Lao Shan gui lian (1984)

... aka: 嶗山鬼戀

... aka: Love with the Ghost in Lushan

Directed by:

Fong Pau

Liaozhai zhiyi (English title: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio) is a collection of allegorical ghost / supernatural tales compiled by Songling Pu over a forty year period, starting in the 1670s up to the turn of the 18th century. The collection features around 491 stories in total, was first published in 1766 and is now seen as a classic, influential work of Chinese literature. There have been a number of films adapting some of these stories going all the way back to the mid 1920s. Included among those are the Shaw Brothers productions THE ENCHANTING SHADOW (1960), The Enchanted Chamber (1968) and The Ghost Story (1979), Taiwanese director Feng-Pan Yao's ALL IN THE DIM COLD NIGHT (1974), The Blue Lamp in the Winter Night (1974) and Ghost Under the Cold Moonlight (1975), and the acclaimed hit A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). That covers only about 1% of all of the films that are either direct adaptations or clearly took ideas and inspiration from the collection.

This one opens with a little biographical information about the author and his work and tells us the movie we are about to see is based on just one of the book's chapters. When I glanced back over at my review of the same director's THE PAINTED SKIN (1966), his only other genre effort, I realized he began that film the exact same way and it's also based on another of these stories.

Wanting to take advantage of the breathtaking scenery, artist Jiang Yu (Henry Fong) travels to a remote mountainous region of China to work on some drawings for wealthy client Mr. Wu (Ming Chiang). Upon arrival, he sees a female figure in white disappear behind some trees. He then hears a woman's cries for help. Following her voice, he sees a few brief flashes of the figure and then some smoke being sucked into cracks between rocks. Shrugging off the incident, a local foodstall owner (Kwai-Ping Wong) informs him of a free place to stay while he's in the area; a long-ago abandoned temple formerly used by Taoists, which is currently occupied by an old drunk (Jing Ping Wu). His first night there, he again sees the figure in white, only this time accompanied by footsteps forming on the ground all by themselves and then the same young woman being beaten by a woman before they all suddenly disappear.

The following day, Jiang once again spots the girl running around in the mountains, only this time she leaves behind a slipper a la Cinderella. (For the record, the origins of the Cinderella story predate Liaozhai zhiyi by 1500+ years). The girl - Shiu Sen (Fay Yu) - later returns to the temple to retrieve her shoe. Jiang inquires about her peculiar behavior and she tells him a sad story about how her abusive stepmother (there's that Cinderella nod again) had sold her into slavery. She pleads with him to take her away from there, even promising to become his servant for life if he does. However, he's just a poor artist, feels he doesn't have much to offer and sends her on her way.

As soon as the mysterious young woman vanishes, yet another mysterious young woman arrives. She - Hung Yu (Bing-Hsin Hsia) - claims to be Shiu Sen's stepsister, though she's much more heavily-made up and expensive in dress than Shiu Sen, who wears peasant's clothes. Hung Yu wants to commission him to draw a picture of her. However, she wants it done immediately and he must be finished before the sun rises to collect his gold. As soon as he begins, the woman strips off her dress and comes on to the outraged artist. When he attempts to kick her out, she suddenly transforms into a blue-faced vampire and attacks, though Jiang manages to escape shaken but unscathed.

While fleeing down the mountainside, Jiang ducks into a cave, discovers Shiu Sen's grave hidden inside (revealing to him that she's actually a ghost) and is almost grabbed by zombie hands that emerge from the ground. It's then that he realizes that someone has stolen all of his drawings, so he's forced to return to the haunted village to retrieve them. In his absence, the seductress ghost has killed a wandering swordsman (Pei-Wen Hou). Luckily, he runs across Shiu Sen before he does her sister. A good ghost, Shiu Sen, further explains her predicament: She's trapped at the mercy of an old mistress who sends her and Hung Yu out to seduce men so she can drink their blood. His only hope may be convincing the old drunk, a former Taoist, to get sober long enough to help banish the evil spirits. After doing so, or so they think, Jiang retrieves Shiu Sen's bones and plans on giving them a proper burial so that she can finally be at rest.

Returning home to his grandmother (Ping Qiu) and kid brother, Jiang realizes he's now late on delivering Mr. Wu's artwork. He asks for a few more days, in which time Shiu Sen pays him another visit (he still has her remains so no rest just yet) and helps him with his artwork, which is a rousing success. She brings additional pieces to him during her late night visits and the two begin to fall in love. While it seems like a doomed relationship if there ever was one, hope is found through the possibility of revival if he can feed her enough of his own blood. Complications ensue thanks to Mr. Wu's daughter, Su Jin (Kong-Nam Ha), who has also fallen in love with Jiang, and a rival artist who is himself in love with Sun Jin and jealous of Jiang's sudden success. And even more complications ensue than that when those mountain ghosts find their way there looking for revenge.

