Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters aka The Era of Vampires (2003)

Dir. Wellson Chin

Written by Tsui Hark

Starring Ken Chang, Michael Man-Kin Chow, Suet Lam

Somewhere in fantasy-world 17th century China, a master vampire hunter (Chun Hua Ji, THE LEGEND II) gets separated from his four irreverent disciples Fat (Michael Chow, POLICE STORY 2), Choi (Chan Kwok Kwan, Bruce Lee in IP MAN 3), Hei (Ken Chang, SPL: KILL ZONE) and Kung (Lam Suet, ELECTION). Given the proliferation of vampires in the area, the four decide to strike out on their own, and end up infiltrating the house of Master Jiang (Yu Rong Guang, IRON MONKEY, MY FATHER IS A HERO), the extremely creepy patriarch of a wealthy family whose primary hobby seems to be preserving the corpses of deceased family members in an elaborate house of wax (this is not a spoiler, they openly admit to doing this). Recently, Jiang’s son has married another in a long series of mysteriously deceased wives (Anya, THE DEVIL INSIDE ME), only to have the son himself unexpectedly kick off and end up getting the wax treatment. Seems like there’s probably something vampire-y going on here, one would think, especially considering the title. But the four vampire-hunters (which in the parlance of Hong Kong cinema translates, obviously, to “kung fu masters”) are really more interested in the buried treasure which is said to be located somewhere nearby, and, as a secondary goal, perving out on the young widow who is now stuck in a somewhat macabre living situation with her in-laws.

Now, that sounds exactly like the kind of imaginative, ludicrous nonsense you’d want from Tsui Hark, the infamous Hong Kong madman who specializes in nutty, outrageous martial arts fare like his ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series, and, most notably to me, Jean Claude Van Damme’s legendarily insane one-two punch of DOUBLE TEAM (which teamed JCVD up with Dennis Rodman and his inexplicable basketball parachute) and KNOCK OFF (which makes time for Rob Schneider repeatedly whipping Van Damme on the ass with an eel, and I’m not even a little joking). Hark wrote the screenplay here, and it’s plenty crazy, casting a wide net into the sea of Hong Kong and Western horror and action tropes and dragging the resulting pile back to shore to fester in the sun. But behind the camera is Wellson Chin (Qi yue shi si*), who has enjoyed an arguably less notable career, in that of his 19 movies as director, only 5 even have titles which have been translated into English. And one of those stars Cynthia Rothrock. This presents a problem, because while there might be a smattering of fun ideas in Hark’s ADD-addled screenplay, Chin’s execution of those ideas is too bland and lazy to make much of them.

It’s not a total disaster, but you’d think with Hark on board and an absolutely absurd amount of hopping vampires, this would be a little more memorable. Unfortunately it’s more generic than crazy, and too pedestrian to have much impact without better gimmicks. It’s not dull exactly; there’s almost always something happening and a fight is never more than a few minutes away. Problem is, there aren’t really any big showstoppers. The fights are serviceable, but short and lacking in any unique gimmicks or personality, and the film gets bafflingly little milage out of its kung fu master vs supernatural flying corpse conceit. It’s not that they don’t fight, because they do, it’s just never a particularly good fight. That basic problem is at the heart of the film’s dysfunction. I love hopping vampires (and there are plenty here**) but they don’t really DO a lot here. A really creepy concept with a whole house full of embalmed wax corpses doesn’t pay off at all (although it definitely does get the skin crawling a little). Yu Rong Guan has some nice beats as a not-quite-villain who’s nonetheless thoroughly creepy and a little deranged, but he turns out to be relatively unimportant. See what I’m getting at here? The story is needlessly overpacked with underdeveloped ideas and ends up being debilitatingly convoluted with unacceptably little payoff. It’s crammed with subplots and characters that don’t add up to much and just serve to clutter up a martial arts vs flying monsters setup that, by all rights, ought to have been completely straightforward. Hell, there is no defensible reason why the movie even needs four (and eventually five) vampire hunters. Only one ends up doing anything meaningful.

