Lin tou jie (1988)

... aka: 林投姐

... aka: Revenge Ghost of the Tree, The

... aka: Revenge of the Ghost of the Tree

... aka: Revenge of the Tree Ghost

... aka: Sister Lin Tou

Directed by:

Shan-Hsi Ting

Weepy servant girl Mai Hsiu (Feng-Chiao Yen) shows up to a temple late at night praying for her masters and mentioning some kind of "homicide scandal". We then immediately zip into flashback mode to see just what she's crying about in this Taiwanese ghost tale with a period setting. Master Hsi Ping Wu (Shao-Wei Sun) and his wife Hsu Yuen (Szu Shih, in her final film role) are a wealthy, though charitable, couple who do right by their servants and appear to be in good standing in their community. Hsu Yuen even takes it upon herself to educate local hooligans about Buddhism in her free time to help them change their ways. Returning from a long business trip away, Master Wu brings along an amiable new friend; Chuan Chow (David Chiang), to stay with them.

Chuan turns out to be quite the smooth operator. When gangster Liu San (Te-Sheng Wang) shows up demanding money for his Japanese boss about a shipment of camphor (a waxy substance extracted from an evergreen tree of the same name found in East Asia) they never received, Chuan concocts a bogus tale about the merchandise being damaged to drive him away. A young lady, claiming to be Master Wu's now-pregnant lover, and her brother then show up demanding money. This gives Chuan a chance to show off his formidable martial arts skills by kicking the brother's ass and having the two of them thrown out. However, Madame Wu isn't fully convinced her husband didn't actually have an affair with the girl. Still, Chuan has quickly established himself as a welcome and trusted addition to the family.

However, not is all that it appears to be. Chuan, who's secretly plotting against the family, wants Wu's money, property and everything else in his life. Mr. Ito (Kuang-Ning Lin), a corrupt local politician who's conspiring with him, is cool with that as long as he gets the wife in their bargin. After plying him with sake, Chuan gets Master Wu to sign an important paper allowing him to collect a debt for him but in reality opens the doors for him to steal money. Master Wu's dedicated servant Yau (Cheng Ku) tries to warn him about funds disappearing, but he won't hear of it as he's convinced his new friend is the bee's knees. Wu then accompanies Chuan out of town and ends up falling down drunk at a brothel. This gives Chuan the opportunity to have him murdered. He's stabbed in the heart and his body is tossed over a bridge into some crocodile-filled waters. A dismembered leg is found the following morning and a piece of clothing identify it as belonging to Wu.

Immediately after his death, Madame Wu is visited by her late husband's ghost. Doors swing open, wet footprints form on the floors and the place on the bed where the master slept is soaked. She also spots his reflection in a mirror and in a framed portrait. Because rumors start circulating around the village about Chuan still living in their home, Hsu Yuen kindly asks him to leave. He then produces a forged deed with her husband's signature letting her know that he's now the owner of the property. One thing leads to another and Yau the servant takes his own life. Madame Wu then plots to kill Chuan herself, but his goons pin her down on the bed, smother her with a pillow and then take her body into the forest and hang it from a tree. Chuan probably should have reigned in his murder count because he now has not one, not two but three potential ghosts who'll be looking for revenge.

Madame Wu's mournful ghost soon materializes. She really only wants what's best for her three young surviving children, who are constantly at risk from Chuan, who can't decide whether he wants them all killed or merely shipped off somewhere else. Servant girl Hsui, her fiancée Ah Wan (Ya-Tung Sun) and Ah Wan's mother, Auntie Liu (Yin-Shang Liu), all team up to assist the ghost by finding the children and hiding them. The mother, a blind bakery owner who has psychic powers, can "see" the ghost at all times when others cannot and uses magic spells to strike out at the bad guys, who have since transformed the formerly respectable Wu household into a gambling den / whorehouse. Chuan hopes to counteract this by hiring an evil priest (Feng Tien) to help keep the ghost from enacting her revenge. Spell papers, laser-shooting magic mirrors and a "soul sucking sword" are included in their arsenal.

