Jui gwai chat hung (1983)

... aka: 7 Ghost Chasers
... aka: Seven Heroes Chase Ghost
... aka: Trail, The
... aka: Zhui gui qi xiong

Directed by:
Ronny Yu

Developing a love for the cinema from a young age (they were first an escape from a bout with polio when he was just nine years old), Ronny Yu decided to explore film further in America when the time came for college. Telling his father he'd study business or another surefire lucrative profession while abroad, he majored in advertising and communications instead and took as many film courses as he could while earning his other degree. Upon returning to Hong Kong, he went to work for his father's company and became acquainted with a few guys who wanted to get involved in the film business. He then co-wrote a script. After the major studios turned it down, his backer suggested he direct it. It was then a case of learning on the set for the young, inexperienced director, who had no clue what he was doing and relied on the cameraman, editors and other more experienced crew people for advice. The resulting film, the 1979 crime-drama Cheung laap cheing ngoi (or The Servant), ended up becoming a surprise hit, which led to other opportunities. The next decade was spent making a number of films in various genres, but it wouldn't be until 1993's Bai fa mo nu zhuan / The Bride with White Hair (a winner of three Hong Kong Film Awards) that Yu would receive international attention. Hollywood eventually came calling and he ended up directing both Bride of Chucky (1998) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003).

The Trail was Yu's fourth film, his second film for Golden Harvest Company and his first horror effort. It's worth noting that even though the Internet Movie Database lists it as an adventure / comedy, other Hong Kong databases categorize it (correctly) as a horror / comedy. It's a good thing I stopped relying on IMDb and their genre tags long ago to come up with my horror lists or else I'd be missing out of hundreds of horror movies here. Speaking of IMDb, this has a paltry 30 votes and a middling 5.9 rating over there. That really needs to change. I would say poor distribution is the main reason why this is so under-seen but that doesn't seem to be the case. There was an English-subtitled VHS release by Tai Seng, a VCD distributed by Mega Star and a DVD from Fortune Star.

The setting is the Xiang Xi Provence of China in 1922. Wealthy, evil Master Miao (Miao Tian) is used to getting whatever he wants and getting away with whatever he does, in part because his father has been struck down with leprosy (supposedly bad karma from being a playboy for years) and doesn't have control over much of anything anymore. Those indebted to Miao's family usually have a steep price to pay, especially those with daughters that can be bartered as sexual favors to buy them more time in paying back the money. One evening, Miao demands the company of a beautiful songstress (Siu Ling Tsui). When she refuses to put out, he drowns her husband in a fish tank, leading to the song bird's suicide. Miao quickly wants rid of the musician's corpse so it doesn't ruin his reputation, so he has the body wrapped up like a mummy and hands a bag of gold over to two monks and tell them to dispose of him. The monks; Ying (MR. VAMPIRE co-star Ricky Hui) and “The Captain” (Kent Cheng), actually aren't monks at all, but opium smugglers.

Along with the rest of their seven-man smuggling operation; brains of the operation Reader (Anthony Chan), wonky-eyed, sunglasses-sporting Little (Addy Sung), oafish Bo (Cheng Fu Hung), skinny Fatty (Mars) and silver boomerang-armed cool cat Flint (Fat Chung), the men hit the trail to their next destination with plans of disposing of the corpse somewhere along the way. While going through a bubbling sulfur swamp, Ying and Bo get stuck in a quicksand bog and have to be rescued but they lose the body when it sinks down into the muck. Assuming they've done the job of getting rid of the body, the men carry on, encountering a group of thugs along the way and getting on their bad side after accidentally cutting off the leader's ear. Those men won't be the only problems they'll face when the corpse rises from the swamp looking for revenge.

