Bi gui zhuo (1986)

... aka: 俾鬼捉

... aka: 誰當鬼

... aka: Bei gwai yuk

... aka: Ghost Snatchers, The

... aka: Invasion from the Beyond

... aka: Shui dang gui (Who Is the Ghost?)

Directed by:

Ngai Choi Lam

Nearly every guy working at Fox Centre, a high rise office building, has the hots for secretary Judy Hsu (former Taiwanese model Shu-Yuan Hsu). She's so in demand she makes interested parties fill out an application that, according to the subtitles, is "To check if you've in recent years got V.D., syphilis or AIDS. Also your size and lastingness." What nobody knows is that Judy is the target of evil spirits. During a late night office party, lightning strikes the building and Judy is accosted in the bathroom by said spirits. The walls split, a long corridor opens up, hands burst through and start throwing her around and then a giant hand grabs her. Now possessed, a voice regularly calls out to her, demanding she "Kill all men and women!" Sometimes her eyes glow red and she's aided by the pale-faced ghosts of former Japanese soldiers. So why Judy? Well, it has something to do with her having a yen horoscope.

Meanwhile, we meet luckless "fatty" Bong Chu (Jing Wong); your standard HK ghost-comedy leading men who creates a mess out of pretty much everything he touches ... and life returns the favor! He's the type who can't even sit down for a simple breakfast without a fly landing in his fish congee. Since he's unemployed and still living at home, his parents make an arrangement with his uncle, Pien-Chou Fan (Stanley Fung), for him to work as a security guard at Fox Centre. He's trying to save up money to get married to his girlfriend, Hsueh Tai, who's played by the super-cute Joey Wong. Yes, part of the joke is that she's way out of his league, even though there's a catch. Hsueh's brother, Erh-Lung (Michael Wai-Man Chan), is a low rent underworld figure with a thug entourage who swindles his money away and tries to prevent him from dating his sister. Also, a bird shits on his lunch.

Because of its design, the Fox Centre is cursed. It all has something to do with yin and yang and magnetic forces and spiritual fields and feng shui and Japanese soldiers being executed on the site of the building during the war and now wanting to rebuild the Nippon Empire and, well, let's just say Fox Centre was erected in the wrong place in a super-specific way that's made it a hot spot for paranormal activity. Back when the building was first being built, several construction workers died under mysterious circumstances. And then the architect who designed the project (supposedly) died by suicide. And then the Inquiries Commission chairman in charge of investigating the mysterious deaths died himself. You get the picture.

Since it's a special time of year when all the yins and yangs are compromised or something, anyone working there who was also born during a certain time of the year is in danger, which happens to include Bong, his uncle and Hsueh. They seek assistance from Hsueh's fortune teller godsister, Ling Chang (Miss Hong Kong 1984 and future Mrs. Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi), who advises the chairman (Wai Shum) of things he can do to thwart the evil. That involves closing up parts of the building, like the top floor and the parking garage, and other things that he's not willing to do. 

Ling, who's young, beautiful and has a good personality, also becomes the unlikely love interest of Pien-Chou, who's middle-aged, average and a pervert who spends all his free time in porn theaters and massage parlors. Hey, you guys already used that hot-chick-who-can-do-1000-times-better-hooking-up-with-a-complete-idiot joke once already! Ling goes out of town for a single day to try to get them help and what does Pien-Chou do? He tries to have sex with the possessed Judy, even after he's explicitly told she's a ghost!

Dumb moments aside, this movie is packed with so many ghostly, gory, weird shenanigans that it almost succeeds in spite of itself. We get a face pulled off, an ear bitten off, a heart ripped out of a chest, eyeballs ripped out, an exploding head, a nightmare inside of a nightmare, someone split in two with a giant guillotine, someone split in two with a samurai sword, centipede eating, a ghost pissing blood, a movie theater slowly filling with ghosts, a "safety charm" that can be used once to ward off ghosts, a male spirit medium with a dubbed-over female voice, a haunted TV set that eventually sprouts arms and legs and lots of other entertaining stuff. The only thing we don't get is a decent screenplay.