Not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel. Some are just perfectly nice examples of what they are, and that's basically what we get here. The director deftly mixes horror, fantasy, drama and romance, and does just enough stuff differently, to land this firmly in hidden gem territory. And when I say hidden gem, this really is one, unlike any of the titles you'll find listed in books like Fangoria's laughable 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen or highlighted on one of those awful countdown specials like 50 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen. Good luck finding any information online for this one. Almost no one has even heard of it, or watched it, and it doesn't even have enough votes to register a score on any of the major movie websites.

Among the more novel touches here is how it handles its main characters. The artist is kind and a genuinely nice guy, but he's also a bit squeamish and has a bad habit of either running off or passing out whenever things get to be too much. In other words, he behaves like the vast majority of real people would in similar situations! With our nominal hero proving to not be much use in tackling the evil threats, this hands the reigns over to the drunken Taoist and the good ghost girl. We assume from the beginning that the former is going to be utterly useless, but he proves to still have some tricks up his sleeve, while the latter starts the film as your standard weepy / tragic figure but proves to be the most courageous character in the entire movie, not to mention the most talented artist!

In addition to a likable cast of characters, this offers up some really beautiful outdoor locations in the first half, fine art direction, nice camerawork with lots of tracking, crane and POV shots, some good, though sparsely used, make-ups and visual effects, and fine production values all the way around. There are also some interesting things plot-wise to spice things up, like a poisoning victim being resurrected to get revenge on their killer, a man emerging from a painting and a blessed bag that acts as a ghost vacuum to suck up spirits.

Currently, the only available print is a bad pan-and-scan VHS copy with some jagged editing, a large logo blur on the top right corner and cut-off English subtitles, meaning this also gets added to the list of films in desperate need of rescue. Sadly, in this case, that's not likely to happen. Since this was made by the Feng Huang Motion Picture Company, which was later dissolved into the Chinese-government-run Sil-Metropole, what we have now is likely the best we'll ever be getting. Feng Huang was known for making social issue films with a left wing political stance, meaning it wouldn't be one bit surprising to learn that China destroyed its entire catalogue of films upon acquisition.

★★★

Man Beast (1956)

... aka: El hombre bestia (The Beast Man)

Directed by:

Jerry Warren

One person's filmography I was decidedly not in a big rush to get back to was Jerry Warren's. He holds the distinction here of being one of the only directors to make multiple NO STAR-rated films not even fit for bad movie connoisseur consumption. Furthermore, Warren himself flat out admitted he had zero interest in making good or entertaining films, which I guess makes him a cinematic charlatan of sorts. He was in the business solely to make money, which required cheap as possible investments on what he hoped would be big returns. That's his entire dispassionate career in a nutshell. While I'll never begrudge anyone trying to make an honest living, what Warren was doing ventured more into the realm of hucksterism. Any filmmaker who's worth a damn is either an artist or someone at least attempting to make enjoyable product for consumers. Warren was neither. His usual routine consisted of buying the distribution rights to unreleased-in-the-U.S. foreign films, having them hacked up and re-dubbed (or simply narrated over) and adding cheap, talky scenes featuring American actors so he had names to put on the poster to lure in unsuspecting genre fans. In doing so, he simultaneously destroyed the original director's work, showed genuine contempt for his target audience and became quite possibly the laziest director to have ever walked the face of the Earth.

Though most of his work was pilfered material, Warren did make a handful of his own films. These included the God awful bore TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1959), the almost tolerable THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD (1959), Frankenstein Island (1981), which I've not yet seen, and this one, which was also his directorial debut. Still, even most of these "original" works depended strongly on recycled stock footage to fill in the budget gaps and boost the running time, and this barely hour-long effort is no exception.

 

After a strenuous hike through the Himalayan mountains, determined blonde Connie Hayward (Virginia [Asa] Maynor) and her sourpuss friend Trevor Hudson (Lloyd "Cameron" / Nelson) arrive at a remote outpost. They're there because Connie is searching for her missing brother, Dr. James Hayward, who'd taken an "experimental injection" back in the states and now may die due to a side effect caused by high altitudes. Along with a small team, James had set out to explore the area ten days earlier and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

In the same area, there've been occasional Yeti sightings going back decades. More recent Yeti footprints have been discovered, which merit further investigation. Four previous expeditions to find the fabled creature have turned up nothing though, and every expedition had lost at least one man. Connie manages to sweet talk reluctant expert climber Steve Cameron (Tom Maruzzi) into escorting them to where he believes the brother has set up camp.

