It’s October, and I’m sick. I foolishly, after weeks of lecturing the children about not drinking out of the same cups as their friends, let all three of them taste my iced pumpkin chai. I am: suffering. And since I am suffering, it is hard to pay attention to the kind of slow, ponderous horror movie I often like. My brain just doesn’t wanna do it. This is where Hong Kong action movies come in, as is so often the case for me lately.
I put this on expecting to fall asleep halfway through, like I did with some of the Mr. Vampire sequels. Which I do love but are also great for napping through when you feel like shit. Some movies are like this. Our fathers and grandfathers understood this. This is why they still show The Fugitive on basic cable. Good movie. Good for napping through, too.
But I couldn’t nap through this. I was transfixed by our hapless little debt collector, his ghost girlfriend, and the Taoist priest who lives in a haunted temple to ‘avoid trouble in the martial arts world.’ I’m gonna start telling people that’s what I’m doing. I’m not self-isolating I’m avoiding trouble in the martial arts world.
There’s a lot of these movies where the premise is ‘stupid guy accidentally avoids ghosts who really want to kill him in increasingly funny ways.’ I love all of them. It’s a brand of slapstick that’s never not funny to me. I don’t really know why. What makes A Chinese Ghost Story different from the rest is two things: the central romance, and how hard it commits to being balls to the wall goofy.
In a movie as silly as this, you don’t expect anything particularly heartfelt or moving, especially if you are used to the Mr. Vampire brand Hong Kong horror comedy, lotta fart jokes and dudes getting kicked in the balls, and a lot of sex comedy, but not a lot of big stirring emotions. This is fine. You don’t need it when there’s fun monsters.
But A Chinese Ghost story has both. You Really Believe in poor Choi-san and Siu-sin’s doomed romance. He carries her zither around for her. She tries to warn him to leave so he doesn’t get ghost murdered because he is Too Nice. He is so, so sweet to this poor murderous ghost, who is revealed to be murderous only against her will and enslaved by an evil tree demon woman. I told you this movie ruled. By the time Siu-sin pins him underwater and kisses him to avoid discovery by her evil tree mistress even I, jaded asshole that I am, was rooting for them.
And the evil tree demon is just awesome. She carries a whip and she DOES whip the small collection of beautiful ghost women she has both enslaved and also treats as her daughters with it. She gets in arguments with the Taoist priest while in the form of a tree. She sucks people’s youth out of their bodies and turns them into desiccated skeleton guys. And she fights people with: her giant evil tongue. How big can an evil tongue really be, you wonder? Big enough to destroy a whole house! For one thing! Big enough to wrap around a guy as it tries to force itself into his mouth to suck out his vitality. Again I say: this movie rules.
There’s some other great stuff going on here: the Taoist priest has an inexplicable musical number, there’s head soup, a portal to the underworld, a really funny gag where Choi-san melts a bunch of evil skeletons and doesn’t even notice, wolves that are clearly just somebody on the film crew’s dogs because all the budget was spent on making the giant tongue, I assume. It’s really great.
I’m gonna rewatch this every October. If you’re a lover of campy 80s horror, think your From Beyonds and your Reanimators, I highly recommend you check this one out. The practical effects are great, it’s legitimately very funny, and just overall a good time. I loved it a lot. I think you’ll love it.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 