Gui da gui (1980)

... aka: 鬼打鬼

... aka: Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind

... aka: Encounter of the Spooky Kind

... aka: Encounters of the Spooky Kind

... aka: Gwai da gwai (Ghost Against Ghost)

... aka: L'exorciste chinois (The Chinese Exorcist)

... aka: Spooky Encounters

Directed by:

Samo (Sammo) Hung

Seeing how I've seen at least two dozen later films that were heavily inspired by this one, I probably should have watched this a lot sooner than now but, hey, better late than never! Though not the very first of its type, Encounter is still one of the key titles in the development of both the jiangshi (hopping vampire) and slapstick ghost-comedy subgenres that would dominate fantastic cinema in Hong Kong in the second half of the 80s. These films typically placed more emphasis on the crazy than the narrative and gleefully mixed martial arts action, comedy, fantasy and horror elements into an entertaining, though often meandering and episodic, brew. The objective really was to pack so much into the film, and keep things moving at such a quick pace, that audiences didn't have time to get bored. Or question what they'd just seen. Prototypical brainless entertainment, if you will. And while there's not a damn thing wrong with that, the better examples of this type of film always contained at least a reasonably engaging and (if we're lucky!) coherent plot as well as some heart to go along with the gonzo.

Depending on which version you watch, Sammo stars as either "Bold," "Big Guts," "Fatty" OR "Courageous" Cheung (we'll settle for just "Cheung" from here on out), a none-too-bright cart driver of chubby proportions. He's poor, lazy, surrounds himself with all of the biggest losers in the village and is stuck in a terrible marriage with a lying, backstabbing social climber (Suet-Mei Leung). He begins to suspect something is up with his wife when she suddenly starts wearing expensive new clothes they can't afford on his measly salary. He later looks through a peephole and catches her right in the act, though she's somehow able to talk her way out of it. Little does he know, but she's been sleeping with Master Tam (Ha Huang), a wealthy old man he often chauffeurs who also has aspirations to become mayor.

Wanting the wife all to his own, and figuring Cheung will find out about the affair eventually anyway, Tam plots to eliminate him from the equation. His advisor Lau (Tai-Bo) comes up with the idea to enlist the aid of Hoi Chin (Peter Chan Lung), an unscrupulous black magician who's willing to do anything granted the price is right. Skilled in "Maoshan sorcery," Hoi Chin is tasked with setting up an altar at Tam's place where he can cast his spells in anonymity. His toadie, Old Dog Fah (Ma Wu), is then sent out to make a wager with Cheung. If he can spend the night locked inside a reputedly haunted ancestral crypt, he'll reward him with silver. Cheung takes him up on the offer.

Luckily for Cheung, Hoi Chin's understudy Tsui (Fat Chung) takes offense to his master's plans since their brand of sorcery is supposed to only be used for good. There are four taboos in the sect's doctrine: Insatiable greed, unprincipled killing, nefarious collusion with cronies and blasphemy against their three luminaries, and his former master is about to break all four of them in exchange for some gold. Instead of playing along, Tsui decides to secretly help Cheung out and guides the naïve bumpkin through various traps laid out for him. He's barely able to survive a night inside the crypt after Hoi Chin resurrects and controls a jiangshi, but then the wager is increased five times and Cheung accidentally accepts. Tsui orders him to gather black dog's blood, four dog's paws and fifty chicken eggs to do battle the next night. Against all odds, Cheung survives the night yet again.

The bad guys then step up their game by trying to implicate Cheung in his wife's murder. He comes home to find blood everywhere, but there's no body. Nonetheless, inept constable Ching-Ying Lam throws him in jail, though he's able to escape after beating up four guards. While trying to elude authorities, he encounters myriad other dangers like a rat-and-maggot-infested resurrected corpse and various magic spell attacks launched by the evil magician. In one of these, one of his hands becomes possessed and takes on a mind of its own, which then breaks dishes in a café, throws stuff around, starts attacks guests, punches its owner in the face, makes him flip, etc. in a scene that was later copied by Sam Raimi for Evil Dead 2. No chainsaw, though.

There's also a nightmare scene featuring skeletons, flying urns and ghosts biting off flesh, voodoo doll usage, a real chicken getting decapitated, a skull-faced warrior and two minions summoned from beyond, a clawed, half-purple female ghost that sucks a guy into a mirror and a ritual where Sammo gets red talismans painted all over his nude body to become Tsui's disciple. All of the fight scenes and stunts are excellently choreographed and performed by the cast and there's some nice pyro work thrown in here, too. Though the big finale gets a little too silly (with characters given high-pitched, sped-up voices and one getting possessed by a monkey spirit and acting accordingly), the last 30 seconds are hilarious and absolutely priceless.