From there, it's a dangerous ascent up the mountainside and then a long trek through the snow-covered, rocky terrain. They finally catch up to famous anthropologist and evolutionary scientist Professor Erickson (George Wells Lewis) and his two local guides, who are on their way to meet up with Connie's brother at base camp. Everyone decides to do the rest of the journey together. Like the brother, Erickson's ultimate goal is to try to locate and capture a live Yeti, which he believes to be the missing link. Coming across the previous expedition's camp, they find it wrecked, abandoned and in total disarray. Setting up there for the night, they awaken the next morning to find Erickson's hired help have run off and left them.

Eventually turning up at the camp is the "half-Mongolian" Varga (George Skaff), one of the best and most requested local guides in the area, who's so experienced at what he does that he never runs out of breath and seems almost immune to the freezing temperatures. Varga had brought Connie's brother up to the mountain and claims to have been out scouting for tracks when whatever happened back at the camp went down. Still, Connie and the others are skeptical of his story and find him to be shady. There's a ludicrous, though amusing and, I must admit, original, plot twist here involving the species of Yeti attempting to incorporate themselves into our society. That involves killing human men so they can kidnap and then knock up human women to produce human/Yeti hybrids. Naturally, we never actually get to see anything of the sort in the film itself!

All of the impressive mountain climbing footage and aerial shots seen here have been snatched from an unfinished film of unknown origin (some sources claim it's Mexican). Having that footage in his possession, Warren then had a script fashioned specifically around it, attempting to match up his new footage, using the same amount of characters, trying to dress them all similarly to the climbers, etc. Surprisingly enough, he actually does do fairly good job of splicing it all together! If one were to nitpick specific details they can certainly find discrepancies between wardrobe, gear, locations, cast appearance, etc., but very few things really leap out as being extremely obvious either. And, in a way, this approach is really not all that dissimilar to how major studios work, where they'll send a 2nd unit director and crew off to shoot location footage with stunt doubles while the primary director handles all of the close-ups and actor stuff.

Warren has also lucked out that the footage he acquired is actually excellent and features some thrilling moments, imaginative camera shots and beautiful locations. That said, most of what Warren himself brings to the table is, as expected, not very good. He's shot mostly dialogue scenes here but, unlike some of his other films, at least he put some effort into finding snowy / rocky outdoor locations to use instead of filming scenes of people sitting around on some porn-grade set talking to each other as he'd later do. The Yeti suit, which is (supposedly) the same costume used for White Pongo and The White Gorilla (both 1945 releases), also isn't too bad.

Most of the performances are pretty lousy, with the actors sometimes randomly looking off to the side as if searching for cue cards, stumbling over lines or even looking directly at the camera as others are speaking. The sole standout here is Skaff, who puts in a good campy turn as the mysterious guide. His hilarious facial expressions alone almost make this one worthwhile all by themselves. Skaff would go on to a decent career as a character actor and later appeared in some good movies, like Michael Ritchie's Smile (1975) and John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me! (1978). Warren's soon-to-be wife Brianne Murphy, who'd go on to a respected career as a cinematographer, plays the Yeti in some scenes and was also the script supervisor. 

Top billed above everyone else in the cast is one "Rock Madison," who plays, well, nobody! This was a fake name added to the credits for some reason, though I'm not exactly sure what that reason was. Perhaps attempting to confuse fans of Rock Hudson and Guy Madison?

This was, I believe, only the third genre movie made about the Yeti / Abominable Snowman. It was preceded by the dreadful THE SNOW CREATURE (1954) and the decent Japanese BEAST MAN SNOW MAN (1955), which later became the basis for an "Americanized" version called Half Human (released in 1957). Amusingly, Man Beast wasn't even Warren's only Yeti movie. He also purchased the rights to a 1959 Swedish / American co-production called Rymdinvasion i Lappland (given many English titles like TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN), did his usual butcher routine on it (adding boring new scenes and narration from John Carradine) and released it as Invasion of the Animal People in 1962.

 

In theaters, this played on a double bill with Prehistoric Women (1950). There were numerous VHS releases here in America, two from Rhino in 1985 (paired with 1948's Human Gorilla / Behind Locked Doors for their release "Saturday Night Shockers: Volume 2") and 1988, and another from Acme (a subdivision of Rhino) in 1996. Rhino also released a DVD in 2002. In 2013, Kit Parker Films released three multi-disc DVD sets of Warren's work. Man Beast is included on the first volume along with Curse of the Stone Hand (1965), which was mostly bastardized footage from several 1940s Chilean films, and The Wild World of Batwoman (1966).

★★