Yue ya er (1978)

... aka: 月牙兒

... aka: Crescent Moon

... aka: New Moon, The

Directed by:

Feng-Pan Yao

Just how much misery, suffering and abuse can be heaped upon poor Barbara Wang in just an hour-and-a-half by the Lars von Trier of Asian ghost movies? Guess you'll just have to read on to find out. This one's structured like a lot of the others, with a brief "modern day" (though still period-set) framing story acting as both bookmark and intermission and the bulk of the film being in flashback form. The framework here features a young writer with an interest in supernatural tales who's on his way to the capital for an examination and seeks shelter at an abandoned home late at night. There, he spots three graves, a walking skeleton and a floating ghost girl. An elderly man shows up, takes him inside and then explains to him why the place is haunted. Cue flashbacks.

Yu-Ching Liu (Yang Yueh), a scholar who's studying to become a public official just like his powerful Uncle Kung, is having a lot of pressure put on him by his family. They think he needs to succeed as a way to honor his late father, ancestors and his controlling widowed mother (Bi-Hui Fu), who currently runs a small shop and is desperate for the family to achieve a high social standing. The mother and another uncle (Han Hsieh) forbid Yu-Ching from getting married until he passes his exams but it appears his whole life is pretty much being laid out for him by other people. He'll study hard. He'll get a specific job. He'll marry a girl from a wealthy and reputable home. And he'll always be concerned with his wealth and have to maintain his status within the community. Late one night, a beautiful, bashful young woman named Hsiu-Niang Huo (Barbara Wang) stops by the shop for some herbs. The two have instant chemistry and Yu-Ching lends her his umbrella, less as an excuse to be kind and more as an excuse to go visit her later on.

But Hsiu-Niang is just a poor country girl who lives with her sickly, alcoholic old father (Hsiang-Ting Ko) in a shack near some peach blossom trees and someone his family would never approve of. Still, Yu-Ching is persistent. He asks Hsiu-Niang to visit him at midnight at an ancient temple he frequently studies at and it's there he asks her to spend the night with him. He promises that if she does, once he passes his exams he will marry her. And he's sincere. At least at first. However, when his mother finds out, she's irate, refuses to even meet her potential daughter-in-law and demands her son never see her again. But Yu-Ching cannot stay away and Hsiu-Niang soon becomes pregnant with his child.

Yu-Ching leaves for the long journey to the city to take his exam, with hopes of eventually returning to marry Hsiu-Niang, but his mother and uncle start conspiring against him in his absence and laying down the groundwork to destroy the relationship. They inform Hsiu-Niang that her future husband has already been betrothed to an official's daughter and thus can never marry her. And, when Hsiu-Niang visits Mrs. Liu (who's also been intercepting any mail her son sends), she berates her as disreputable and uneducated and blames her for seducing her son when it reality it was the exact opposite. When her father finds out she's pregnant, he beats her and then, descending further into his alcoholism, dies soon after. Hsiu-Niang becomes the subject of local gossip and few will even deal with her, aside from one sympathetic couple who help her give birth to a baby boy she names Han-Er.

As far as Yu-Ching is concerned, he simply never comes back to the village to fulfill his promise. After passing his exam in the city, he found out that he's expected to marry his cousin, Shu-Hsien (Wei-Ling Chen), and already been designated to take his uncle's place as Minister of Finance. Finding himself attracted to his cousin, he agrees to the coupling and just marries her instead. The two move into a guarded mansion and live in luxury, with a large staff.

Meanwhile, Hsiu-Niang is left barely eking out an existence as a poor single mother. Mrs. Liu attempts to buy the baby from her to help alleviate her burden but she refuses and insists Yu-Ching will return to them one day. More years pass and the boy, now three years old, is already becoming an outcast himself. Other kids bully him and refuse to play with him because he has no father. After finding out the asshole she's waited all this time to reunite with has since married, she packs up her belongings and travels to the city with Han-Er in tow. All of her money is stolen by a thief and then, when she finally gets access to Yu-Ching, he claims he doesn't know who she is is, slaps her in the face, pushes her down and has his guards throw her into the street. She's then forced to dig through trash for food and beg people for help.

Shu-Hsien, who doesn't believe her husband's lie that he doesn't know Hsiu-Niang, grows concerned they'll become the subject of ridicule unless they "terminate" the problem. Yu-Ching hires an assassin to kill her but the man has second thoughts and allows her to go back home. Unfortunately, Han-Er dies as soon as they arrive and then Hsiu-Niang hangs herself. Naturally, the restless spirit of our tormented heroine has to return to settle the score, with Yu-Ching, his wife and his mother the primary targets.

This is about 80% melodramatic morality tale soap opera overacted within an inch of its life (check out how many "gasp!" reactions you can count at the various revelations) and 20% below average ghost / revenge tale, which is mostly relegated to the final 15 minutes. That's not a winning percentage. Once again, Yao reuses the accidental pregnancy angle from his ALL IN THE DIM COLD NIGHT (1974) from just four years earlier, as well as the good-hearted but long-suffering female protagonist who's used, discarded and can't seem to catch any kind of break trope that's used in a zillion other Asian ghost tales. In other words, this New Moon is same as the old, only not quite up to par.

