Master Ko (Lam Ching Ying, stunt master in "Fist Of Fury" and "Enter The Dragon") faces the daunting task of re-burying a rich man's father-in the hope that the new tomb will bring further prosperity. The frightening twist comes when the corpse comes back to life with a foul and vengeful netherworld gang. Desperately trying to right his wrongs, Master Ko finds himself sinking in deep trouble as apprentices Dan (Ricky Hui) turns into a vampire himself and Harry (Chin Siu Ho) is reduced to a weak soul possessed by a fierce ghost.

"Mr. Vampire" is an adventure that is both utterly hilarious and terrifying-it's the kind of thrills and spills that action fans have come to love all over the world.

Don't get me wrong though, Mr. Vampire is very much a horror comedy, one of many that came after Sammo Hung's extremely influential Encounters of the Spooky Kind which successfully mixed comedy, kung fu, and horror elements to make a big ball of gooey fun! Mr. Vampire stars the now sadly deceased Lam Ching-Ying as Master Kou, a Taoist priest responsible for burials, and also has a great understanding of magic and the supernatural. He has two assistants, the hapless Man Choi (Ricky Hui) and the handsome, but almost as hapless Chou (Siu-hou Chin). Their goofing around accidentally awakens a group of slumbering vampires that Master Kao was looking after in his mortuary, forcing Gau and the controller of the vampires to incapacitate them once more. The vampire controller rings his bell and takes his vampires off into the night while Master Kao scolds his foolish young students. The next day, Kao takes Man Choi with him to a meeting with a local wealthy gentleman in a English-style tea room and amongst the culture clash jokes we get some plot. The wealthy man, Mr. Yam, was told by his fortune teller that he should dig up his dead father and re-bury him in order to bring much good fortune upon himself and his family, and he wishes Master Kao to perform the ceremony. Man Choi is distracted by the Yam's daughter Ting-Ting (the cutey pie Moon Lee), whom he takes an immediate liking to. We will later meet Yam's nephew too, the extremely irritating local police captain Wai, who has amorous intentions towards his cousin Ting-Ting.

The ceremony goes ahead, and curiously the corpse has been buried vertically, but Kao also gives the bad news to Yam that his fortune teller had given him the wrong instructions and had ruined the original burial, bringing much bad fortune upon him. Man Choi and Chou are left to put incense on all the graves, and after commenting that one dead girl died too young, Chou inadvertently attracts the attentions of her ghost. Things get worse when Kao realises that the corpse has not decomposed at all in the twenty years it had been buried, and slowly starts to transform into a vampire. Kao prepares chicken blood in order to prevent the vampire from escaping its coffin, but in a moment of very poor judgement leaves Man Choi and Chou to do it. The vampire soon escapes and goes straight for the home of Mr. Yam, dispatching him using his sharp elongated finger nails. Wai, trying to impress his cousin, arrests Kao for the crime, seeing as he had a couple of long fingernails himself, and locks him up in prison, keeping the body of his uncle there too for safe keeping, not believing Kao's warnings that the corpse could come back to life at any moment. Thing is, if you are killed by a vampire you are doomed to become one yourself, though luckily Kao had instructed Chou to bring him his tools for such an event. The corpse springs back to hideous life, made all the more threatening by the fact that he had not yet experienced rigor mortis and was all the more maneuverable for it. Kao and Chou manage to subdue and destroy the vampire despite the hindrance of the idiotic Wai. However there is still another vampire on the loose determined to avenge his improper burial on his family, and Chou has the small matter of a ghost whose love for him might lead to his own death.

Mr. Vampire is an extremely enjoyable and funny movie. Unlike some Hong Kong films where cultural references can unfortunately be lost on laymen such as myself, Mr. Vampire successfully mixes slapstick and amusing dialogue, the visual humour is a hell of a lot of fun. Sharing some similarities with Sammo's Encouters of the Spooky Kind movies, indeed the director Ricky Lau directed Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2 five years previous. Practically everything is played for laughs, from the interplay between the characters and their goofing off, to some of the potentially fatal encounters with the undead, everything is carried off with a sense of good-natured fun and humour meant as a piece of wacky entertainment rather than to provide any shock value. There's also this kind of goofy, innocent feel to the humour, one scene in particular springs to mind when Ting-Ting tells her father that she's going out to buy some make-up. Meanwhile Chou is working in his aunt's make-up shop, when his auntie tells him she's going out for a little while, but warns him that a prostitute from the brothel across the street is coming over to buy something. I found myself laughing at the setup rather than the joke itself, you can spot that kind of humour coming a mile away and I find it a very endearing aspect of Hong Kong cinema.

