Back in the late eighties I remember reading about Hong Kong “hopping vampire” films, but I was never able to get my hands on one. Fast-forward two decades later when I’d all but forgotten about this peculiar sub-genre and what happens? One of them surprises me by jumping on my lap, courtesy of a friend who brought me back a gift from a visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown: a DVD of Mr. Vampire (aka: Geung si sin sang, directed by Ricky Lau, 1985).

Several sources point to Mr. Vampire as being THE big hopping vampire film that started a trend (Hong Kong Digital refers to it as having “started the keung si horror/comedy craze”) and its success would be followed by a string of sequels and imitators. Mr. Vampire was finally made available here in the U.S. via foreign labels in 2000, followed by more recent domestic DVD releases.

The story follows an elderly Taoist priest/mortician/magician who is “assisted” by two bungling young men who act like they’d be right at home in a slapfest with The Three Stooges. If this film were a pie-chart it would have many slices that you could divide up into: horror, martial-arts, romance, action, period-piece, and humor – and that last slice would be the biggest.

As a fan of Evil Dead 2, which also has its share of Stooges-inspired slapstick zaniness, it was interesting to me that I found so much of Mr. Vampire‘s humor infantile and tiresome. Offhand, I’ll guess that Stooges-like slapstick worked for me in Evil Dead 2 because it was always subservient to the horror element, so much so that even Sam Raimi referred to Evil Dead 2 as “splatstick.” Other factors may have diminished my receptiveness to Mr. Vampire’s humor and, admittedly, some things may have gotten lost in translation. This quibble aside, Mr. Vampire was a fascinating film to watch for all the ways in which its vampire mythology diverged from the vampire mythology of Western Culture. The following youtube clip is, alas, dubbed, but it does give you a nice taste of the very first few minutes:

In this opening scene of Mr. Vampire several undead are released from their frozen state and move around by hopping. It’s a show-stopper. (I especially like the moment at 6:17 where you can see them hopping in formation.) How are they frozen? With written spells tacked to their foreheads. And when they are released, they don’t go for blood, they go for your breath (they are blind). But they do bleed you to death, but not with their teeth but rather their fingernails. And forget the garlic, if you want a food item to battle these hopping supernatural creatures, you’ll want some sticky rice. And the list goes on…

Michael Helms, writing for Digital Retribution, notes that “The Master is played by stern but wise Lam Ching-Ying, former fight assistant to Bruce Lee and integral part of the Sammo Hung stunt team. Hung is credited as Mr. Vampire‘s production manager and had already acted as the director and star of the film that really launched the Chinese kung fu horror film subgenre Encounters of the Spooky Kind. As the mono-brow, anti-vampire team leader, Ching-Ying went on to star in many Mr. Vampire sequels with a character so definitive he was even personally awarded recognition with the film entitled, New Mr. Vampire 2: One Eyebrow Priest.”

I recommend that anyone interested in more about this read Ian Whitney’s Expect the Unexpected: Horror, Humor, and Hopping in Hong Kong:

http://tinyurl.com/3lto69

An excerpt from that piece provides appropriate text for the tombstone: “Imitation, overexposure, the decline of the Hong Kong film industry and the early death of the genre’s greatest star sent vampire comedies back to the grave. Between 1991 and 1994, about a twenty vampire comedies were made; still a lot, but a significant drop off from the vampire-mad late 80s. After 1994, in which only two vampire comedies were released, the films disappear from Hong Kong theaters.”