At least it’s shot like a horror movie, with no shortage of backlit fog and some pretty good-looking framings of the wax corpses, which are far and away the coolest thing in here. There's a sprinkling of nifty and gross-looking vampire designs, too. But the “comedy” pretty much undoes any atmosphere it can must long before it has any impact. Hong Kong comedy is a dish I never much took to anyway, and even by its usual shrill standards this seems pretty low-rent. The film is better as a horror movie, but it’s only ever intermittently a horror movie, and rather incidentally at that. It's much more interested in being an action movie. Alas, the action is workmanlike, but with approximately 180,000 similar Hong Kong period-set supernatural martial arts movies to compete with, “workmanlike” isn’t gonna cut it. And that all adds up to something a Tsui Hark movie about flying vampires and wax corpses and kung fu nonsense ought never, ever to be: unmemorable.

*I picked that one from a fairly long and completely undistinguished Hong Kong B-movie career (which translates outside Hong Kong to “Z or lower”) because the IMDB description is pretty special: ”Two undercover cops are forced to be a team to find a serial killer. Chow is straight-laced and Lau has ESP. The victims were all childhood friends. The killer is a ghost!”

**Though I guess they’re demoted to “zombies”? In VAMPIRE HUNTERS’ opinion, vampires are flying demigods which are the result of “zombies” (traditional Jiangshi) getting, I dunno, left out too long in the sun I guess and inexplicably gaining super powers.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	ERA OF THE VAMPIRES
TAGLINE	Five Heroes. A Coven Of Vampires [sic]. A Lot Of Bad Blood.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s definitely a Tsui Hark-scripted movie about Vampire Hunters
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No, although I could dimly see that being worthwhile, with some major narrative streamlining.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Hong Kong
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Hopping Vampire / Demon Hunter / Kung Fu
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	I wanna say none?
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None, though some horses become victims again
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	“Zombies” and “Vampires”
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	Wax bodies of the dead
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Human into zombie into vampire
VOYEURISM?	Yes, our heroes watch a girl bathe and then bicker about it. Not about if it's an indefensible invasion of privacy, of course, just about who should get to bang her.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Hunting vampires obviously requires a surprising expertise in Kung Fu. But then again, a lot of stuff does when you start to think about it.

Rigor Mortis

Rigor Mortis (2013)

Dir. Juno Mak

Written by Philip Yung, Jill Leung, Juno Mak

Starring Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chan, Kara Hui, Lo Hoi-pang, Hee Ching Paw

Yesterday we saw John Fasano’s American tribute to the Hong Kong jiangshi or “Hopping Vampire” films of the mid-80s and early 90’s. Today we look at something completely different: Hong Kong’s modern tribute to the Hopping Vampire genre. Bizarrely, where the American version carefully (and mostly successfully) attempted to cultivate the goofy, Scooby-Doo tone of the original run of these movie, Hong Kong has been going in a different direction lately; the Tsui-Hark produced ERA OF THE VAMPIRE in 2002 brought a more serious tone to the genre (he made up for it with a goofy comedy version called VAMPIRE EFFECT the following year), but RIGOR MORTIS goes further still. It has many aspects of the original genre, including a Taoist exorcist, a hopping vampire, vengeful spirits, supernaturally-assisted martial arts battles, plenty of the specific trappings of this particular mythology (symbolic sticky notes which control the dead when placed on their forehead; glutinous rice which deters them), and even a roster composed heavily of the stars of these films. But in almost every way imaginable, it uses these details to evoke an entirely different style. Where MR. VAMPIRE and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPOOKY KIND were colorful and broad, RIGOR MORTIS is grim, dark, and arty.

Set in modern times, this is the story of washed up actor Chin Siu-ho (Chin Siu-ho, star of the original MR. VAMPIRE, playing a fictionalized version of himself a la Van Damme in JCVD) moving into what has to be the most dismal, brutalist apartment complex this side of THE RAID. It honestly makes the one in DREDD look cheerful, at least those guys had drugs and a smattering of colors. Little surprise, then, that Chin tries to kill himself on his first night there -- only to be saved by bespectacled cook/ex-vampire hunter Yau (Anthony Chan, also of MR. VAMPIRE fame, and TWIN DRAGONS) at the last minute. Anytime you have a main character who almost dies at the beginning of the movie only to improbably be saved, you’re holding your breath the whole time for fear they’ll pull an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge movie-negating twist on you, but fortunately it’s quickly made clear through the movie’s many impenetrable subplots that specific concrete explanations are so minor a concern for the film that it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Chin, still alive but just as depressed, quickly finds that his new digs are densely populated with eccentric characters and supernatural tomfoolery, particularly the two (count ‘em!) angry female spirits which haunt his apartment. He’d just like to sit around stewing over his lost wife and child, but there are just too many people around --living and dead-- who want something from him. Besides the spooks, you’ve got Auntie Mui (a terrific Hee Ching Paw, John Woo’s BULLET IN THE HEAD, Jet Li’s FEARLESS) and her soon-to-be-undead husband Tung (Richard Ng, numerous Jackie Chan movies), a mysterious sorcerer (Fat Chung, SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS, TO HELL WITH THE DEVIL*), a twitchy single mom (Kara Hui, DRAGON [2011]) and her creepy albino kid. Their intersecting stories and lives gradually weave together into an escalating mess of ghostly menace, and culminate in a wild, magic-fueled martial arts smackdown.

