Ling huan xiao jie (1988)

... aka: 靈幻小姐

... aka: Lady Vampire
... aka: Miss Magic
... aka: Miss Magic Spirit

Directed by:
Fung Hak-On

At a small film studio, a director (Teddy Yip) and crew are shooting some kind of period action / horror / samurai swordsman epic. When they're not busy gambling away their pay, some of the immature extras play a prank on obnoxious fellow extra and "fatso" Billy Tung (Billy Lau, doing his usual mugging routine) by pretending to be hopping vampires, leading him to humiliate himself by confessing that he's never had a woman (“I'll shoot you with my virgin pee!”) Unbeknownst to any of them, but a real ghost (Lau Chin-Dai), a nice, friendly one at that, is actually haunting the grounds. Studio janitor Uncle Fok (Fat Chung) knows about her and interacts with her. Earlier, he'd found her bones in the mountains behind the studio and had them buried. However, even a proper burial hasn't brought her peace and she's still hanging around. The ghost girl idolizes the studio's star actress Jenny (Petrina Fung), but encounters with the starstruck ghost, brief and innocent as they may be, drain Jenny of her energy so Uncle Fok frowns upon it.

A frequent presence on set is Wong-Ngan (Pauline Wong Yuk-Wan), who's married to studly film star / martial arts expert Wai-Keung Chiu (Norman Chu); a man who has a bad habit of (really) beating the shit out of the extras during action scenes. Wong-Ngan is just a wee bit insecure in their marriage, paranoid he's fooling around behind her back and had previously tried to kill herself by drinking antiseptics and slitting her wrists multiple times. Wai-Keung, who's doing an all-night shoot, promises to be home at 8am so they can have breakfast. However, there is no overnight shoot. He just wants to go out with his buddies to get some drinks. Wong-Ngan catches him there, slaps Jenny in the face, is slapped back by Wai-Keung and angrily storms off. When a drunk Wai-Keung returns home later that night he discovers his wife has hung herself. The fact she put on a red dress beforehand means that she'll be back.

After the funeral, Wai-Keung doesn't seem the least bit upset (“Wives are like clothes... I can buy new clothes.”), but he soon will be once his former wife's vengeful spirit returns to settle the score. She doesn't waste any time taking over Jenny's body and sends her out to try to kill him. The friendly studio ghost opposes her and Uncle Fok, who's not just skilled as a janitor but also at exorcism and swordfighting, expels the ghost from her body. Jenny is taken to the hospital, while Uncle takes Wai-Keung to an old lady spirit medium (Lap-Ban Chan) who does some kind of ceremony with incense, spell paper and eggs with faces drawn on them that allows the angry ghost to speak to her husband through her. Convinced he and Jenny were having an affair, the unreasonable ghost proves herself to be immune to reason and promises to kill them both.

Wai-Keung attempts to appease the spirit by putting some of her favorite things around their home but when that doesn't work he goes to “ghost buster” Priest Troublesome (Peter Chan Lung) for help. They rig up his apartment to trap the spirit inside (using “magic powder,” a spell paper lamp and contaminated perfume) and then Wai-Keung's left alone to stab her with a magic dagger. None of that works and she ends up attacking him in the parking garage (by starting up and moving the cars herself) and then blowing up his car with him inside. But now that he's gone to join his wife in ghost world, she still won't be content until the innocent Jenny is dead, too.  Uncle Fok comes up with a plan to get her soul out of her body and trap it in paper so that Wong-Ngan thinks she's dead. He can then return to the spirit to her body once the ghost is gone.

After successfully separating Jenny's spirit from her body, Fok prepares Billy and four of his pals to do battle with the ghost but their trick backfires. Wong-Ngan gets into a heated battle with both Fok and the good girl ghost from the movie studio, which ends with one of the guys (Tai Bo) being forced to eat Jenny's spirit paper containing her soul (otherwise it'll be burned and she'll be dead for good), which makes him pregnant. Wong-Ngan leaves but she'll be back so Fok sends for reinforcements. Ghost expert Master Wong (Bill Tung Biu), who's “sometimes” crippled and in a wheelchair but only when he wants to be (?), and his little apprentice Wai (Ho Kin-Wai, from the Mr. Vampire sequels) show up to help during the final battle.

This movie is the poster child of a 5 out of 10, or a C grade, or a 2 out of 4 as my ratings go. Nothing about it is terrible but there's also not much about it that really stands out either. While it does an admirable job balancing the comedy and action, the plot and all of the ghost fighting techniques are overly familiar, right down to a strange infatuation with virgin urine. We are even shown the little boy pissing into a bowl so it can be poured down some poor guy's throat to drive out the evil spirit at one point. (The boy is the only virgin left in the room after Billy gets raped in a coffin by a horny old female ghost in a cemetery). Also setting things at a film studio and not using that platform to take a few humorous digs at these kinds of films seems like a wasted opportunity. The best this really has to offer are some surprisingly well-executed special effects of spirits splitting and hopping in and out of bodies.

The director, who passed away earlier this year, is best known as an actor (he directed just four films but acted in over 150) and is the son of screen veteran Fung Fung, who also acted, directed and worked as a stuntman and action choreographer during his long career. The leading lady is Fung's daughter / the director's sister, who was a popular child star in the 1960s and likened to Hong Kong's answer to Shirley Temple. Despite receiving top billing, she doesn't really get much to do here and is covered with a sheet during the entire finale.