While there's certainly some fun to be had here, that's a bit compromised by needless complication in the plotting, overly familiar characters and too many detours away from the primary story. A good example is a long and utterly pointless scene where Ling summons a "Mahjong ghost;" an awful, big-nosed, stuffed animal looking puppet wearing sunglasses, to help our bumbling heroes win a game. And then there's a subplot where one of the guys loses 3 of his 10 souls and the rest of the cast have to rush around trying to find them and then reunite them with his body before the hospital staff can conduct an autopsy. So what does any of that have to do with the haunted building? Not a damn thing really. It's like someone just came up with ideas they liked and threw them into the stew whether they belonged here or not.

Toward the end, we learn the only way to banish the evil is to locate the portal to a spiritual realm called "Asolo Field." While there, they must find the "Ghost King's skeleton," put a spell on it, return intact with something called a "longevity rope" and then let a virgin (Joey Wong's character) hold it. Oh yeah, and the only people who can enter are those that are yang. Got that? Nope, well then forget that and just enjoy the strangeness of the colorfully-lit ghost realm, which is accessed through a portal in the women's restroom mirror and culminates in a fight against an undead Japanese general and his animated skeleton (a well-executed puppet effect) around a lake of acid.

The director also made THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986), a better, more-polished horror-comedy than this one, the excellent rape-revenge film Her Vengeance (1988), the manga adaptation and box office hit The Peacock King (1989) and its sequel, Saga of the Phoenix (1989), Erotic Ghost Story (1990), another big hit in Hong Kong, the cult classic Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and, his final film, The Cat (1992). With a track record like that, it's a true shame he abruptly stopped working in film altogether in 1992.

Also in the cast are Charlie Cho (THE FIRST VAMPIRE IN CHINA) as a Mahjong player, Lap-Ban Chan (HOUSE OF THE LUTE) as Hsueh's granny, Tony Leung (who also wrote the script) as a security guard, Tau-Wan Yue as a cross-eyed security guard, Siu-Ming To as a cross-eyed TV ghost and lots of other familiar faces.

This Golden Harvest production did middling business at the box office. It was first released on VHS in Hong Kong in 1986 on the Pony Canyon label. That was followed by VCD and DVD releases from Fortune Star. The latter includes an English subtitle option, as does the Malaysian DVD release from Speedy Video. There's no Blu-ray to my knowledge, though this seems like a prime candidate for such a release so it'll probably happen eventually.

★★1/2

Polish Vampire in Burbank, A (1983)

Directed by:

Mark Pirro

Remember all those T&A “bikini” comedies that dominated last night cable and video stores in the early 90s? There was The Bikini Carwash Company (1 and 2), Bikini Summer (1, 2 and 3), Bikini Drive-In, Bikini Beach Race, The Great Bikini Off Road Adventure, Bikini Island, Bikini Squad, Bikini Hotel, Beach Babes from Beyond, Beach Beverly Hills, Cave Girl Island, California Hot Wax and scores more. The formula was simple: Fill your movie with as many beautiful women in barely-there bikinis (usually consisting of little more than a few pieces of strategically-placed string) as possible.

One title from this cycle that always stood out to me was Pirro's Buford's Beach Bunnies (1993), which "boasted" the star value of Jim Hanks (Tom's brother) and was on constant rotation on late night cable. Even though it otherwise stuck pretty closely to the usual bikini movie formula, I remember being surprised by the sheer number of goofy sight gags that were packed into the film. Sure, some of them worked better than others, but what was impressive was that the director even bothered putting them in there in the first place. Instead of entirely focusing on lingering ass and tit shots, Pirro would stick a lot of the comedic gags in the background. It's kind of like he wanted to make the comedy movie, was assigned the T&A movie (or knew he could market the T&A movie), and decided to make both and have them running simultaneously. Not high art, mind you, but it showed more effort than other, similar titles and it did make the film stand out.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to watch another Pirro movie, but I was almost instantly glad I did when I found myself smiling throughout the opening few minutes of this one. After the camera spends some time prowling around a castle, we meet a young vampire named Dupah (played by the director) and are immediately bombarded with a bunch of sight gags. Dupah keeps a poster of Farrah Fawcett on his coffin lid, sleeps with a stuffed Frankenstein monster doll and wears bat pajamas. He then makes his way to the bathroom and brushes his fangs with Close Up toothpaste and a toilet brush (!) As that's going on, we venture out onto the city streets at night. A hooker is approached by an older potential client. She asks, "You wanna party? You got the bread?" and the man instantly pulls a loaf of bread out from behind his back (lol, Jesus!) An older male vampire (Hugh O. Fields) and his vampire daughter, Yvonne (Marya Gant), then kill both the hooker and her pimp.

