"The Fake Ghost Catchers" (1982) d/ Liu Chia Yung

Tonight's review, a supernatural kung fu comedy from director Liu Chia Yung starring the likes of Hsiao Ho, Chang Chan Peng, and Fu Sheng, has only been on my "to see" list for the past thirty years, having been unable to score a copy anywhere until the glorious advent of all region dvd players finally made it and many other Shaw Brothers films accessible to long time Western enthusiasts like myself. As one would expect, this is a weird and wild ride, packed with cereal-faced zombies, hopping ghosts, spiritual posession, lazy eyes, foot moles, broad physical slapstick comedy, lo-fi special effects, and Chinese mysticism that pre-dates Ivan Reitman's own Ghostbusters by nearly two years, or, in other words, a must-see for any self-respecting fan of martial horror-comedy. Still not convinced? What if we threw in Wang Lung Wei in a friggin' eye patch? Yeah, thought that'd do the trick...


Fu Sheng, at his dramatic finest, as you can clearly see here.
After a man (Lung Tien Chiang) commits suicide with poison over his unrequited love for a beautiful young newlywed (Lily Li), his spirit returns from the afterlife during a bungled grave robbing by a group of starving bumpkins, who are interrupted by a wounded whistleblower (Chang Chan Peng) fleeing the armed henchmen of a corrupt Qing official (Wang Lung Wei) known as "the one-eyed general", who's trying to kill him before he can transport evidence of his treachery to a nearby judge. The vengeful ghost kills the young woman, whose ghost enlists the services of a phony Taoist magician's young assistant (Hsiao Ho), who happens to be the whistleblower's cousin, leading him to also unwittingly involve himself in the deceased woman/ghost's plan to foil her ethereal murderer before he can give her twin sister (also Lily Li, of course) a similar fate. The titular fake ghost catchers bring in an extravagantly garbed and perpetually unlucky opera performer  with nine lucky moles on his foot(Fu Sheng) and carry along the female ghost in a paper spell inside an umbrella for the ride. Nope, not a typo.


"Let's see Linda Blair pull some shit like this off!"
The actor only agrees to help the young men if the female ghost will help him to be more successful at gambling, leading to expectedly ludicrous results at the local gambling house with a lazy-eyed casino owner (Tu Shao Ming), who even has a lazy-eyed mistress. Meanwhile, the plotting, murderous general only has one eye. You with me, so far? One eye captures the whistleblower and tortures him for the whereabouts of the secret list, but the woman's ghost possesses him, making him impervious to blows, weapons, and even flaming sticks of incense, which he chews menacingly (!) before escaping the general's clutches. At the climax, a trap is set at an abandoned house by the judge and the ghost catchers who defeat and arrest the general and his men when Li's ghost again possesses Peng, who subdues One eye while fighting like a Shaolin wooden marionette. Fu Sheng poses in ornate traditional marriage drag as Li's twin sister afterwards, as part of the set up for Lung's ghost, who naturally isn't about to give up hauntings and murders without a knock down, drag out fight to the finish, complete with wire work, lighting fx, cheap horror masks and makeup, and a goodly dose of gung fu magic, luckily for all of us watching from our seats. See for yourselves.


...and Johnny Wang as the evil One-Eyed General. Joke pretty much wrote itself.
1982 was a busy year for Fu Sheng, who showed up in My Rebellious Son, Cat vs. Rat, and The Brave Archer and his Mate all in the same year as this effort, and his appearance here is mostly in a supporting comedic role, with few fights to mention, but he's freaking hilarious throughout the damned thing, so we'll let that slide this time. On the other hand, the acrobatic Hsiao Ho, who never really received the spotlight he truly deserved, is excellent here, and Sheng's younger brother, Chang Chan Peng, who retired from acting altogether after completing Wang Lung Wei's This Man is Dangerous in 1985, has some equally impressive fight scenes, and it can be argued that his possessed wooden man routine vs. Wang here, rivals or even bests his brother's similar sequence (on a physical level if not a comedic one) in Liu Chia Liang's Legendary Weapons of China,  which was also released in 1982, coincidentally. A good time to be had, for sure, and three Wops on the scale. See it now!


(Not very)Special make up tip # 7783: Apparently, ghosts like their Cream of Wheat with strawberry preserves mixed in. 

