Feb 171985
 
two reels

Master Gau, along with his two bumbling assistants, Man Choi and Chou Sheng, are asked to rebury the patriarch of the Yam family in order to generate good luck, but the patriarch turns out to be a vampire and breaks free. Gau, and in his own way, the dim, obnoxious police captain, attempt to destroy the vampire and protect Yam’s daughter, the beautiful Jade, but there are complications. Man Choi is scratched and is slowly turning into a vampire while Chou Sheng is seduced by a ghost.

If your goal is to study the development of Hong Kong horror and comedy in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, then Mr. Vampire is a must see. While not the first to use the Chinese hopping vampire, it popularized the monster in film. Unlike their Western counterpart, these vampires move by hopping (makes sense), are controlled by prayers, are blind and hunt by detecting breathing, attack primarily with long fingernails, and wear traditional Chinese garb. Mr. Vampire was the first in a series of films, but also started a whole movement. For a decade, kung fu horror-comedy dominated pure horror in Hong Kong and these vamps became very popular.

If, on the other hand, you have no interest in film history and just want to watch a good film, then letting this one slip by you isn’t a problem. Mr. Vampire doesn’t bother with character development. Gau is a Taoist master. That’s it. Choi and Sheng are slapstick goofs. That’s it. The three get the lion’s share of the screen time but I knew no more about them at the finale than I did after the first scene. None of them have any depth or change in any way. None of them can really be called characters. And Jade is nothing but a pretty face. It is hard to figure why she’s in the film besides the desire for cute eye candy. She has no part in the fighting and hunting or even the humor. OK; that leaves the traditional female roles of love interest and victim, but she doesn’t even get those. The film sets her up as the love interest at the beginning, but abandons that. While she is attacked by the vampire, it is no more consequential than the attack on Man Choi. She ends up being background, literally. In the middle of the film, she simply walks around at the back of scenes, carrying bowls of rice.

The plot wobbles about. The main vampire story starts slowly as we’re given the prelude to the romance that never happens. Then things stop so we can have a ghost story for a while. It all feels cobbled together.

There’s also nothing frightening. The “horror” label should be replaced by “fantasy.”

That leaves kung fu and comedy. In the first, it does pretty well. The action scenes are well choreographed, with plenty of unusual variations and a great deal of frantic motion. Technically I’d rank the fights higher than a majority of the Hong Kong sword epics of the time. The problem is that it’s empty. The actors move well, but with no characters to be concerned with, and no plot to follow, it’s a meaningless dance.

So, it’s down to the comedy and your predilection for the very silly. I have little patience with The Three Stooges, so found nothing here to laugh at. If people falling down, dropping their pants, and getting their heads stuck between bars is your idea of a good time, then you’ll do OK. If you’re like me, skip it. But as more people like slipping on banana peels than not, I raised the rating by one Reel. Still, catching it on free TV is all it deserves.