Considering the exotic weirdness and fetishistic, macabre detail director Juno Mak (actor, REVENGE: A LOVE STORY, apparently also a musician and fashion magnate) layers into the movie, it’s a surprise that RIGOR MORTIS is as much about offbeat drama and ambiguous dread as it is about horror. In fact, far from the goofy fun of the MR. VAMPIRE movies, the film it recalls most is the 2000 Korean minor masterpiece BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE by Bong Joon-Ho. Both stories are concerned with bleak apartment structures and the strange, dark characters lurking within, but they both get most of their real mileage out of the actors and a tone of moody, but darkly comic, strangeness. RIGOR MORTIS has a lot more explicit horror than BARKING DOGS does, but even so, the things that linger are the sharp characterizations of the actors and the melancholy but ominous ambiance. The script (by Mak, Philip Yung [AS THE LIGHTS GO OUT], and Lai-Yin [Jill] Leung [REVENGE: A LOVE STORY, the upcoming IP MAN 3) is limited, almost minimalistic, with some limited exposition, but mostly just the bare bones of a story, only enough structure to hang the details on. That leaves most of the heavy lifting to the actors, but that turns out to be the film’s most surprising advantage, since the cast is uniformly terrific. Chan and Paw in particular turn in heartfelt, nuanced performances which belie the simplicity of their narrative roles and create drama with some real heft. The script doesn’t really give us enough detail about Paw’s character Auntie Mui for us to understand why, exactly, she would think it was a good idea to resurrect her deceased husband as a jiangshi, but her haunted, crushing delivery conveys more about her loneliness and desperation than any speech could. Mak’s willingness to simply sit and watch an actor’s face as he gratefully sucks a cigarette or contemplates a sizzling cooking pot adds texture and impact in the gaps between scripted lines.

Mak matches his strong cast with beautiful, sometimes downright flashy visuals which turn even the gray palette into something sharp and evocative (it’s nearly a black-and-white film, save a few flashes of expressionistic red lighting). It’s a startlingly impressive look for a first-time director, and the way in which he delicately weaves quiet comedy, dark drama, disturbing horror, and flashy action is rather miraculous in its ambition and its success. It’s hardly unusual for an East Asian film to sport multiple genres, but Mak corrals them more elegantly and blends them more effectively than many of his peers, especially when it comes to Chinese horror. While I can’t really argue with critics who find the film intellectually a bit hollow, I’m honestly baffled that anyone would complain about such a bounty of goods. I’m probably not familiar enough with the jiangshi genre to get all the meta-jokes which are obviously part of this, but honestly that seems like the least interesting aspect of this production anyway, more of a bittersweet tribute than a reason for its existence. Maybe it started out as a salute to this mostly-departed genre, but the finished product probably has as much in common with the J-horror cycle of the early 2000’s (particularly since Japanese horror maestro Takashi Shimizu [TOMIE: REBIRTH, THE GRUDGE, the interesting-sounding TORMENTED] co-produced along with Mak) as it does with the original jiangshi craze. Really, though, its greatness is a product of its own design more than it is a function of its inspirations. Co-produced by a Japanese auteur, directed by a Hong Kong actor/singer/fashion designer, and ostensibly paying tribute to a decades-old regional horror subgenre, it ends up feeling like none of them particularly. But it’s quite a promising start for a new kind of thing.

