Mr. Vampire (1985)

directed by Ricky Lau
Hong Kong
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is probably the most famous example of the Chinese hopping vampire (also known as jiangshi and in Cantonese goeng-si) on film, which is basically where a body comes back to life, due to poor burial practices or a curse or just whatever, as a hopping corpse with its arms out, zombie-like, dressed in traditional garb with a paper scroll stuck to its face. The scroll is supposed to immobilize it, and the hopping part is probably intended to emulate rigor mortis. The hopping vampire is instantly recognizable and there's media depicting it all across Asia; I think there's even some kids' movies and maybe like a Digimon or something based off of it.

So, it's popular, but is it good? Yes! I can't speak for the plethora of sequels this movie spawned, but this one, at least, is really fun the way Hong Kong horror comedies always are. As with the majority of them, most of its humor is slapstick and comes from characters doing silly things and throwing around some goofy over-the-top martial arts at each other, but there's also jokes with a kind of universal humor that work no matter the time and place. This could have done without the misogyny (incl. transmisogyny unfortunately) though.

Obviously the focus of the film is the jiangshi, but there's no shortage of non-jiangshi reanimated corpses in this. Depicted as equally fearsome and a little more immediately threatening due to their speed, some of the bodies come back to life as aggressive and extremely mobile creatures more like stereotypical Western zombies than anything else. I don't know what the difference was between these guys and jiangshi, or why some bodies turned into one and some turned into the other, but they both share the factor of not being able to get you if you hold your breath (and probably therefore hide your qi- the stuff they feed on) which results in some of the characters using a long bamboo pipe contraption to redirect their breath to another place in the room, which was pretty clever.

A lot of the time when I watch Hong Kong genre comedies from the 80s and early 90s like this one, I have trouble keeping up with the plot because there's so much happening all at once, but that wasn't an issue with Mr. Vampire. It still has the chaotic energy of its cinematic peers, but I could grasp what was going on- everything didn't have the cobbled-together feeling that I struggle with sometimes. You gotta have sticky rice to thwart the hopping vampire bite, both cooked and uncooked. But it has to be sticky rice, regular rice won't work. So be careful who you get your sticky rice from because some people have no idea of the urgency of your request for like 80 pounds of rice and will simply give you regular rice because it's cheaper for them. I think people who dislike this movie are people who just hate fun.