There are scenes of action too, Siu-Hou Chin gets to show off his acrobatic prowess on a number of occasions in his attempts to avoid the vampires' attacks. Lam Ching-Ying is occasionally allowed to cut loose with some of his impressive martial arts abilities too, though I you want to see him fight you'd be better off getting Prodigal Son or Magnificent Butcher for his excellent work with Yuen Biao. This isn't a martial arts film really, the heart of this film is a horror comedy, where little is played seriously, and even when it is serious it doesn't stay that way for long. The vampires, partly due to their rather comical way of moving about, and because of the tone of the film, are not exactly menacing, their lack of sight and their movements are used as comic devices. One great exception however is a scene were Man Choi and Ting-Ting are trapped in a wardrobe with the vampire grandfather mere inches away, having to hold their breath in the hope that he won't be able to detect them and leave. This was an effective and tense scene and one or two more like that wouldn't have gone amiss, though the comedy was still funny enough that it didn't suffer from a lack of suspense.

With Mr. Vampire its comedy first, with horror and kung fu distant second and third respectively, but this is a really fun, good-natured movie that really could only have come from Hong Kong. For an introduction to the crazy side of Hong Kong cinema, this is a damn good place to start.

Lam Ching-ying gives a stand out performance as a cool-headed Taoist priest responsible for managing the unruly walking corpses. His handsome assistant Chin Siu-lo provides the love interest with the sexy female ghost Moon Lee. Lee's rabid sexuality and fascination with human seduction places her closer to the traditional Western vampire than the bloodsuckers themselves, who are strange creatures, hopping in unison, speechless and blind. The whole film has the same pleasant shock of making the familiar strange, much like Michel Foucault's famous extracts of animal definitions from a Chinese dictionary at the beginning of his seminal work The Order Of Things. What translates less effectively, as is often the case, are the frequent slapstick comic moments. Though part of a tradition of such scenes in Hong Kong cinema, Ching-ying's discomfiture at the etiquette of an English teahouse or the botched wooing techniques of the local PC Plod simply don't cross cultures with the same success as the suspense and gore. More broadly, the ambitious generic mix of horror, comedy and chop-socky action at times falls flat...

The film opens with bumbling Man Chor (Ricky Hui), who's apprenticed to Taoist priest and undertaker Kou, entering the mortuary to perform the appropriate rituals. He lights a bunch of incense sticks and places them around the coffins, so the sweet smoke will "feed" and appease the spirits of the dead. He also places some sticks in front of a group of eight corpses, clad in Mandarin robes, standing at one end of the room with yellow paper affixed to their foreheads.

Standing? Yes. A word about the Chinese undead mythology is appropriate here. The restless dead can apparently take two forms: hopping vampires -- the Mandarin-clad guys, who are so stiff in death that they can only hop. These undead are blind, and home in on their prey's breath. Hold your breath, and you're safe -- for as long as you can do it. Those killed by a hopping vampire are doomed to rise as the undead themselves.

Fortunately, hopping corpses are pretty slow, and their spirits, as we've already observed, can be appeased by Taoist rituals. Incense helps, and the yellow strips of paper with Chinese characters written on them immobilizes the dead when affixed to their foreheads. Uncooked sticky rice also has the same repellent effect as garlic does on their Western counterparts.

The other kind is the dreaded walking corpse. Although more decayed, the walking corpse isn't bound by the stiffness of rigor mortis. No, they can see, and even do kung fu. Walking corpses pose a much greater threat than a mere hopping vampire.

Chinese mythology is also rife with more familiar elements, such as ghosts who fixate on the living, posses them and feed on their energies.

Now that we have that all straight, let's get back to homely Man Chor as he lays some good feng shui on the hopping dead in the darkened mortuary. He's surprised when his incense is sucked into one of the coffin. Curious, he raises the lid. If anyone thinks this course of action is a particularly good idea, the probably haven't watched too many horror movies...