"Spiritual Kung Fu"(1978)d/Lo Wei

The screenshots for tonight's review come from my dvd burned from an original Chinese language print, letterboxed VHS original I snagged out in Manhattan's Chinatown in the early eighties, though I'd never hold such trivia over anybody's head.But I suppose you could say I was a hardcore Chan-man fanatic while you were somehow impressed by Chuck Norris' non-acting and clunky fight choreography on a cable box in your parlor with a bag of Taco-flavored Doritos sitting on your belly and a two liter of 7Up resting against one of your Nike Cortez.And you'd probably be right.Watching Jackie in any of his pre-Yuen Woo Ping movies, while he was under contract to Lo Wei's production studio, is tantamount to seeing Clint Eastwood in Tarantula(1955) or Lee Van Cleef in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953), in that you can sense bigger and better things on his horizon with untapped skill and presence beginning to shine through.This and 1979's Dragon Fist are probably his best efforts under the old man, who was also responsible for Bruce Lee's earliest successes in the early part of the decade.Chan also provides the fight choreography here, which was fairly innovative at the time, but compared to the rollercoaster ride movies he would later produce, it wouldn't be outrageous to hear people call this boring stuff.As it stands, there's a helluva lot of Jackass-style buffoonery, dime store skeletons, poverty-level special ghost effects, and surprisingly good fights on board here, enough to keep you from crashing the fuck out midway through at least, I'd ponder.

This unsuspecting poultry is about to become an ingredient for a Hungry-Chan dinner.
Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) is a mischievous student at the Shaolin temple; when he isn't being naughty, he's being punished for being naughty.The peace-loving monks usually come up with tasks for the young man to do that border on sadistic, whether its balancing a bench with a bowl of water on the end around his neck and two bowls full in his hands while his equally naughty classmates throw him food on the sneak-sneak, or wielding a giant calligraphy brush to stroke tiny, intricate characters on paper.When he's given temple guard duty, a mysterious man in ninjutsu threads breaks in and steals the "seven deadly fists" manual, with every intention of mastering it and using it for evil, as is usually par for the course.Ye-lang is appropriately punished for not performing his job along with the other students who allowed the unspeakable theft, which, it would seem, knocks the yin and yang of the universe off balance, causing a cosmic counter-occurence, where an ancient lost training manual for "five style fist" is unwittingly stumbled upon by...yeah, you know who.The book is protected by five pasty-faced ghosts with magenta wigs, each topped by a toy rubber animal that coincides with the forgotten style kung fu that they've mastered, and white leotards and hula skirts(like some experimental Chinese jazz musical off-off-Broadway or something), who manage to frighten the bejeezus out of just about everyone in the temple with some pretty low-brow holy x-ray paper and plastic skeletons, save for Ye, who's graduated from catching live frogs, snakes, chickens, and eels for a stew and stuffing them into his drawers for safe keeping, loosens his sash and takes a hearty piss(!) on the spirits as they're hiding behind a bookcase in the corner.After being wedgied and grab-assed like a Riker's Island blow up doll by the gaudy-looking ghosts, he bullies them into teaching him their potent styles of kung fu, by apparently tearing open his frog buttons to reveal the manual, the home of the ghosts themselves, tied to his chest.I'm warning you, I'll sweat all over it, guys...you know I will...Come to think of it, that'll probably come in handy later in the film, because...

Better to be pissed off than pissed on:Movement number one, novice Ye-lang(Jackie Chan) pisses on Five Style Fist ghost sifus.
The stolen seven deadly fist manual turns up in the mitts of the diabolical Luk(James Tien), who's perfected the style with full intention of restoring dignity to his family's name by becoming the master of the martial world.Naturally, Luk cannot achieve this without handing out some serious martial beatdowns to the competition, so he does so, every chance he gets.Meanwhile, back at the temple, Ye offers himself as an escort for the hot-to-trot daughter(Mo Man Sau) of a visiting Wu Tang master.He questions whether she's really a girl(!!), then gets his monkey ass handed to him when he tries getting fresh with her.Embarrassed by the prospect of getting housed by a chick, he improves his technique further with the aid of the martial spectres, enough to defeat the fiesty girl and administer a hearty spanking to her wushu-proficient ass.Her father has the nerve to up and mysteriously die, when Ye suggests that he leave the temple to do some detective work on the unsolved murder.The head monk tells Ye that he cannot leave until he's proven his mettle with two tonfa batons against the eighteen lohan priests, all wielding bo staves(one of the better tonfa v. staff displays ever committed to celluloid, I'm here to tell you).Fifteen breath-taking minutes or so later, Ye is on the case.Luk challenges the orphaned girl to a pugilistic square off when Ye jumps in to help out, getting Pwnd instead.The monks recognize Luk's vicious style as the one from the stolen manual, and arrange more fisticuffs between the two, which Ye emerges victorious from, drawing Luk's father(!!!) out from behind his monk disguise and into the fray.With the help of the five ghosts released from the manual tied to his chest, mid-scrap, Ye is able to pulverize the old bastard into the afterlife with leopard fists as his unearthly sifus hold him in place.Afterwards, Ye mistakenly steps on the manual, causing the ghosts to attack him as he jumps into a mid-air freeze frame.We hear the "Goodbye....goodbye" lifted directly from the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1978).