The men stop by an inn, where Captain gets in hot water with drunkard innkeeper Walter Tso's flirty younger wife (BLACK MAGIC star Ni Tien aka Tanny) and ends up getting his legs shaved in the process. Later that night, one of the men is found with his head twisted around backwards. The next morning, villagers swing in to the inn to complain about finding their pigs and chickens dead, drained of blood and smelling like sulfur. A superstitious old woman says these are all signs that a zombie is on the loose. And, as well all know, there are several ways to fight a zombie... Fire? Well, no. Decapitation? Sure, but not here. Smashing in the brain? Hmmm... did you forget we're in Hong Kong? Try yellow paper, nets, learning how to croak like a frog and, of course, urine from a virgin. Knowing they will have a tough fight ahead, the men get busy making up strips of spell papers, practicing their bellowing and having little prepubescent schoolboys pissing in pots for them to use later on.

The action moves back to the woods to a crumbling old temple, where the men encounter the slimy, lumpy-faced zombie late at night but are unable to kill it, plus waste all of their hole-y water trying. The next day, they descend down into a series of caves and locate an awesome “king's tomb” lit with blue and green lights and full of human bones, stone statues of Terracotta warriors, mice and snakes. After locating the zombie and unsuccessfully attempting to kill it, only two of them make it out of there alive. We also check in with the tormented Miao from time to time and learn he's being haunted by horrifying visions of the creature and signs that it's coming his way.

Things gets really crazy during the last twenty or so minutes. Our heroes (decked out like scarecrows) battle the zombie once again with the help of a powerful Taoist priest (Shu Tong Wong), but attempts to do it in with fire and lightning bolts shot from a rosewood sword don't work. After finding out what Miao has done to prompt this curse in the first place, our heroes attempt to blackmail him for gold and find themselves being used as zombie bait instead. That leads to the zombie showing up to go the Jaws route and chomp some men under the water, plus decapitate one with its tongue and cause a house boat and dock to blow up. Not good enough? How about an out-of-left-field send up of a famous scene from The Exorcist (1973) to wind things down?

This is a very well-made, nicely-photographed, atmospheric, energetic and very busy film. There's so much going on and so many characters to keep track of it's sometimes difficult to follow (especially in the first half), but things eventually settle in quite nicely. Yu co-wrote with comedian Michael Hui (also the producer) and their script offers up numerous hilarious moments, plus many more sure to at least put a smile on your face, without short changing viewers on the action and horror in the process. I've seen enough by now to know that's not an easy thing to pull off and most fail at it, but this one seems to find the right balance. Production design is excellent and the actors acquit themselves well and seem perfectly chosen for their particular roles. In addition to a sometimes confused narrative, this also gets dinged for stealing much of its music from other films, most notably Tangerine Dream's score from William Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977) and Ennio Morricone's score from John Carpenter's THE THING (1982).

Yu's horrorography also includes The Occupant (1984), a romantic horror comedy about a haunted apartment, Bless This House (1988), a more serious ghost story about a family moving into a new home that's haunted, and The Phantom Lover (1995), a Phantom of the Opera-inspired tale set in a 30s-era theater. He also directed "Family Man;" one of the better episodes of the short-lived series Fear Itself.

★★★

Scarecrows (1988)

... aka: A Maldição dos Espantalhos (The Curse of the Scarecrows)
... aka: Paratroopers
... aka: Zona restringida (Restricted Zone)

Directed by:
William Wesley

In preparation for this review I decided to do a brief history on the killer scarecrow subgenre. It was then that I realized there really isn't much of a history to the killer scarecrow subgenre. To my knowledge, the first walking, talking, "living" scarecrow on film is the same one created by L. Frank Baum for the children's book The Wizard of Oz, which has had multiple screen versions dating as far back as a 1908 silent short. That character would most famously be played by the wonderful Ray Bolger in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. While a few genre movies would use scarecrows as a plot device (Hammer's NIGHT CREATURES aka Captain Clegg instantly comes to mind), it wouldn't be until 1981 that an inanimate scarecrow would supernaturally come to murderous life and be front and center in a horror flick. That film was the very good made-for-TV movie DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW, which scared the stuffing out of many children who happened to see it on TV back in the day. From all indications, Scarecrows may be the second film to center around a killer scarecrow and the very first to feature multiple killer scarecrows. 

