Three Films Make A Post: He's a Modern Day Devil Hunter He's a Master of the Martial Arts He's… MR VAMPIRE!

Magic Cop aka 驅魔警察 (1990): In what is sometimes sold as a direct continuation of the Mr Vampire series, Lam Ching-Ying plays a policeman who does rather more Taoist movie monk work than policework. Here, he’s on the trail of a Japanese sorceress who uses the walking dead as drug mules, for reasons the film never gets into. The film isn’t quite as slapstick heavy as some of the Mr Vampire movies, but has a lot of fun milking the differences between Lam’s character and Wilson Lam Jun-Yin’s big city cop.

The black magic in this one is also seriously creative, with things I haven’t seen quite like it in other Hong Kong films featuring black magic; the climax does of course become, as is tradition, properly mind-blowing. Director Stephen Tung Wai – who did much more work as an actor – may not be one of the great horror comedy directors from Hong Kong, but he certainly knows how to make the most out of what martial artists and effects people offer him.

Time aka 殺出個黃昏 (2021): Staying in Hong Kong, though a couple of decades later, Ricky Ko’s film concerns the travails of three former triad badasses played by Patrick Tse Yin, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo and the great Lam Suet, who are now elderly, lonely and depressed, with nobody, a family that doesn’t love them and a prostitute being their only connections to life, respectively. Their ties as friends, and a very small-scale plot concerning a troubled girl who adopts Tse’s character as her grandfather do return hope and a bit of light into their life. In between, there’s seriously played semi-naturalistic drama, a bit of funny martial arts, and some ironic but always empathetic variations on classic gangster movie tropes.

It’s a lovely little film, clearly harbouring a lot of love for the actors, the archetypes they represent here and people who haven’t really had any luck in life.

The Ghost Station (2021): But let’s not end on a positive note today: on paper, this tale of a young, bottom feeding online reporter (Kim Bo-ra) stumbling upon a cursed subway station and accidentally unleashing a curse on rather a lot of people who’d never had encountered it without her, sounds like a nice enough bit of South Korean horror. Alas, director Jeong Yong-ki never manages to turn the film into anything but a series of disconnected scenes I’ve seen realized much more effectively in other movies, never building up the creepy and spooky mood that’s needed for his movie to work. He doesn’t even manage to turn the subway station into a proper liminal place, which is quite an achievement given that they are liminal by nature.

Actually making good use of the social commentary about a certain style of online media and responsibility inherent in the plot is of course just as beyond the film.

Three Films Make A Post: Some mistakes are better left in the dark

Vampire Vs Vampire aka One Eyebrowed Priest aka 一眉道人 (1989): On one hand, it’s nice that Lam Ching-Ying’s long stint playing the same Taoist exorcist character with different names – if he gets one at all – finally bought him the possibility to direct his own adventures for once.

On the other hand, Lam is just another example of an actor whose work in front of the camera didn’t teach him what he needed behind it, and the resulting film is one of the weakest in the expanded Mr Vampire cycle, an endless, tedious, series of jokes that mostly don’t land and slapstick action sequences that lack the joyful and goofy imagination of the better films of this sub-genre. Lam seems to lack the ability to create the kind of flow the film desperately needs – which is particularly difficult to ignore when he was in so many other films of the same style whose flow was perfect.

From Black (2023): I loved the brilliant A Dark Song, concerning a long and desperate magical ritual and its psychological weight on the woman committed to it. Thomas Marchese’s From Black is very much a variation on the older film, only one that seems less grounded in an indie sensibility and extrapolated research about actual, real-life ritual magic and a lot more in what the movies teach us about magic.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film – as the more mainstream variation on a theme it wants to be, it is actually rather successful, containing as it does a handful of genuinely creepy scenes, an excellent central performance by Anna Camp, and the proper downward movement of many a good horror film. Basically, this exchanges some depth for downbeat fun, and is very successful at what it does.

Southern Journey (Revisited) (2020): This documentary by the wonderful duo of Rob Curry and Tim Plester follows in the footsteps of the Southern journey of Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in 1959 and 1960, revisiting some of the same places, not so much checking in with any sense of nostalgia, but in an attempt to find change a swell as traces of the past, attempting to understand specific parts of the Southern US experience through the virtues of openness and genuine interest and the way other people live. In this way, it actually feels like an actualisation of what Lomax’s approach never quite managed to achieve: letting subjects speak for and about themselves without bringing too much of the documentarians’ own interpretation in. That there’s quite a bit of great music and a wealth of interesting people involved rather comes with the territory.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Banana Spirit (1992)

Original title: 精靈變

Chic (Francis Ng) works as a beautician for the dead (his words, not mine) in a morgue, but he also helps his spiritual boxer buddy Che (Ngai Sing) out with an exorcism business that isn’t always completely honest even though Che does have actual spiritual powers.

