Think you know your vampires huh? Read enough Anne Rice novels and episodes of Buffy to know all there is to know huh? Well think again bucko, for western culture was not alone in deriving the legend of the vampire from myth and folklore, the Far East has its own image of those of the long fangs and a thrist for blood. Well first off, they don’t thirst for blood. The legend of the eastern vampire is that if it had died after suffering some great injustice, its last breath remains in his throat rather than being released. Until he has breathed its last, it will not rest and will take revenge against the living, also they don’t thirst for blood, they’re merely extremely violent and wish to kill those who stand in its way. These vampires typically dress in old-fashioned Mandarin dress, and usually they have suffered rigor mortis, preventing normal movement and forcing them to hop. In addition to this, they are blind and rely entirely on their sense of smell, smelling the breath of the intended target. You can also forget the garlic/crucifix/holy water methods of hurting and killing a vampire, these can only be hurt by uncooked sticky rice or chicken’s blood which has been treated in the proper manner. These vampires can also be incapacitated by a script of sacred writing written in blood attached to their forehead. Though the idea of hopping vampires might seem comical, well it might at first if you’re not used to it, but they can be just as scary as any other vampire, and at least as scary as a wussy bi-sexual vampire who complains about being undead all the time. Oops, sorry.

Don’t get me wrong though, Mr. Vampire is very much a horror comedy, one of many that came after Sammo Hung’s extremely influential Encounters of the Spooky Kind which successfully mixed comedy, kung fu, and horror elements to make a big ball of gooey fun! Mr. Vampire stars the now sadly deceased Lam Ching-Ying as Master Kou, a Taoist priest responsible for burials, and also has a great understanding of magic and the supernatural. He has two assistants, the hapless Man Choi (Ricky Hui) and the handsome, but almost as hapless Chou (Siu-hou Chin). Their goofing around accidentally awakens a group of slumbering vampires that Master Kao was looking after in his mortuary, forcing Gau and the controller of the vampires to incapacitate them once more. The vampire controller rings his bell and takes his vampires off into the night while Master Kao scolds his foolish young students. The next day, Kao takes Man Choi with him to a meeting with a local wealthy gentleman in a English-style tea room and amongst the culture clash jokes we get some plot. The wealthy man, Mr. Yam, was told by his fortune teller that he should dig up his dead father and re-bury him in order to bring much good fortune upon himself and his family, and he wishes Master Kao to perform the ceremony. Man Choi is distracted by the Yam’s daughter Ting-Ting (the cutey pie Moon Lee), whom he takes an immediate liking to. We will later meet Yam’s nephew too, the extremely irritating local police captain Wai, who has amorous intentions towards his cousin Ting-Ting.

The ceremony goes ahead, and curiously the corpse has been buried vertically, but Kao also gives the bad news to Yam that his fortune teller had given him the wrong instructions and had ruined the original burial, bringing much bad fortune upon him. Man Choi and Chou are left to put incense on all the graves, and after commenting that one dead girl died too young, Chou inadvertently attracts the attentions of her ghost. Things get worse when Kao realises that the corpse has not decomposed at all in the twenty years it had been buried, and slowly starts to transform into a vampire. Kao prepares chicken blood in order to prevent the vampire from escaping its coffin, but in a moment of very poor judgement leaves Man Choi and Chou to do it. The vampire soon escapes and goes straight for the home of Mr. Yam, dispatching him using his sharp elongated finger nails. Wai, trying to impress his cousin, arrests Kao for the crime, seeing as he had a couple of long fingernails himself, and locks him up in prison, keeping the body of his uncle there too for safe keeping, not believing Kao’s warnings that the corpse could come back to life at any moment. Thing is, if you are killed by a vampire you are doomed to become one yourself, though luckily Kao had instructed Chou to bring him his tools for such an event. The corpse springs back to hideous life, made all the more threatening by the fact that he had not yet experienced rigor mortis and was all the more maneuverable for it. Kao and Chou manage to subdue and destroy the vampire despite the hindrance of the idiotic Wai. However there is still another vampire on the loose determined to avenge his improper burial on his family, and Chou has the small matter of a ghost whose love for him might lead to his own death.

Mr. Vampire is an extremely enjoyable and funny movie. Unlike some Hong Kong films where cultural references can unfortunately be lost on laymen such as myself, Mr. Vampire successfully mixes slapstick and amusing dialogue, the visual humour is a hell of a lot of fun. Sharing some similarities with Sammo's Encouters of the Spooky Kind movies, indeed the director Ricky Lau directed Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2 five years previous. Practically everything is played for laughs, from the interplay between the characters and their goofing off, to some of the potentially fatal encounters with the undead, everything is carried off with a sense of good-natured fun and humour meant as a piece of wacky entertainment rather than to provide any shock value. There’s also this kind of goofy, innocent feel to the humour, one scene in particular springs to mind when Ting-Ting tells her father that she’s going out to buy some make-up. Meanwhile Chou is working in his aunt’s make-up shop, when his auntie tells him she’s going out for a little while, but warns him that a prostitute from the brothel across the street is coming over to buy something. I found myself laughing at the setup rather than the joke itself, you can spot that kind of humour coming a mile away and I find it a very endearing aspect of Hong Kong cinema.

There are scenes of action too, Siu-Hou Chin gets to show off his acrobatic prowess on a number of occasions in his attempts to avoid the vampires' attacks. Lam Ching-Ying is occasionally allowed to cut loose with some of his impressive martial arts abilities too, though I you want to see him fight you'd be better off getting Prodigal Son or Magnificent Butcher for his excellent work with Yuen Biao. This isn’t a martial arts film really, the heart of this film is a horror comedy, where little is played seriously, and even when it is serious it doesn’t stay that way for long. The vampires, partly due to their rather comical way of moving about, and because of the tone of the film, are not exactly menacing, their lack of sight and their movements are used as comic devices. One great exception however is a scene were Man Choi and Ting-Ting are trapped in a wardrobe with the vampire grandfather mere inches away, having to hold their breath in the hope that he won’t be able to detect them and leave. This was an effective and tense scene and one or two more like that wouldn’t have gone amiss, though the comedy was still funny enough that it didn’t suffer from a lack of suspense.

With Mr. Vampire its comedy first, with horror and kung fu distant second and third respectively, but this is a really fun, good-natured movie that really could only have come from Hong Kong. For an introduction to the crazy side of Hong Kong cinema, this is a damn good place to start.