Toward the end, there are some very poor optical effects with the ghost's head detaching and a shrunken ghost getting trapped between two cymbals and popping out of a pot, as well as your standard green and red gel lighting on ghost faces. Also after about an hour and 15 minutes of grueling serious stuff, they decided to throw in some embarrassing comedy centered around a pair of bumbling, ineffectual exorcists and a mentally challenged servant called Kung Fu (played by Chen Fang), who, at one point, breaks the fourth wall and repeatedly looks directly at the camera making goofy faces.

This was the recipient of an English-subtitled VCD release at some point but that's the only home video release that I'm aware of. I could not locate a theatrical film poster* for this, nor any actual scans of a VHS or VCD cover. (* Scratch that! While it took me forever to find the theatrical poster, I obviously eventually did!)

★1/2

Qiu deng ye yu (1974)

... aka: 秋燈夜雨
... aka: All in Dim Cold Night
... aka: All in the Dim Cold Night
... aka: Autumn Light, Night Rain
... aka: Tragedy of a Ghost
... aka: Tragedy of Ghost

Directed by:
Feng-Pan Yao

Widowed landowner Lord Chao (Yang Yueh) becomes infatuated with sheltered, naive country girl Tsio-O (Meng Chin). In order to finagle his way into her life, he hires her father (also a widower) as a rent collector and uses his frequent absence from the home to make his move. After Tsio-O repeatedly rejects his gifts / sexual propositions, Chao gives her an offer too good to pass up: He'll marry her if she'll just have sex with him. After all, he says, she has to marry someone anyway so she may as well wed a well-off lord, right? Tsio-O finally relents to the lord's sexual demands and waits patiently for him to follow through on his promise. Soon after, chatty matchmaker Miss Tsaw (Hsing-Chih Kao) comes to the lord's home with news that the fiance of Shew-Yin (Ling-Chi Chin), an extremely wealthy lord's daughter, has been killed and her father has agreed to let him marry her. Seeing how Shew-Yin comes from so much money and Lord Chao has recently been depleting his own wealth, he agrees to the union. Only there's a complication... he's gotten Tsio-O pregnant.

Managing to conceal her pregnancy for six months, Tsio-O finally has to come clean due to her weight gain. Her father (Chung-Lien Chou) reacts to the news by beating her until she reveals who knocked her up. When he goes to confront Lord Chao, he's met with denial that they were ever even together. He's accused of being a liar and loses his job. Later that winter, Tsio-O gives birth alone in her room, passes out and awakens to find her baby gone. While she was out, her father had bundled it up, taken it outside and left it in the woods to die. Tsio-O flees into the forest and finds it, then goes to the lord's home to ask him to have mercy on their child. He refuses to even see her and orders his men to slam the door in her face. She ends up freezing to death on his doorstep. As for the baby, Chao orders his right hand man Chao Chung (Yu Wang) to "throw him out."

With rumors quickly spreading around the village about what's taken place, the matchmaker and Lord Luu (Yeh Tien) decide to fast track the wedding. The bride is delivered and the marriage is consummated. However, it's not going to be happily ever after for Lord Chao, his new wife and some in his inner circle when Tsio-O's "very revengeous ghost" returns. A puddle of blood keeps appearing right where Tsio-O died, laughter and crying are heard outside the home and other strange things occur. The ghost tricks the matchmaker into eating centipedes before dropping a boulder on her and then pays Lord Chao a visit on his honeymoon night demanding to know where their child is. Consulting a monk (Kuo Chun Chen) leads Chao to prayer and fortifying his home with spell paper.

After her horrifying honeymoon, Shew-Yin returns to her father and refuses to go back to the home, giving Tsio-O's ghost the opportunity to impersonate her to gain access and trick Chao into bed with her corpse. The body is then placed in a casket, taken to a temple and sealed with sacred paper, but she still manages to get out when a buffoon accidentally sets the paper on fire. She returns to the lord's home yet again, where the monk attempts to exorcise her spirit before she can carry out her plans to kill Chao and find the burial location of her baby.

From a technical standpoint, this is well done in regards to the sets, costumes, period detail and overall atmosphere. Being Taiwanese, I wasn't really expecting this to match the quality of similar traditional ghost tales from Japan and Hong Kong, but this was a respectable enough production. There's a strong performance from lead actress Chin, a few fun special effects (especially a bit where the ghost's top half detaches and flies around) and some decent camerawork following the floating spirit around. The first 40 minutes provide a serious, fairly compelling dramatic set-up to the supernatural revenge scenes. All of that makes the second half, which deteriorates into a poorly-paced mess of uncertain mood (the introduction of two "funny" characters throw the tone completely off), sloppy jump cuts and underwhelming horror scenes, all the more disappointing.

The ghost's "revenge" is also incredibly unsatisfying. Tsio-O is poised to take out a lot of people who really deserve it, but ends up only killing two and driving a third (who didn't even have anything to do with what happened to her) to suicide. The guards who push her and her baby out into the cold to die aren't even touched and one is later used for lightweight comic relief! The man who buries her baby per the Lord's orders - who may have even buried it alive - is not only left unscathed but positioned to be the film's conscience! Tsio-O's father beats her, threatens to kill her, tries to kill her baby and seems more bothered by her being pregnant out of wedlock than the aftermath or her death. Nothing happens to him either and he's last seen in pleasant spirits relaying helpful information to the very people responsible for his daughter's death. I see little point in even making a film like this and then refusing to give these assholes their just desserts.

Never officially released in the U.S., but there's an OK quality widescreen print available in Mandarin with embedded English and Cantonese subtitles. FLK Cinema offers that same version on DVD under the title Tragedy of a Ghost.

★★