Snake-style fist says, "Ssssssss.....sssssssss....ssssssss."
Stickler for detail I no doubt am, I added the original Cantonese trailers found at the beginning and end of several of my VHS as extras on my custom disc.There are previews for Fearless Hyena, Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, and an outrageous trailer for To Kill With Intrigue that incorporates a terrible dated pop soundtrack in a miserable pony-tailed period piece where Chan gets his face burned and his ass repeatedly kicked by a sadistic kung fu honey before barely outlasting his final opponent in the final reel.The misleadingly hip trailer is pretty amusing.Yeah, I'm a goober like that.I dug the hell outta this one growing up though Chan's propensity to consistently outdo himself once he'd achieved international superstar status sort of leaves it undeservedly buried in the back of the minor classics closet.Wei would follow this up with three more Chan vehicles(Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, Magnificent Bodyguards, and the silly, incoherent Half a Loaf of Kung Fu) all in the same year, and one in the next(Dragon Fist).James Tien, who co-starred in Bruce Lee fare early on, has never looked better than when he's been choreographed by the Chan-man here.On the scale, it merits two wops, and comes recommended for Jackie Chan completists and lovers of kung fu movies everywhere.Hunt it down!

Don't you love when guys call out what they're hitting you repeatedly with?In this case it'd be...dragon fist!Dragonfistdragonfistdragonfist!

"Kung Fu from Beyond the Grave"(1984)d/Li Chao

...and then there's the wrong way to mix kung fu, horror, and comedy.Let's give Eternal Films and director Li Chao a little credit for something, though.With tonight's review, they failed epically.As a Billy Chong fan for decades now, I couldn't help but be embarrassed for the guy to have lent his name to this.Three years earlier, he scored himself a kung fu horror-comedy hit with Kung Fu Zombie(1981).He obviously should have quit while he was ahead.It's no wonder he returned to Indonesia afterwards to salvage his career there.After a porcelain bomb of this magnitude, it's remarkable that he was even able to do it.Grave is kinda like reinvisioning Ghostbusters(1984) as a kung fu flick centered around one impressive martial arts expert with a crew of incompetent fuck ups, a supporting cast of orange belt forgettables, Woolworth-level Halloween costumes, special effects that'd get trumped by a high school production of Mary Poppins, and an overall budget of, I dunno, how much you have on you right now?
The problem that Chong, aka/"The Bruce Lee of the 80's", frequently faced in his movie career, squaring off against unworthy opponents, having to rely on camera trickery to make the fights seem interesting, is never more glaringly apparent than right here.Though Lo Lieh has always been a fantastic cinematic villain, and he turns in an appropriately demented performance here, he's simply too old to keep up with Chong's hyper-flexibility and acrobatic style.Add an insultingly fucking ridiculous plot to the mix, and you're in the neighborhood, alright.

Place onion, garlic, and two hearts of humans killed at the point of orgasm with Worchestershire sauce or marinade into wok, cook with magic for thirty seconds or until they break down into a bubbly red paste...
A narrator tells us that this is the seventh month of the lunar calendar, where the dead rise from their graves, and on the 14th, townspeople make offerings to the ghosts, or visible fishing line, that clumsily lifts pineapples and fried chicken into the air, and ghostly green hands.Whichever you wanna believe, man, it's all good to me.Pissing all over the notion of staying indoors while the listless dead walk the earth, Chun Sing(Billy Chong) gung fu-trains out in the courtyard, no superstitious 'fraidy cat he.A ghost that drops in on him gets wicked kicked upside the head and knocked over a wall.Incredulous, the ghost says "Whoa!", and reveals himself as the spirit of Chun's pop, urging him to bring a blood vendetta against the dirty mischiever what sent him to Hell(he bribed his way back to earth to visit his namesake).He tells his concerned mother that he's off to get revenge.Cut to two kung fu wizards gliding across the ground in the midst of an epic sword match, complete with shoddy fireworks, over a fabled book of magic.The baddie spits poison into the eyes of the righteous pugilist, blinding him before introducing his tai chi blade to his labonza.Chun stumbles upon the body before the evil wizard can score the magic book from it, and, pissing all over proper crime scene etiquette, buries it in a shallow grave right then and there.While hollowing the earth, the pommel of the sword he's using comes loose and reveals ...the magic book(didn't see that coming).He puts it back in the sword, leaving it near the grave.Wait.What?Meanwhile, the victorious black wizard prepares a magic spray derived from two human hearts, stolen at the point of orgasm(he cooks it down in a wok), which he spits all over Kam(Lo Lieh), one ruthless-assed motherfucker looking to become impervious to all weapons.For now, though, he's just fucking gross with blood all over him.The wizard tells his two cronies that he needs another two human hearts in three days to finish the process.