Indeed, Man Chor discovers to his dismay that the coffin contains a pallid, snarling figure in Mandarin robes, who chases him around the mortuary, dislodging the paper from the hopping vampires in the process. The figure corners a cowering Man Chor -- and then laughs, revealing himself to be Chou (Siu-hou Chin), Man Chor's fellow apprentice. Man Chor continues cowering, though -- because he can see the hopping vampires advancing.

Just in time, the Taoist priest Kou (the impressive Lam Ching Ying) and his guest, who's in charge of keeping the eight hopping vampires (his "customers") under control, arrive on the scene. Assessing the situation quickly, the two bite their fingers and use the blood for some quick magic that immobilizes the corpses. Outnumbered, Kou, known as the One-Eyebrow Sifu for an obvious physical characteristic, unleashes a little kung fu to slow down the approaching dead.

This opening sequence perfectly illustrates the elements of horror, comedy, and martial arts action that director Ricky Hui blends in perfect proportion to make Mr. Vampire such a delight. Hui deftly switches gears from one genre to another. The influence can still be seen even in much later entries such as Wilson Yip's 1998 Bio-Zombie, whose low budget precluded martial arts set pieces but still blended action, comedy, and horror.

Lau's accomplishment is even more impressive considering how difficult it is to blend comedy effectively into a horror film. Although a touch of humor is usually essential for relieving the tension in a horror movie, less competent directors usually bring proceedings to a screeching halt with an obviously tacked-on comedic sequence. (There's also the likelihood that an untalented director hasn't instilled all that much tension in the audience anyway.) Other common, but not very effective, methods include the presence of an Odious Comic Relief character or a wisecracking killer.

But in Mr. Vampire, comedy set pieces aren't distracting digressions from the plot. Rather, they often cleverly advance the plot by providing essential exposition. For example, just after the opening sequence, Kou and Man Chor visit wealthy businessman Mr. Yam for English tea.

The two are concerned that they don't know what happens at an English tea, and so secretly resolve to imitate what Mr. Yam and his daughter do. Realizing this, Yam's daughter, the pretty Ting Ting (Moon Lee), mischievously tricks the two into drinking their coffee black and chasing it with a swig from the milk pitcher, and spooning milk and sugar onto their custard tarts. As the coffee business proceeds in the background, Yam outlines his plan to have his father moved from his funeral plot according to a fortuneteller's advice.

Lau doesn't confine the humor to slapstick set-pieces, though. During one fight with a walking corpse, Chou exhibits his notable kung fu skills, but a panicked police chief keeps accidentally getting in the way of Chou's blows. This sequence, like the movie, deftly blends action, scares and slapstick in just the right proportions.

And the bumbling Man Chor amply performs many of the comedy relief chores, but his good-hearted nature makes him a sympathetic character. Wounded by a hopping vampire while defending Ting Ting, he struggles against the onset of the vampire curse. His efforts are often comic, but underscored with a note of pathos. Meanwhile, Kou gets some chuckles with his exasperation at his two apprentices' frequent goofing off.

The plot centers around the reburial of Lam's father. When he arrives at the grave, Kou discovers that the plot bears a curse that has transformed the elder Lam into a vampire. Despite his efforts, the creature gets loose and moves to inflict its supernatural revenge on the Lam family. Meanwhile, the handsome Chou is haunted by an attractive ghost (Pauline Wong).

Although Lau is very effective at creating an ominous, spooky atmosphere, his heroes aren't the sort to run screaming from the undead, nor rush foolishly to their doom. Kou and his apprentices fight the spectres with a combination of elemental magic and kung-fu. There's plenty of opportunity for action as the characters fend off the hungry undead.

In an insane set-piece battle, Kou barricades a bound Chou within his compound and decks himself out for magical conflict to rid his apprentice of the ghost. Unfortunately, Man Chor begins to succumb to the vampire curse, and begins stalking the bound Chou within while Kou fights the ghost outside. Kou, unaware of Man Chor's transformation, testily responds to Chou's frantic pleas to save him that he's doing his best to keep the ghost away.

The martial arts in evidence is fully serviceable. Lau lavishes the camera's attention on his stars' impressive stunt performances that generally eschew wirework. Lam Ching Ying has a long history in Hong Kong chop socky cinema, including uncredited appearances in Bruce Lee films. He was also the sifu who trained Michelle Yeoh in martial arts for one of her first movies (Yes, Madam).