The film is actually kind of a tour de force for Sammo, who wore many hats in the production. Aside from giving an energetic lead performance and directing, he also co-wrote (with Ying Wong), was an (uncredited) executive producer, did stunts and was one of the martial arts / action directors. This was the freshman effort from his newly-formed Bo Ho Films Company Ltd. and became a modest success in theaters. It was followed by The Dead and the Deadly (1982), which Hung starred in, co-wrote, co-produced and also did fight choreography on (directorial duties were passed off to Ma Wu). It ended up becoming an even bigger hit and helped to solidify this whole formula.

Hung's company would hit their apex with MR. VAMPIRE (1985), which was the highest grossing film of all of these, netted thirteen Hong Kong Film Award nominations and was followed by four successful sequels, a few spin-offs and many copycats. Other genre releases from this team, which all dependably grossed anywhere from 7 to 13 million HKD, were HOCUS POCUS (1984), Those Merry Souls (1985), MY COUSIN THE GHOST (1987), Scared Stiff (1987) and BURNING SENSATION (1989). By the end of the decade, audiences were starting to tire of this style of film and the companies last two horror-comedy hybrids; Mortuary Blues and Till Death Shall We Start (both 1990), saw a steep decrease in profits.

Though Hung certainly deserves the bulk of the praise, Fat Chung, a great mix of wily, wise, funny, professional and effortlessly cool, is also worth singling out for his standout performance as Cheung's protector. Other actors who appear in small roles are the cross-eyed Siu-Ming To (who has a giant, hairy fake mole glued to his face to complete his look), future directors Ricky Lau (the Mr. Vampire series) and Billy Chan (New Mr. Vampire), veteran actress Ying-Ying Hui as a gossipy village woman and extremely prolific (over 500 credits) veteran actor Pak-Kwong Ho as a peeping tom. Nearly everyone would be back in later films for the company.

This was released on VHS in France (as L'exorciste chinois / "The Chinese Exorcist" and dubbed into French), Hong Kong, Japan (dubbed into Japanese and on the Pony Video label), the U.S. and the UK, followed by DVD and Blu-ray releases in all of these countries. The American distributor was Tai Seng and there's another well-circulated release from Fortune Star. The Australian and UK releases offer an English dubbed audio track, though, as usual, I strongly recommend watching the subtitled Cantonese-language version instead.

A belated sequel, Encounters of the Spooky Kind II (1990), came ten years later. Also produced by and starring Hung (though for Bojon Films Company Ltd.; another of his film companies [there were at least three!]), it ended up grossing over twice as much at the box office.

★★★

Skinned Alive (1990)

... aka: Escolados vivos

Directed by:

J.R. Bookwalter (uncredited)

Jon Killough

In 1985, Bookwalter began filming his low budget zombie opus The Dead Next Door for his fledgling production company Tempe. Put into context of when it was made and released, the film was quite notable for a variety of reasons. For starters, it was shot entirely on Super 8, which was a film format until-then reserved almost exclusively for amateur home movies and vacation videos. While Dead wasn't the first to do that - Mark Pirro, for instance, had already shot several of his earlier films on Super 8 - it was a much more ambitious undertaking. Taking four years to complete and with an estimated budget of 125,000 dollars, it would later be called "the most expensive Super 8 movie ever made." Around midway through the production, the film also attracted the interest of both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who were fresh off their success of the second Evil Dead. Raimi (who billed himself as "The Master Cylinder" in the credits) chipped in some money as executive producer while Campbell did some voice-overs and worked on audio. That ended up getting Dead some genre press coverage which then resulted in this small regional movie becoming a minor cult film on home video. That in turn led to a number of other independent horror productions over the next few decades from the same people.

Though (mostly) directed and written by Killough, who'd worked on all of Tempe's previous films, Bookwalter's stamp is all over this one. He produced, directed (both as second unit and in a finishing director capacity), did the music, did the titles and receives credits as camera operator, foley artist, sound effects and sound engineer. He also oversaw the re-edit and remastering of the film in 2002 for its initial DVD release. Most of the actors seen here had appeared in previous Tempe films, and many of them also worked various jobs behind the scenes on this one as well. This is the type of ultra low budget production where most of the folks involved had to wear multiple hats in order to get things done. Even so, this one almost never got done!

Skinned Alive is a Texas Chainsaw-inspired tale detailing the exploits / killing spree of a white trash family of serial killers as they travel around the Ohio countryside. The trio of psychos is led by Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson, and NOT the same actress from The Waltons as most websites currently state), the wheelchair-bound, eye-patch-sporting, beer-guzzling, constantly cackling and cursing matriarch of the clan, who suffers from some gender identity issues (she sometimes prefers to be called "daddy"), endlessly berates her idiot offspring and brags about killing her own mother. Her children are manic, pill-popping Phink (Scott Spiegel - INTRUDER) and man-hating blonde seductress Violet (Susan Rothacker), who share incestuous desires for one another and are every bit as obnoxious as their ma. The family get by operating a traveling tannery out of a black van and murder whoever they stumble across, skin them and make leather goods from their hides.