Wait, what's Dick Cavett doing here, and why's he dressed like Dracula?
Chun shows up at Kam's crib with the tale of his father's ghost, kicking the asses off of all of his bodyguards and demanding that the murderer reveal his father's burial spot, give away all his money, and finally, kill himself.Kam declines, allowing Chun to go knuckles up with his magical lazy-eyed wizard, instead.After losing two rounds to the magician, due to his uncanny ability to make himself be seen through a kalaidoscope lens(which apparently makes him unhittable and his blows unstoppable), the young expert surmises, after also having to put the spinning wheel kicks to some undead zhosts(zombie-esque hopping ghosts), that there must be some magic behind all of this.Remember that book of magic you discarded earlier, mamalucco?Yeaaaaaah, that one.After meddling with the dark arts inside a courtyard yin/yang, Chun calls the attention of some nearby ghosts, who happen to be listening for magical activity with a bamboo antenna jutting out of their coffin.I'm not shittin' ya.Aligned with the living dead(and a hunchback), he revisits Kam, who's wizard summons two demons in black and white dunce hats with impossibly long tongues, on the defensive.Chun incinerates the duo with cheap laser effects that shoot from the book itself, forcing the wizard to retaliate the only possible way at this stage:throw a handful of American cash into the air, and as it magically catches fire, call Count Dracula to come to your aid.One effeminately sassy Dick Cavett-looking vampire with dimestore fangs and cape screaming, "I'm coooooooommmmmmiiiiiiing!!" while flying in on visible wires later, Chun is forced to resort to the old standbys(crosses and garlic)to thwart the pint-sized blood drinker in his tearing apart of the zhosts.Will the young martial expert somehow manage to vanquish Count Dracula, the evil wizard, and Kam in completing his blood vengeance and returning his chi to perfect balance?You'll have to do the unthinkable, and see it for yourselves to find out...

If that's his contract that Chong is holding, he should have burned it while he had the chance.
There's a lot of you who eat up low budget craptaculars like this one as if they were deep-fried s'mores and you were E. Wilford Brimley in the throes of a sugar diabeetus attack(I'm occasionally that motherfucker in question myself when it comes to rotten flicks).You might find yourselves guiltily digging this, in that case.If you're a Hong Kong snootmeister who grooves on only the finest martial epics, you'll feel soul-raped by the time this ejercicio en el absurdo draws to a close.So it's your call.From a technical standpoint, this is embarrassingly hokey shit that's difficult to endure.On the scale, it merits but a single wop, for the Chong presence alone.

Billy Chong uses poor old Lo Lieh as an escalator.

"Kung Fu Zombie"(1981)d/Hwa I Hung

Kung fu horror-comedies were pretty popular at the box office back in the glorious eighties, with titles like Mr. Vampire and Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind making lucrative bank in their theatrical runs.Eternal Films took their own shot at it with Hwa I Hung's Wu long tian shi zhao ji gui(say that five times fast with a mouth fulla beans, I dare ya), known internationally as Kung Fu Zombie, a briskly-paced supernatural mix of Asian blood-spitting magic, vengeful ghosts, supercharged Buddhist vampires, plenty of the martial stuff in-between, and a goodly portion of "Holy FUCK!" throughout.Normally, I'm not real big on mixing my genres.When I want horror, I watch horror.If I'm feeling like martial arts, then I throw one in.The one obvious exception to that rule would be this movie.Played mostly for laughs of a moronic nature and anchored firmly with a micro-budget, Zombie ended up being something of a hit in Hong Kong, earning HK$ 2,237,587, due to the highly enjoyable straightjacket insanity transpiring within.

