After a few weeks' hiatus, I'm hoping to do a show later this week (Thursday and/or Friday).
Since I haven't been able to find a digital copy of Tom yum goong that doesn't look like crap (thank you VCD and a puny Thai film distribution industry), I'm skipping that and treating Iron Monkey as a one-off.
So next up is "Our Vampires Are Different", featuring the classic Mr. Vampire (1985). Yes, that's the name of the film. This was the film that singlehandedly brought the jiangshi ("hopping vampire") genre into prominence in HK cinema. There were four sequels and dozens of imitators, such that the genre was domminant for about 8 years fro 1985-1992. What Night of the Living Dead was to zombie films, Mr. Vampire was to jiangshi films. It's part comedy, part action flick and part supernatural horror story. And it created a trope character in HK cinema--the badass Taoist priest/ghost hunter/exorcist. The actor who portrayed this role, Lam Ching-ying, pretty much got typecast for the rest of his career in this role.
The plan is to follow that up with Chinese Ghost Story (1987). From noted director Tsui Hark, this is a loose retelling of a Qing Dynasty-era short story, about a young man and the ghost of a beautiful young woman, who fall in love but are seperated by the fact that...well, she's a ghost. Complicating matters is the fact that her soul is captive to a demon. So to free her, he enlists the aid of...a badass Taoist priest/swordsman. The special effects are over-the-top, but the acting is generally good (especially the main pair, whose love story is believeable thanks to Joey Wong's portrayal as Nip Siu-sin, the beautiful ghost). There's no vampires per se, but the Tree Demon has some vampiric attributes (a giant bloodsucking tongue being foremost among them).
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Topic: Livestream - Boots to the head! (*Friday 10/28/11*) (Read 6482 times)