Having to be in Columbus the following day, their van picks the perfect time to break down in some "shithole redneck town." They offer friendly mechanic Tom Miles (Lester Clark) a thousand bucks if he can fix it ASAP, and he agrees to let these weirdos camp out in their basement for the night in the meantime, where they're constantly annoyed by his chatterbox wife, Whinnie (Barbara Katz-Norrod). In between, they indiscriminately kill whoever they happen to run across while shouting inane dialogue. That's about it as far as plot is concerned.

What this mostly amounts to is an excuse to show off gore fx, with awful, childish "comic" dialogue used to try to paste it all together. The first victim, a hitchhiker (played by the director), is kicked in the face, beaten with a hammer and then shot in the head. An obese guy (Michael Render) stumbles upon the killers after being stranded on the roadside when his "God damn piece of Jap shit" car breaks down. After offering them free tickets to "Wayne Newton's Las Vegas All Nude Revue," he's chased through a cornfield, impaled with a flying machete and shot multiple times. A delivery man (Mike Shea) has his fingers hacked off, a Jehovah's witness (played by Bookwalter) is immediately shot in the front yard in broad daylight then later skinned in the basement and another guy (James L. Edwards) listening to a Walkman and eating cheese puffs gets run over in front of a store. No one seems to really care.

Clearly having more space to fill than what the thin main story will allow, we're introduced to Tom and Whinnie's depressed next door neighbor, Paul Hickox (Floyd Ewing Jr.). Paul is an ex-cop first seen wearing a "Boycott Jane Fonda American Traitor Bitch" shirt, sucking down an entire fifth of vodka for breakfast and passing out. He lost his previous job for accidentally killing an innocent woman and is now going through a nasty, bitter divorce with his bitchy wife, Louise (Jennifer Mullen), who's already gotten custody of the kids and all of his money, and is in the middle of also getting the house. She and her divorce lawyer / lover (Michael Tolochko, also the cinematographer, executive producer, editor and camera operator) show up unannounced to rub salt in the wound by mocking him as he's packing up his stuff. While this should get us in Paul's corner, he's a sullen, self-centered drunk, a wife beater and as big of a shithead as anyone else in the movie, killers included.

Now a well-placed insult or use of profanity can certainly be funny if it's in the right context and done appropriately, but when half the dialogue of your film consists of juvenile attempts at crude humor, the effect becomes numbing and just plain irritating after awhile. Supposed zingers like "fat fuckwad" "dingleberry" "walking abortions" "dick cheese" "stupid fucking idiot jerk-off" and "fat crippled butt fuck" constantly being screamed at the top of lungs by terrible amateur actors playing detestable yet oddly flat characters just isn't much fun. Sad too because this could have been a pretty decent indy horror had the director / writer not coached the cast to act like this (bad actors / non-actors can be likable and personable if handled correctly) and the script not been so terrible.

Aside from some nice colors and autumnal Ohio scenery, the only other redeeming factor in this < 20,000-budgeted, 16mm production are the make-up effects by David Lange and Bill Morrison, with David P. Barton (who'd go on to work for KNB, Kevin Yagher and on many big budget Hollywood films) listed as a consultant. We get plenty of gore and blood here, including a head hacked in two, a body being completely obliterated by machine gun fire, a machete stuck in a shoulder, disembowelments, skinned corpses, a chest carving and much more. These bits are fun; the rest not so much.

Credited director Killough worked as a production designer and actor on a few other Tempe films (like Robot Ninja and the aforementioned Dead Next Door). According to Bookwalter, he also walked off the set at some point and never completed his own film, which forced him to step in and direct additional scenes to push the running time up to around 70 minutes, not including the slow credits. This appears to have severed Killough's ties with Tempe permanently since he didn't work for them again after this. The very busy David DeCoteau was the executive producer.

This was originally given an unrated VHS release on the Cinema Home Video label in 1990, which featured an unrelated photo of Linnea Quigley from MURDER WEAPON (1989) on the front cover. Ample footage from this also ended up padding out the same companies Shock Cinema documentary series.

Many DVD releases on numerous labels followed but those can all now be cast aside for the 2 disc "Ultimate Edition" Blu-ray release from Makeflix. It features the best possible restoration of the film (all things considered) and includes multiple audio commentaries (including a new one with the director and another with Bookwalter and Lange carted over from the 2002 DVD release), interviews with most of the cast and crew, a number of short making-of documentaries, behind the scenes footage, two episodes of a public access sitcom called Roommates many of these same folks worked on and a lot more. There was also a limited edition VHS release for collectors.

★1/2