Midnight Conjure
               
Director: Mao Chiang-pang
Year: 1991
Rating: 3.0
Aka - Demonic Umbrella

Aka - Fatal Umbrella

I need to stop randomly picking HK films out of my VCD pile. It could be hazardous to my health. In the last few days, I have watched a few real stinkers, but I have been sitting on these for years waiting for them to hatch and I thought it was time. Back in the 1990s Hong Kong was producing films like pancakes off the grill - hundreds a year for this small city. An amazing feat but what is often left out is that a lot of them were really cheap and bad. They ended up on VCD. And people like me bought them having no idea what they were about. But hell there on the cover are Carrie Ng and Lam Ching-ying. It must be worthy. Well, the odd thing about this film is that for the first 30-minutes it was. I mean good. I was thinking I had found a real hidden gem and then wammo it runs into a brick wall of total incompetency. I would love to have been a fly on the wall of this production. How did it go from wuxia fun to absolute malarky. Did Tucker Carlson edit this film? There is a case study here.



It begins in ancient times. When there was flying about galore, sword fighting, ninjas burrowing under the ground, silk sleeves that were killing machines, women who spent all day at the spinning machine, Taoist priests who appear out of nowhere and then vanish, an evil woman being carried around in a palanquin that flew in the air. All the cool stuff we love from wuxia films from the 1990s. Kind of a low budget Asia the Invincible. At one point this evil woman named Sherry (Yeung Man-huen) runs up the side of a mountain in red high heels. Did she steal them from Dorothy?



There isn't much of a plot but it looks great. Two brothers have ambitions of the being the best in martial arts. One brother Long Wu has already accomplished this but has retired to live with his wife Su (Carrie Ng) who spins all day. His brother Fang though still wants to be the best and even though he is defeated by Sherry as she uses her silk sleeves to cause maximum damage and then out of the blue a priest shows up in the desert and also gives him a good beating. The priest is Lam Ching-ying.



And then we are catapulted into modern times. Sherry is a drug dealer, Fang is a cop in charge of going after prostitutes and drugs, Carrie is - no idea - she just hangs around giving enigmatic smiles and maybe is having an affair with Sherry. To pad out the film they have three scenes of a different man brutalizing a different woman - of which we have seen none of them before and we never see them again. At one point Fang who along with a bunch of cops just had a big shoot-out with Sherry and her gang - goes to her house - not to arrest her but to ask her to help with security in an auction selling two ancient swords - which just happen to be their swords from 3,000 years before.  None of it makes a bit of sense.  Lam Ching-ying shows up again to say hello and leaves. Smart guy.