Throughout the 90s, killer scarecrows would make sporadic appearances in films like Dark Harvest (1992) and Night of the Scarecrow (1995). Then, in the 2000s, there were suddenly tons of them from out of nowhere; all likely made in response to the success of Victor Salva's popular Jeepers Creepers (2001), which wasn't technically a killer scarecrow film but featured a monster that frequently posed as a scarecrow. Among the later scarecrow titles were Psycho Scarecrow (2000), Kakashi (2001), Scarecrow (2002), Dark Harvest (2004) and its two sequels, Scarecrow Gone Wild (2004), Scarecrow Slayer (2004), Hallowed Ground (2007), Messengers 2: The Scarecrow (2009), Rise of the Scarecrows (2009) and the list goes on.

A heavily-armed, five-member commando group managed to somehow hold up Camp Pendleton and get their hands on 3 1/2 million dollars worth of cash; leaving three dead marines in their wake. Afterward, they managed to hijack a cargo plane, forcing the pilot Al (David James Campbell) and his teenage daughter Kellie (Victoria Christian) to deliver them (presumably) to the Mexican border. On their way, Bert (B.J. Turner) gets greedy and decides that he wants all of the money for himself. He tosses the crate containing the money out the hatch, parachutes out and leaves behind a grenade. The others manage to toss the explosive out just in the nick of time, but now they have an all-new objective: find Bert and find the money before he's able to get away with it. Three of them; calm, bald, quiet tough guy Corbin (top-billed Ted Vernon, who also financed the film), manic Curry (Michael David Curry, who seems to have carefully studied Joe Pilato's performance in DAY OF THE DEAD prior to acting in this) and big dumb oaf Jack (Richard Vidan), all parachute out. The lone female robber, Roxanne (Kristina Sanborn), then has the pilot and his daughter land the plane in a field with hopes of meeting up with the others later.

As everyone scours the grounds below picking up "very ugly vibes" while looking for that "no good, double crossing, scum-sucking son of bitch" Bert, they come to the realization that they're on a condemned, fenced in plot of land. There's only an abandoned farmhouse, a graveyard and overgrown fields full of, you guessed it, scarecrows. It isn't long before the solemn guardians of the fields come springing to life armed with sharp tools of butchery (knives, pitchforks, scythes, axes, meat cleavers...) to start knocking everyone off one by one. The general idea here is that these scarecrows kill victims, dismember them, gut them, stuff them, sew them back together and then bring them back to life to add to their legion. Why? Well, your guess is as good as mine. How were the scarecrows able to come to life? No clue. What do the scarecrows hope to accomplish? You got me. Why do they keep showing the same photo of three men on the wall of the abandoned house and who are they? Dunno and dunno. The script doesn't bother explaining any of that and it's left up to us to fill in the blanks on our own.

Scarecrows has a minor cult following and all I could think during the entire first half was "Why?" It's slow-moving, there are probably 100 shots of the same three scarecrows repeated endlessly, the acting is amateurish, there's next to no plot or characterization and the dialogue - half of which seems to consist of the characters saying each others names into their headsets  - is utterly useless. The entire film is set at night and is extremely dark, which alternately works in its favor and works against it. Thankfully, it manages to pick up a bit in the second half and becomes rather enjoyable. Mind you, the aforementioned problems don't just suddenly stop; they simply become less of an issue when the action and bloodshed come to the forefront. For the modest budget of just 425,000 dollars, it's atmospheric and looks fairly slick thanks to cinematographer Peter Deming. There's also a good music score from Terry Plumeri, fine makeups from Norman Cabrera and effective scarecrow designs. And yes, there's plenty of gore in this one, too...

Torsos and faces are stabbed, stomachs are gutted, hands are speared with pitchforks and slowly sliced off with rusty saws, fingers are bitten off, heads and arms are hacked off and so forth. Some of the victims return from the dead as stitched-up scarecrows themselves (stuffed with the cash they're so desperate to find) to attack the others. It was all enough for the film to run into ratings problems upon release, so original VHS distributor Forum Home Video released both R and unrated / uncut tapes. The latter runs 4 minutes longer. There's now a nice-looking, uncut DVD through MGM. Apparently director Wesley recorded a commentary track for that release but they opted not to include it.

★★1/2