Currently with just six votes on IMDb, this isn't the easiest of such films to find nor is it really worth the effort. There's no DVD release anywhere to my knowledge but there was a subtitled VHS from Ocean Shores back in 1988 and likely a VCD release also.

★★

Prokletí domu Hajnù (1989)

... aka: Damned House of Hajn, The
... aka: Invisible
... aka: Invisible Man, The
... aka: Uncle Cyril

Directed by:
Jirí Svoboda

Peter Svejcar (Emil Horváth) started from humble beginnings as son to a poor couple (including an alcoholic father) but lucked out (well, sort of) that a senile old man took pity on him and wanted to pay for him to get a better education. He did and made a decent life for himself working as an engineer until he was fired. Now middle age and out of work, Peter has hooked up with the lovely and much younger Sonia (Petra Vancíková). He'd perhaps like to marry her, and has bought her an expensive ring made of her moonstone, but first he needs to get a family blessing and accompanies Sonia back to her family's huge mansion in the small town of Jesenice for an extended stay.  Things are extremely odd right off the bat, with everyone, family and staff alike, behaving strangely and secretively. Sonia's mother is said to have abandoned them, but her father Hugo (Radoslav Brzobohatý), who runs a soap factory, lives there along with his rude, elderly great aunt Caroline (Valérie Kaplanová) and the staff. Over dinner, Auntie makes an odd comment that poor Sonia has had “bad luck with suitors” in the past but doesn't elaborate on that.

Also occupying the house is Uncle Cyril (Petr Cepek) aka the family shame. He's a laughing, maniacal, voyeuristic, cat-hating madman who lives in the attic and paints creepy abstract pictures on nearly everything he comes into contact with. Cyril used to be a brilliant academic when he was younger but one day out of the blue he suddenly started to believe that he'd become invisible. After spending six months in an asylum and (supposedly) being mistreated there, the family took over custody of him and brought him back home to live out the rest of his days. Now everyone plays along and pretend that they can't see him either.

The family, who actually hired a private eye to learn all he could about Peter prior to him even coming there, soon start trying their future son-in-law's patience. Auntie makes rude comments about his impoverished upbringing and confesses she lives for the past, reading and then burning one letter from a male admirer every evening before bed. The home is one of an underlying suspicion about Peter and his true intentions. Does he really love Sonia or is he only marrying her for her money after having fallen on hard times? Peter ignores flirtatious servant Katy (Evelyna Steimarová) when she warns him that he should run away while he still can, and goes through with the marriage. The two move into a separate wing of the house (yes, it's THAT big) and can't even get through their honeymoon without Uncle Cyril spoiling the consummation with his peeping tom routine.

Peter goes to work in the factory making scented soaps but Cyril's strange behavior is having a psychological toll on Sonia. Peter promises her they'll move out but when Hugo gets wind of it, he threatens to bequeath everything to a local orphanage and downgrade Peter to a grunt position if he takes Sonia away. With Katy's help, Peter gets his hands on some of Cyril's paintings and perverted scribblings, which show he has incestuous designs on his niece. Even that's not enough of a red flag. Nothing is done and one day he manages to get in her room and rapes her. Perhaps it's not the first time. Katy catches them and pulls him off. Against Catherine's wishes, he's finally put into a straight jacket and hauled off to the nuthouse... but someone else is about to take his place as the household's resident crazy.

Traumatized from the event, Sonia starts going insane. She alternates between going on crazy, teary-eyed, screaming rants and jovially skipping around the mansion grounds, plays the same song at the piano over and over again and refuses to sleep in the same bed with her husband, let alone have sex with him, which prompts Peter to take Katy (who also occasionally sleeps with Hugo) as a lover. When it's revealed that she's pregnant, she's convinced that Cyril is the father and the baby is going to be invisible, too. She ignores the baby's cries, hides him all around the house, feeds him bread so that he chokes, bites him, bruises him, etc. and also believes an invisible Cyril has escaped and is still lurking around the house. Eventually, she must be quarantined in a room in the house and kept away from the baby.

Really (and I mean really) beautifully photographed by Vladimír Smutný with constant use of lots of rich, saturated colors. This is one of those films where you can tell that great care has gone into the look of every single shot and how it is staged, dressed, lit and photographed, with nice use made out of things like stained glass, mirrors, fog and fans to make it look even more opulent. In addition, this throws in some wacky camerawork that would make Bava and Argento envious with shots prowling the outside of the house, swooping out of trees and descending upon people and so forth. There are strong performances across the board and fairly well-defined, albeit highly unpleasant, characters. The plot is interesting but seems of secondary concern next to the visual presentation.

Based on Jaroslav Havlíček's novel Neviditelný (or “Invisible”), which is essentially a negative critique of the greedy bourgeois way of life, this does honor the novel by touching on the corrupting influence of wealth and trying to maintain a certain stature within a community. The director was a graduate of FAMU and later taught film, TV and media arts there. He was also heavily involved in politics in his home country (and was a former member of the Communist party) and unsuccessfully ran for the Prague Senate in 1996 as an independent.

★★★