Pang(Billy Chong) just wants his due.Got that? His...due.
Lu Dai(Jeng Kei Ying) is a petty criminal with a debt of vengeance to repay to a wise-assed young martial expert named Pang(Billy Chong), who meddled in his affairs and got him locked up for it.Aiding Dai in his quarrel are a merry band of blundering jagoffs that includes a Taoist priest(Chan Lau) who dabbles in the black arts.Their scheme is nothing if not fucking ridiculous: Lure Pang to the cemetery for a duel, then use magic to reanimate some cadavers to push him into an open grave with a coffin lined with daggers in it.Of course, it fails miserably, with Dai ending up poked full of holes and dead in the box...and struck by lightning of the hand-scratched film variety.His ghost, hysterical at the sight of his own mutilated corpse, demands that the fumbling priest find him a new body forthwith.During the body-shopping process, Dai uses his ectoplasmic invisibility to frame the priest in a busy restaurant, using ghost hands to feel up a prostitute, who turns and slaps six shades of spinning shit outta the innocent priest, who tumbles into an incoming Chinese heiffer's fat booze-umms, which he bounces off of repeatedly for optimum comic effect before she falls on top of him the way fat people often do in kung fu comedies.The priest's body-switching ceremonies don't go so well either, when he tries to insert Dai's spirit into a body at the morgue, it turns out the guy just happened to be a martial expert(Kwan Yung Moon) sleeping in a coffin for the fuck of it, until his big vengeance duel with the same young hothead Dai is after.Pang's father(Chiang Tao)trains him to endure fights that last two hours or more to be ready for Lung, who Pang cockily sends back to the morgue with precious little fanfare.The priest tries to insert Dai into the fighter's body a second time, but only succeeds in turning the murderous bastard into a full-fledged vampire!

Lu Dai(Jeng Kei Ying), put your old body away.It stinks.
To further complicate matters, Pang's father eats heart-seizing death while getting loaded and playing with the reward money for Lung's body, providing Dai with his final opportunity for a new body(you only get three chances,apparently)and revenge against Pang.The priest only manages to make half-good on his promise, causing Dai, now in Pang's dad's body, to hunt all his brothers-in-crime, who safeguard against him in a number of ways: one gets arrested(ghosts can't cross the law), one becomes a piss-poor excuse for a monk(he's kicked out after frying up a puppy!), and the priest, well, he just wears a leaf hat(!), that makes him invisible to Dai, and ridiculous to everybody else.Meanwhile Lung is rewriting vampire folklore, attacking people during the day, and kicking the heads off of peasants and leaning over the geysering neck stumps like a kid at a high school water fountain, to hungrily gulp down the red stuff(!!).Of course, this all leads up to the final confrontation between Pang and Lung, with the remaining members of Dai's gang trying to pull his spirit out of Pang's father's body in the process.During their supernatual rowdydow, Lung's fists and foot suddenly catch fire as his head starts to smoulder(!!!), with the vampire using them to strike at Pang.Somewhere out of left field, a monk appears and drapes Buddhist prayer beads around Pang's neck, slapping protective holy yellow post-its all over his torso, before pushing him back out into the battle zone.Huh?!!!The vampire's flaming extremities burn away most of Pang's protection, but in the nick of time, the young hero remembers to wrap the prayer beads around the vampire's neck, jump effortlessly into the branch of a tree some twenty-five feet up, strangling the blood drinker while breaking off a piece of branch stump and ramming it repeatedly into the top of the vampire's head, killing him.Whaaaa??!!??Insert four exclamation points here.

"I'm having dramatic slo-mo chest pains!Where's my Chinese Life Alert?"
Despite some sped up action and chase scenes(for Benny Hill-style comedy hijinks,methinks),Billy Chong is high-kickingly amazing as always, especially when squared off with Kwan Yung Moon, an equally impressive fighter.I should also mention at this point that Cheng Hong Yip played the character of "Hamster"(that's right).You should be able to snag a copy of this one for next to nothing at your local video clearance outlet or FYE, if you can't locate one on Amazon.A restored, remastered special edition is just crying to be released some day soon.It deserves no less.On the scale, the highest possible rating for nearly immeasurable laughs and martial arts entertainment.The right way to mix kung fu, horror, and comedy.

Let's see Van Helsing jump effortlessly 25 feet up a tree, strangling a vampire with buddhist prayer beads, before ramming a tree branch into the top of his head repeatedly.