Friday, April 26, 2024

Mr Vampire - Lam Ching-ying (1985) - Nr Wong Chuk Yeung, Sai Kung

Once again I have Jonathan Ross to thank for my introduction to Mr Vampire as it was one of the movies screened on Channel 4 in 1990 for the short run of "Chinese Ghost Stories". This wasn't long after Ross's "Incredibly Strange Film Show" that featured the likes of Tsui Hark and Jackie Chan, so it was a boon to UK-based HK film fans at the time.

The film really stands the test of time and it's such a shame that Lam Ching-ying died so young (age 43) in 1996. Lam stars as Uncle Ko, a Taoist priest, who runs a funerary and spiritual services business in a small Chinese town. He's employed by a wealthy businessman to exhume his father's body for reburial but on exhumation discovers that the corpse has not decomposed and is most likely a vampire/zombie. The vampire (played by a heavily prosthetically disguised Yuen Wah) subsequently breaks loose and wreaks havoc on the town before Ko and his two novices are able to defeat it. There's also a small subplot that involves one of Ko's novices (played by Chin Siu-ho) getting seduced by a ghost (Pauline Wong).

According to wikipedia, most of the sets were constructed in Taipei including the houses and the temple where the film's characters live, as well as the red brick street that features in a few of the scenes. Watching the film it's quite obvious that the street set was based on the red brick buildings that can still be found on Di Hua Street today (you may remember a post I did on The Sand Pebbles). However, there are at least two locations in Hong Kong that I can identify and so worthy of posting about here. The first will be very familiar because I have covered it a few times in recent weeks - it's the flat area of ground near to the fire lookout at Wong Chuk Yeung. This is the scene when the coffin containing the vampire is first exhumed. The grave was obviously a prop. The last but one image shows the view looking north towards Tolo Harbour, showing a similar view to the one seen in The Blood Brothers (in that link see the second image down of David Chiang).


This is the view looking towards Tolo Harbour in the north

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