There’s also some comedy-of-manners work being done with the Republican-era China setting (and some queasy retrograde qualities - in particular, a subplot involving a sexualized female ghost - that feel a bit out of step in rewatch.) The film is a mishmash of genres, a slapstick martial-arts comedy grafted onto the framework of a horror movie, and the result is a balletic physicality that is irresistibly fun. Chaos ensues, and it’s up to the priest and his bumbling underlings to vanquish the rampant evil.
Vampire follows a Taoist priest and his two inept assistants, who are contracted to rebury a wealthy businessman, only for them to discover that the corpse is a jiangshi. They move around by hopping, which sounds funny at first but is actually pretty creepy.ĭirected by Ricky Lau and produced by the legendary Sammo Hung, Mr. They can be paralyzed indefinitely, if you slap a talisman on their foreheads. They are indiscriminate in their need to suck out the life force, or Qi, of the living. The truth is that the jiangshi of Chinese mythology largely abide by their own idiosyncrasies, dressed as they are in Qing dynasty garb and sporting long blue fingernails. Vampire, are a lot more like zombies than anything resembling the conventional Western concept of vampires.
It’s tempting for me to begin this recommendation by saying that the jiangshi, the antagonizing force in the 1985 Hong Kong film Mr.