After siphoning blood out of the hooker's neck into a plastic baggie, the vampires take it home to give to Dupah (the older vampire's son and Yvonne's brother) for breakfast. He drinks it with a straw while watching vampire cartoons. However, the vampire dad is getting fed up with always having to be the "bloodwinner" (hehe) and his son's laziness, squeamishness ("Bite people? Ewww!") and refusal to work. "You should be out at night roaming the streets... attacking young ladies... Look at you! You're a full grown vampire and you've never bitten anyone in your life! When I was your age, I sucked more blood than a California landlord!" The dad then instructs Yvonne to take Dupah out and show him how it's done.

Yvonne relates a flashback to their missing, even more useless brother Sphincter. He's played by Eddie Deezen, the original production's star when filming began in 1981. Deezen quit midway through filming, which forced the director to re-script the film, dub him (he's given a similarly annoying nasal voice) and use what footage he did shoot of the actor in the form of flashbacks. One of those shows Yvonne taking him to a bar where he strikes out again and again, finally running across a cross-wielding bible thumper and member of a "Judo for Jesus" club who decides to use her skills to "beat the Holy Ghost into him." Sphincter gets knocked out and doesn't wake up until morning, and we all know what happens when vampires are exposed to sunlight.

Dupah and Yvonne stumble upon a couple - Delores (not Lois) Lane (Lori Sutton) and the afro'd Ernie (Steve Dorsch) - exiting a theater showing "Enema Vampires." Ernie acts like a dick and then storms off just because Delores professes to love horror and vampire movies. (What? Is he nuts?) Dupah then makes his move. While Delores may be a hot, bubbly blonde who works at a health spa, she has a darker side when it comes to all things romantic and gets turned on by vampires, castles, biting, large fangs and Gothic atmosphere and imagery. Even more perfect. Could this possibly be Dupah's dream woman? He agrees to swing by her work the following day so they can hang out again. But, wait a minute, isn't he supposed to be vampire-ing?

It soon becomes pretty clearly what parallels this is attempting to draw between a vampire's first time feeding and a human's first time falling in love / losing their virginity. Dupah is even coached by the skull of his late brother, who gives him a bunch of bad pointers that end up backfiring. As Dupah is trying to navigate the relationship and goes back and forth as to the right time to put the bite to his new girlfriend, we meet a bunch of other oddball characters, the best of which is Delores' roommate Misty (Bobbi Dorsch), an extremely confused girl who can't decide if she's some kind of New Age kook or an airhead Valley Girl ("Like, where ya been like?"). Either way, she's dumb as a box of rocks and thinks a Slinky is a Rubik's Cube and test patterns on TV are a "boring" movie.

While there are plenty of dumb laughs and amusingly quirky bits (including a random Sonny and Cher musical performance [?] at a pool party) to be found in here, other parts are just plain bizarre and didn't strike me as particularly funny. Some, in fact, is downright uncomfortable, like the overdubs on some of the black actors. There's also a head-scratching Jacuzzi scene where Dupah encounters both a lost spy wearing a full tuxedo in the water (John McCafferty) and a cursed "Queerwolf" (Paul Farbman) who comes on to him and later shows up in drag. One thing that does manage to shine through here is the director's love for classic vampire movies. Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi get name dropped, Dupah takes Delores to a screening of Count Yorga, Vampire, Elvira is seen on a TV set hosting The Fearless Vampire Killers and there's a gorgeously-shot black-and-white fantasy sequence complete with light strips over the eyes and lots of smoke. Z movie regular / former Ed Wood movie alum Conrad Brooks and Katina Garner (HACK-O-LANTERN) show up briefly in a bar scene.

The director managed to get this a limited theatrical release, a VHS release (from Simitar) and frequent cable TV airings, which is pretty very impressive considering this was shot on Super 8 for less than 2,500 dollars. It went on to gross half a million and is supposedly the cheapest movie ever to play on USA Up All Night... which is really saying something! Pirro also made Deathrow Gameshow (1987), which was shot on 35mm and had the uncommonly high (for him) budget of 200,000 dollars, plus other Super 8 ultra low budget horror comedies with catchy titles like Curse of the Queerwolf (1988) and Nudist Colony of the Dead (1991). Pirro now self-distributes all of his own movies on DVD on his website.

★★1/2