Apparently based on a famous and oft-filmed folk tale, the first half of this is bogged down by endless overwrought melodrama (lots of crying, wailing and suffering!), though this eventually finds its footing in the second half. The ghostly revenge is highlighted by the usage of a "Lin Tao Tree" (the same one Madame Wu was hung from), which has mystical powers. The ghost's soul becomes linked to the difficult-to-destroy tree and also grants her some tree-related powers, like the ability to hurl giant, boulder-like "fruit" at people, using a smaller fruit to trip someone and make them fall to their death, etc. Madame Wu also uses her vine-like hair like a noose to strangle someone, several characters are forced to slit their own throats, a body explodes when it falls in water and the statue of some god called Emperor Kwan (played by Shan Charng) comes to life as a giant to assist our ghostly heroine.

Seemingly completely forgotten, this has been readily available for quite some time on Youtube and other websites, yet has not even managed to generate the five votes needed to register a score on IMDb, nor has it been rated a single time on Letterboxd (though I'll be changing that here shortly). Because of that, I went into this expecting cheap and terrible... but that's not the case here at all. While this is certainly uneven it terms of story and pacing, it's also surprisingly well-directed and handsomely produced. Colors are vivid and there are good sets, costumes and art direction, plus the lighting, camera angles and shot framing are nice throughout. The soundtrack is also good. Then again, it should be since most of it was stolen from A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET! I actually wouldn't even mind revisiting this some day if a remastered version with proper English subtitles ever turns up.

I was only able to find a couple of releases for this one. The first is a VHS from South Korea (above, left) and the second is a 2005 DVD from Central Motion Picture out of Taiwan. Seeing how the latter doesn't come with English subs and the widescreen version I watched had them, there had to have also been a release or two in Hong Kong as well. 

The director made a number of other genre films, including the anthology BLOOD REINCARNATION (1974), the difficult to find The Seven Coffins (1975), the likewise hard to find Love in the Twilight Zone (1977), the ghost comedy Host for a Ghost (1984) and a pair of Joey Wang vehicles: SPIRIT LOVE (1989) and (his most widely viewed genre film) The Beheaded 1000 aka The Executioner (1991).

★★1/2

El invernadero (1983)

... aka: Greenhouse, The

Directed by:

Santiago Lapeira

Spain was very prolific in the genre in the 1970s but their output decreased by half in the 80s. I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but this is in stark contrast to most other film-producing countries, who ramped up horror film production to capitalize specifically on the growing home video market at the time. Even Spain's #1 horror star, Paul Naschy, who headlined a number of box office hits the previous decade, was having a hard time getting funding for his movies by 1980 and ended up working in Japan instead. This may or may not have something to do with Spain reducing the number of co-productions with other European countries like Italy and France, or it may have just been that Spanish audiences were burnt out from the genre boom of the 70s and these kind of films simply fell out of favor. Taking a quick glance at the films produced in Spain during the 80s, it appears that softcore sex films were the video rental of choice for consumers.

It's also worth noting that the actual quality of the genre films produced in Spain during the 80s was of a lower standard than what they were doing in the 60s and 70s. Sure, there were a few very good Spanish genre films made this decade (Anguish and In a Glass Cage immediately come to mind), and we all love junk like Pieces, but most of the rest of their output was pretty hideous on the whole. Quite a few titles (including the one we're about to view) did not receive any kind of international distribution.

Carlos Jiménez (Ovidi Montllor) is a geeky, awkward, friendless, forty-something loner who works in a bookstore, is really into horticulture, lives all alone and generally lives a sad and lonely existence outside of his plants, which he claims are his friends. One evening while out walking, he bumps into a young biker (Bernard Seray) having an argument his girlfriend, Berta (Berta Cabré), which ends with the guy slapping her, pushing her down and taking off. Carlos takes the rattled girl back to his apartment, where he gives her first aid. She confesses she's always been drawn to affairs with abusive lowlifes because they feel more "passionate" than regular relationships. While that kinda bothers her, she doesn't really know what to do about it, nor does she necessarily want to change it. The two also discover they're neighbors and live across the way from one another. He's actually seen her around town before, but was always too timid to introduce himself.