Yam Ching Ling found himself somewhat typecast afterwards, although he enjoyed considerable success reprising his role in the film's sequels and in other genre work until his death in 1997. Chou also displays decent martial arts chops and a laudable willingness to leap off of high platforms.

Mr. Vampire's obvious appeal made it a phenomenally popular film upon its release. The film's blend of horror, action, and comedy sets it apart from Western horror conventions, but are profoundly influential on Asian genre films. It's an invaluable insight into Hong Kong-style horror, and an immensely entertaining flick in its own right. Mr. Vampire is bound to appeal to fans of horror, Asian cinema, or anyone who appreciates a film that can be frightening and funny at the same time.

As HK elements and personalities are absorbed more and more into the Western film culture, films like Mr. Vampire stand alone and truly show why people think Hong Kong movies are the most creative on Earth. Once you get away from some cultural differences, such as the religious practices and the fact that Chinese vampires are more like hopping zombies (rather than our Western notion of suave gothic characters), Mr. Vampire is a sheer delight. It's a jumbled mix of action, horror and comedy that -- unlike many HK movies -- actually uses the different genres to its' advantage. The comedic bits (brought to delightful life through Ricky Hui's performance) make the horror parts that much more scarier. The cement which holds the film together is Lam Ching-Ying. He gives a tremendous performance in a role that could have quickly went the other way. Lam never overacts and takes the role -- even when events get fairly silly -- seriously.

If I was going to draw a comparison between Mr. Vampire and a Western film, I would have to say Sam Raimi's excellent Evil Dead series. Both films took well-tread genres and made them into something their own. If you're looking for a Hong Kong film outside of the martial-arts and kung-fu realms, check out Mr. Vampire. You won't be disappointed. At least you'll find out what the hell people are talking about when they discuss "hopping vampires."

REVIEW:
A pure classic by any standard! Produced by Sammo Hung, "Mr. Vampire" created a surefire combination of chills, humor and kung fu that spawned a successful franchise and numerous spin-offs and copycats. Enriched with classical Chinese folklore and energetic and moody atmosphere, the film is a treat to watch.

The tales of vampires in Chinese folklore is just as popular and rich in tradition as their Western counterparts originating with Brom Stoker's "Dracula". There are variations though on how to control or kill a Chinese vampire or walking corpse and "Mr. Vampire" is probably the best cinematic example on how to deal with them. From sticky rice to Taoist symbols, the principle hero, Kau wields a vast array of weapons to combat the undead.

What makes the film all the more entertaining is the almost comical direction akin to Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters". The fact is that Chinese vampires are simply hopping, rotting corpses with more in common with mindless zombies from "Night of the Living Dead" than a suave Dracula who seduces women. The film's director, Ricky Lau was clearly aware of this and plays for more laughs than chills. The film also borrows from another homegrown hit entitled "Encounters of a Spooky Kind" starring Sammo Hung who introduced the world to the horror/comedy/kung fu genre. Ricky Hui plays the forlorn assistant with charm and Lam Ching gives a star performance as the vampire busting priest who left a lasting impression that he never shook right up to his death.

Cheap special effects, the fact that the only villain is a mindless corpse, and occasionally overplayed and crude humor adds to the camp factor but keeps the film from being more engaging. Also, there isn't nearly as much martial arts action as found in "Encounters of a Spooky Kind". Nevertheless, "Mr. Vampire" is great fun and fans of the "Evil Dead" series should see where Sam Raimi, a Hong Kong film fan got some of his twisted inspiration from.

It is Ricky Lau's highly acclaimed and hugely popular take on the horror genre, "Mr. Vampire", also known as "Geung si sin sang" under its original Cantonese title. The film is a Hong Kong horror comedy at its best, so follow me as I explore the contents of this release. I would like to point out a few words of heed however before we go into the details of this film. A number of scenes and situations from the film may seem zany and abstruse to American audiences at first, but upon closer examination the film is just as seriously un-serious as any American production, but works on different cultural grounds.