The jiangshi genre may have spent the last decades more or less resting in peace, but as these movies have taught us, you can always count on someone new to come along and try to revive the dead. If a new generation of artists can be as flexible and imaginative with these tropes Mak’s film is, I’d say rigor mortis hasn’t set in quite yet.

*And, huh, looks like he played Sherlock Holmes in a movie called THE RETURN OF THE POM POM? That sounds unusual.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: None to speak of
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No, although obviously inspired by films like the MR. VAMPIRE and SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS series.
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: Hong Kong
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: As far as Chinese horror goes, Chin Sui-Ho and Anthony Chan definitely count.
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Yes
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Pretty sure someone loses an arm. It gets twisted completely around, I don't remember if it actually comes off or not but that sucker ain't goin' back the way it was, I can tell you that.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Yes, Haunted Apartment/ Apartment Complex
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Two ghosts and a vampire, at least
• POSSESSION: Yeah, the ghosts really want to get inside Chin's body.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: Nah
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Still no dolls, which have not been making a strong showing this year.
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Man into vamp
• VOYEURISM: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, but now streaming on Netflix!
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Get a better real estate agent, buddy.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Accurate, there is a corpse which gets rigor mortis (in fact, this is the reason the vampires "hop" although we don't see much of that here.)
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

The Jitters

The Jitters (1989)

Dir. John Fasano

Written by Sonoko Kondo, Jeff McKay

Starring Randy Atmadja, Marilyn Tokuda, Sal Viviano, James Hong

THE JITTERS is an enjoyably dorky attempt to bring Hong Kong “Jiangshi” or “hopping vampires” (as seen in MR. VAMPIRE and its sequels) to America. Why this was done, I do not know; no one was asking for it, and, considering its low profile on the horror scene today, is seems like no one knew what to do with it once they had it. But I guess it had to be tried, and ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE and BLACK ROSES director John Fasano was the man to do it.

The story centers around a shop (various reviews online call it an “antique” or “toy” shop, but to me it looks more like one of those stores in Chinatown that sell knick-knacks and golden waving cats and stuff) owned and run by a Chinese-American merchant (Randy Atmadja*), who runs afoul of the absolute worst gang in (Toronto? Chicago?), a gang of indeterminate size (various scenes range from 3 to dozens of members) which seems to have struck on the brilliant idea of robbing the same knick-knack store day after day. When they kill the proprietor in revenge for the savage beating he lays down on three of them, his daughter (Marilyn Tokuda, receptionist in ALL OF ME, various TV shows) discovers a few local religious types (including a funny James Hong [BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, The X-Files]) have resurrected him as the unique flavor of Hong Kong undead, which eventually facilitates some hoppin’ mad revenge.

Unlike BLACK ROSES, which sported some goofy puppets but had a weirdly serious tone for a lot of the runtime, THE JITTERS hits that sweet spot between hilariously boneheaded and genuinely goofy fun. From the GHOSTBUSTERS-esque sythnpop themesong to the animated hopping vampire which menaces the opening credits, to the whiny, incompetent gang members, it’s solid camp through and through, but still captures the charm in the gimmick perfectly. This will never exactly be a terrifying concept, but the movie treats it exactly as seriously as necessary while still having fun with it. There’s plenty of wacky scenes with the hopping vampires mistakenly getting out of control and causing a ruckus, but our main characters (the merchant’s niece and her cornball white boyfriend (Sal Viviano, Demonic Metal singer Damian in BLACK ROSES) don’t ever seem to be in serious danger. That’s no problem, because we’re more invested in the undead victims getting their revenge against the gang than we are terrified by these unholy abominations.

You gotta enjoy the clueless American boyfriend, whose dismissive incredulity to all this Chinese superstition becomes significantly harder to justify by the tenth ambulatory vampire corpse he sees. Like the smug Englishmen in THE MUMMY, he’s so patronizing about it in defiance of all the crazy stuff he’s constantly witnessing that you have to laugh. Unlike THE MUMMY, though, I think this is an intentional parody of clueless, unwittingly ethnocentric white dudes who are so sure they know everything that even being proven wrong again and again can’t shake their cocky confidence that they have it all figured out. But the movie forgives him for it, he’s a good guy at heart, he can’t help it that he’s a white guy in the 80’s. 1989 wasn't exactly noted as a high-water mark for cultural sensitivity, so it's nice to have Fasano tacitly acknowledge through this goofy character that this is China's world, and he's just playing in it. Lest you worry that the movie too enlightened, though, also note that the villain's girl describes the resurrected vampire as "Count Chinkula," in what is surely the year's funniest use of a racist epithet.