Though he tells Berta right away that he's not interested in a sexual relationship with her, Carlos becomes obsessed. He secretly starts taking photographs of her and hides an audio device in the home's communal bathroom so can listen to Berta sing in the shower. After talking her into coming over for dinner, Carlos runs out and spends a small fortune on sweets and cognac per her request and then she just stands him up. Regardless, he stalks her to a theater where she works as a stage actress and watches from the back row, then sends her flowers with no card attached, though it doesn't take much sleuthing for her to know who sent them.

Though it is Carlos who initially pursues Berta, she's not who she claims to be and appears to have sinister motives. Though she claims to have not noticed him prior, she's caught staring at him through a store window before he officially meets her. Knowing full well he lives right across the way from her, she decides the best place to strip is right by the window with the curtains open. When she finally does take him up on dinner, she stumbles into his darkroom and finds all of the photographs he's secretly taken of her. Instead of it outraging her or scaring her off, it turns her on and, despite the non-romantic pretext of their relationship, she then becomes the sexual aggressor.

It isn't long after she starts dating Carlos that he catches her sneaking her abusive biker lover over to her place to make love with him in front of her open window, knowing damn well Carlos will be watching. Clearly she wants him to see what's going on, but just what kind of game is she playing? After a heated argument over her infidelity, Berta vanishes without a trace. Carlos tries to track her down but no one, not even the theater workers, know where she is. He's plagued by strange nightmares (like going to retrieve a doll and then getting squashed by an elevator), someone breaks into his apartment and destroys his beloved plants and he begins to suspect he's going crazy. Then, he receives a mysterious phone call from a deep-voiced man who tells him to go to a greenhouse near the highway...

After a serious set-up and some intriguing, Hitchcockian mystery elements are established, this then takes a turn for the bizarre and nonsensical around midway through. There are a couple of supernatural murders, some otherworldly revenge, ghosts appearing to inhabit plants (?!) that start bleeding once they're cut (they also talk!), blood materializing out of nowhere to cover a windshield and cause a car to go over a bridge and explode, a guy getting knocked off a bell tower and a sub-Swamp Thing plant monster only seen in split second flashes. How all of this comes to be, I haven't a clue. Even though I don't think much of this works, I can at least say that after awhile I had no clue what direction this was heading in!

Technically-speaking, this is not poorly made. Even with the poor-quality VHS copy, you can tell this was shot and lit with style and care. There's also a good music score, some sharp dialogue, interesting central characters and mostly decent acting. Though he's been dubbed by someone else (as have all of the other actors in the film), Montllor is especially effective; he's all sad eyes and droopy faced and perfect for the sad, pitiable role he plays here. Carla Dey (aka Carmen Serret) co-stars as a mousy sweets shoppe worker named Elena, who isn't given much to do. Ditto for prolific Spanish character actors Víctor Israel (who shows up near the very end as a groundskeeper who gets possessed) and Alfred Lucchetti (in one throwaway scene as the bookstore owner).

This was given early 80s Beta and VHS releases in Spain on the Vadi-mon label, who also released some other rare trash seldom seen outside of Spain like Horror Story (1972), ¿Por qué no hacemos el amor? / "Why Don't We Make Love" (1981), Depravación (1982), Porno: Situación límite (1982), Regreso del más allá (1982), No me toques el pito que me irrito / "Don't Touch My Dick, I Get Irritated" (!) (1983) and (the atrocious-looking!) E.T. parody El E. T. E. Y el Oto (1983). As of this writing, there's no English-language version of this one available.

★★