Magic Story (1987)

directed by Lau Bing-Gei
Taiwan
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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It's too bad this doesn't go by its alternate title of Kung Fu Vampire Buster. So what if there's no kung-fu in the movie? It sounds cool. 

This movie is about a little boy who's a hopping vampire, and the efforts of various people- a Taoist priest, an autopsy technician/doctor/embalmer(?), a bunch of corrupt government officials- to catch him and use him for their own gains. Mostly, they want him because there's a reward for capturing vampires and bringing them to the doctor to study. But the clumsy doctor's assistant and the girl he's sweet on (who spends the whole movie dressed like a five-year-old) eventually begin to care for the mini vampire, and most of the film is spent with them trying to secret him away from people who just want to vanquish him or sell him to science. There's also a super-powerful lady vampire who shows up sporadically as well.

For all its comedy, this feels like a good and natural depiction of Chinese vampire folklore. A lot of movies made with intentions of showing off specific cultural traditions end up feeling really forced and awkward, but I'm not sure if there was any kind of push for Magic Story as a Taiwanese film to follow the more rigid guidelines for filmmaking imposed by China. So we get to not only see a lot of traditional Chinese vampire folklore but we're also presented it in a format that's fun and lighthearted.

But also, it's really concerning to remember that this adorable little boy everyone is trying to save is very dead. Like, something bad happened to him, possibly a long time ago, and now he's dead, can't speak, can't even walk properly, and will never get to enjoy being living again. Maybe the point of this is to de-anthropocentrize one's perception of the value of life as a human. But to me it seemed pretty tragic when I actually stopped and remembered that the littlest vampire is indeed among the undead.

Most of the time the plot does make sense to some degree, which is decent praise for a hopping vampire film considering how they can get too zany for their own good sometimes. Magic Story is outlandish and over-the-top slapstick, and uses a lot of visual gags that belong in cartoons or Three Stooges episodes, but to me it was still genuinely funny. It also features a song-and-dance number that's really cute if you can forget that it's about a dead child playing with a living one. Still, even though it's all meant as humor, less fatalistic attitudes towards death are always something I like to see.