With that in mind we enter a dark monastery at night and see number of corpses standing there in a straight line. Each one of them looks like the other and each one of them is banned into place by a written spell that is attached to the creature's forehead. By accident the goofy monastery apprentices, Man Chor (Ricky Hui) and Chou (Chin Siu-Ho) remove these spells and are immediately attacked by the creatures. Only in the last minute Master Kou (Lam Ching-Ying), a Taoist priest, manages to salvage the situation and freeze the undead back in place.

The next day Kou is called to a grave relocation and realizes that the body inside the coffin has become a vampire. He tries to ban the vampire but despite his efforts, the undead breaks free and grows in power. He leaves an array of bitten people in his wake who slowly turn into vampires themselves. Sadly just at the same time as Man Chor is slowly turning into an undead, Chou is lured and haunted by a beautiful She-Ghost. With all his skills and arcane knowledge, Master Kou has all his hands full to rid the world of the Evil that surrounds him and his village.

One of the central themes of the film are the hopping ghosts, vampire-like monsters that find their origins in many Oriental cultures. Undead but stiffened by rigor mortis these creatures are unable to walk and hence make small hops. Since these creatures are somewhat limited in their movements, the filmmakers have also brought in a true flirtatious She-Ghost and a powerful vampire to add pace and diversity to the film.

An incredible and furious mix is the result that is both exhilarating and funny. High-flying kung fu goes hand in hand with macabre jokes, visceral shocks and hilarious sitcom. It is hardly surprising that the film was nominated for various Hong Kong film awards back in 1985 when it was first released and has since become a cult classic and highly sought after gem among horror comedy lovers across the world.

To an extend the horror scenario is only the backdrop to a hilarious comedy that makes fun of the two apprentice buffoons who are unable to control themselves and cause more damage to their environment than is good for them. Think of a kung-fu supercharged Abbott and Costello film and you get the rough idea of what "Mr. Vampire" is like. In their continuous quest to save the world from evil, these goofballs remove important spells to ban monsters, make fun of each other's incapability and eventually get lured by Evil itself. Their struggle to withstand this lure and to shed the evil that is inside them is enough to make you laugh tears, just as the ways to achieve it are unconventional and hilarious too, although based in Oriental mythology. In "Mr. Vampire" the undead detect people by their breathing, which means holding your breath makes you invisible. That by itself is material for great comedic moments. But the hopping ghosts and the dry humor added to that and the full-bodied acting puts the icing on this comedy. Unfortunately some of the witty dialogues clearly lose their impact upon translation because they are based on certain puns in the Chinese language that are practically impossible to translate.

Current DVD releases of Hong Kong movies are a far cry from the washed out VHS releases or the mediocre Laserdiscs we have seen in the past, and "Mr. Vampire" is another testimony to this. The image quality of this disc is quite impressive, featuring a transfer of the movie in a 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The image is detailed and exhibits great shadow delineation even in the most underlit scenes - which are traditionally very frequent in Hong Kong horror and fantasy films. But the transfer also brings out the best of the film's colors. Beautifully photographed "Mr. Vampire" boasts very strong colors with subtle hues and shades within the coloring. The DVD nicely restores all these subtleties and has a very rich overall color reproduction without ever appearing over-saturated. The compression does exhibit the occasional hints of slight pixelation, but no chroma noise or other distracting artifacts are evident. Overall it is a great-looking presentation.

"Mr. Vampire" contains language track in Cantonese and Mandarin in 5.1 channel Dolby Digital, as well as subtitles in a variety of languages. The soundtrack is well produced with some nice effects, although the surrounds are not overly active and used mostly for ambience. It also contains a very good music score that nicely complements the pictures on the screen. The Cantonese language track sounds rather balanced and natural with good unexaggerated bass extension. On a side note it may be noteworthy however that the English subtitles are sometimes unintentionally funny with their broken English translation, which sometimes even heightens the experience of the movie itself.

I had a great time watching "Mr. Vampire". It is a great example how Hong Kong filmmakers combine many elements from different genres to create truly amusing films. The horror elements combined with martial arts and topped of with a good portion of humor is what sets these films apart from anything you will ever see in an American production. If you like films like "Army Of Darkness" are "The Fearless Vampire Killers", this release is a must-see. While its production values may be a little lower than many domestic productions, this film offers a variety of twists and ideas that make it a fun-filled, tongue-in-cheek experience. Check it out. This is a great DVD!