later entries all have the Scooby-Doo-unmasking "I woulda got away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids" reveal.

*******Directed by Lam Ching-ying himself

********Worthy of particular note for being a shot-in-Africa, hopping-vampire fantasy film and the official third entry in the Gods Must Be Crazy franchise(!) featuring ostrich-riding jiangshi, Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, Kung-fu Hustle) narration, Lam Ching-ying's unibrowed wizard priest, and GMBC star Nǃxau, the real-life !Kung bushman of Namibia reprising his role as the coke-bottle carrying Xi. Psychotronic gonzo cinema for us all!

*********A rare jiangshi film to actually not get made is the english-language remake Demon Hunters. Golden Harvest pictures, despite being one of the hugest purveyors of Hong Kong cinema, has a lot of Hollywood clout too producing and/or distributing a lot of films you might have actually heard of like Enter the Dragon, Cannonball Run, Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rumble in the Bronx, Death Wish 3, etc... At one point they thought to reboot Mr. Vampire for American/international audiences and got the star of Dallas and one of the singers of The Mamas and the Papas on board! There's some footage in a Golden Harvest vault somewhere that may never see the light of day.