There’s plenty of fun to be had with the ever-growing hoard of hopping menace, but there is one weird, out-of-the-blue scene which took me by surprise. One of the gang members (the only Asian one, if that means anything) gets bit by a vampire, and returns to the gang headquarters for a midnight snack (posing, improbably, as a delivery boy). But their leader is no slouch, he’s done his homework and for some reason understands that you can defeat such a creature by showing its own reflection in the mirror (a weird twist on the usual vampire-vs.-mirror antagonism that I don’t recall from MR. VAMPIRE, but whatever). When they try this, though, there’s an unexpected result: The vampire freaks out and rips off its skin and becomes some kind of other, weirder, scarier vampire. Doesn’t seem like it’s a significant tactical improvement since they defeat him anyway (by showing him another mirror! Boy, I wouldn’t have thought to try that a second time!), but I don’t know what to make of this bizarre tangent, which is completely different from anything else in the movie, and also from any other movie ever made. I guess Fasano couldn’t constrain his love of goofy monster costumes to just one specific kind of vampire, one more reason you gotta love him.

I don't know what this is, but I like it.

Mostly though, this one gets by on charm more than spectacular effects or harrowing terror. That’s fine, because charm is something it has a surplus of, and more than enough to keep a brisk 80 minutes compulsively watchable. The wacky, slapstick humor is deftly in line with its Hong Kong counterparts, and although its martial arts are significantly weaker, it’s generally well-shot and structured. That means that even its obvious weak points --hilariously tin-eared line readings, an astounding inappropriate score which endlessly repeats two or three semi-random keyboard runs which would sound low-rent as the score to an Atari game-- end up being part of the fun. This is clearly the best John Fasano movie, blending the sublime silliness of ROCK N ROLL NIGHTMARE with the generally competent z-grade filmmaking of BLACK ROSES, and also unfortunately his last film as a director. He subsequently worked as a script and TV movie guy for years afterwards, even writing ANOTHER 48 HOURS, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN, and --according to his IMBD bio (though not his actual IMDB list])-- ALIEN 3, and was in pre-production for his fourth film when he died last year at 53. To my knowledge, the idea of bringing Jiangshi to America** died with Fasano’s career as a feature film director. I don’t know that anything in THE JITTERS suggests that this was some kind of horrible tragedy, but for an under-the-radar one-off, I think is about as good an American tribute to this obscure and ridiculous subgenre as anyone could possibly hope for. Frankly, the idea that some other hack who didn’t have Fasano’s obvious affection for the conceit and talent for making charming trash could come in and shame our great nation with a suboptimal Jiangshi effort… well, it’s enough to give one the jitt[warning: computer has detected hacky writing and has successfully blocked it].

*That seems to be an Indonesian last name, but I’ll trust Fasano to have found a legitimate Chinese-American.

**A dream which apparently Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest flirted with, going so far as to produce and film half of an English-language MR. VAMPIRE sequel --starring Michelle Phillips from The Mommas and The Pappas (!?)-- before pulling the plug when they realized the director’s English was too limited to make a go of it.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: I can't find any evidence of a tagline, but one VHS release says "it's a feeling you'll never loose. Once you get 'em, you just can't shake 'em." I don't know what that means (presumably its in reference to the movie's nonsensical title?) but it really sounds kind of like they're threatening the viewer with an STD.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: In a perfect world, there would be a whole DTV series, but no.
• REMAKE: Not a remake, but obviously inspired by the MR. VAMPIRE series,
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: Canada
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None, though James Hong is definitely some kind of icon.
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: Lots, especially on the street punks
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: A little hard to remember at this point, I don't think so.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Jiangshi!
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Well, the punks do murder an old man in his place of business just for kicks.
• EVIL CULT: Nah, although definitely some questionable ethics on the part of he sorcerers who create an elite squad of undead vampires.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Man into jiangshi, jiangshi into... I dunno, super-jiangshi?
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Quite High.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If you're a roving band of Canadian street punks, consider choosing different stores to rob night after night.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Got no idea what it means.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.