One drunken night, the guys take a friend’s bet to wander off into a banana plantation at night to conjure up a banana spirit out of a banana tree. Banana spirits do apparently like a bit of good old ghost/living slash but also tend to – as most ghosts and spirits in Chinese folklore and religion do – suck their partners’ life energies.

The ritual – that includes Chic imagining his perfect woman whom he just met in form of a model in a bar - works out pretty well, and soon Chic has a new spirit girlfriend named Chang (Josephine Foo), who is actually a rather sweet gal, not in the habit of sucking the life out of anyone not a rapist.

She also uses her X-ray vision to help Chic win back the gambling debt Che owes the rather unpleasant gangster Rabid Hsiang (Tommy Wong); though Hsiang unfortunately cops to Chang’s true nature, which will lead to violent problems later in the movie.

Chic rapidly falls for Chang, of course, and why wouldn’t he? However also as a matter of course, in Hong Kong movies (and in Chinese culture), relationships between humans and spirits seldom end terribly well, so the couple’s time with each is other going to be short, and Chic, Cheng and their master Chen Sheng (Lam Ching-Ying playing your typical Lam Ching-Ying role of this era) will have to put quite some energy into at least getting her back where spirits like her belong safely in the end.

Lo Kin’s Banana Spirit is a rather typical ghost romance movie of its era in Hong Kong filmmaking, mixing an earnest romance, sometimes wild slapstick and whacky humour, kung fu, and eventually some pretty unpleasant (but fun) looking effects into a concoction that feels lively, surprising and likeable even when you know all of its constituent parts from quite a few other movies. This isn’t a masterpiece of its genre – it’s neither quite that charming nor visually quite imaginative enough – but a film doesn’t need to be that to be a highly enjoyable time, and that, Banana Spirit certainly is.

I particularly liked how genuinely Chic and Chang seem to fit together, filling the holes in each other’s character, the film thus perfectly fulfilling the romantic element while not overplaying it. I also had a lot of fun with the film’s other parts: Lam Ching-Ying is obviously always the best, if he’s kicking a burning dead guy’s butt, making fun of his increasing age that apparently means he can only use kung fu defensively anymore (which does of course set-up a couple of fun fights), or romancing Chic’s aunt. Rabid Hsiung’s return from the dead as a melty fire undead gentleman is fun too, providing the opportunity for more kung fu and a couple of excellent looking effects, and adding the needed outward dramatic tension to the climax.


All of this will be a bit too episodically structured for strict contemporary tastes, particularly of western viewers, but the film’s looseness never feels lazy. It is simply a way to pack a broader variety of fun stuff into its running time. It’s a bit of a trade-off against greater structural tightness and tension of course, but whenever any given scene calls for it, Lo Kin has no problem providing that tightness too; and this isn’t so much a film about creating tension as one that wants you to fall into tropes and ideas as if they were your favourite comfy chair. If you ask me, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

Three Films Make A Post: Ruled by a female Svengali, he tortured women with his world prophecies!

Skin Strip(p)eress aka Sexy Ghost aka The Skinned Ghost (1992): What starts out as a mostly harmless (unless you're the snake who is squeezed to death or the frog who is eaten alive) piece of CATIII horror morphs into a just as harmless Lam Ching-Ying vehicle after half an hour or so. Both parts of the movie are definitely watchable - a Lam Ching-Ying vehicle does after all contain Lam Ching-Ying - but don't include anything I haven't seen done sleazier, nastier, funnier or just plain more creative in other movies.

99 and 44/100% Dead (1974): Sometimes you encounter films that are utterly inexplicable. Directed by John Frankenheimer with a cast led by Richard Harris, you'd expect a film to be at least watchable, but this gangster comedy (parody?) fails on every imaginable level as well as on levels the human mind wasn't meant to imagine. Ironically, the film's problem is not a lack of ideas but rather that it has a multitude of them, none of which is good, or clever, or funny. The film feels like nothing so much as like one of those pseudo-Tarantino movies made by directors totally unable to understand what makes Tarantino's movies work, which is quite an achievement for a film made twenty years before Tarantino's time.

If the film's aggressive tendency to laugh about its own, unfunny jokes weren't enough, there are also scenes that go on and on and on for no good reason but for Frankenheimer's wish to make the same, unfunny, joke three times in a row and horribly annoying acting that reaches from undead (Ann Turkel) to a mugging version of Michael Caine cool (Harris). It's so crap you could fertilize a farm with it.

Heaven and Hell aka Wong Jorn Pid (2012): As far as Thai horror anthologies go, Yuthlert Sippapak's and Tiwa Moeithaisong's (of whom I'd expected something better than this) film doesn't go very far. There are some misguided attempts by the directors to make their simple stories more complicated by adding either a wrong-headed stylistic conceit (hey, why not make an intensely talky story where all dialogue is delivered via intertitles!) or tonal shifts that seem random and ill-advised at best. The problem is, if the basics of your story aren't interesting enough to keep an audience's eyes open for half an hour, adding random crap to the story won't help.

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