Kung Fu Zombie
     
              
Director: Hua Shan
Year:  1981
Rating: 6.5
The next time you are in the mood for a kung fu zombie vampire ghost comedy this might be the film for you. Hong Kong actually has a few that sort of fall into this field - Encounters of the Spooky Kind, The Dead and Deadly and some of those Mr. Vampire films - but none of them come close to the idiocy of this one. This is like The Three Stooges Meet Abbot and Costello and there is a whole lot of goofy running around with monsters chasing them. At least that feels like a lot of the movie but now and then it slows down for some real martial arts and it's darn good. Especially the two fights between Billy Chong and Korean kicking specialist Kwan Yung-moon. Their fights are brutal and smack-a-doodle nuts. These are two legit martial artists who bring it on and for those ten to twenty minutes this is great.

 



Chong was from Indonesia where he was a star before moving over to HK for a few "classic" films such as this one and Kung Fu Beyond the Grave. He didn't make that many films in Hong Kong as he was going back and forth but since 1983 he has almost only worked in Indonesia as Willie Dozan in a lot of TV shows right up till the present. Kwan has one of those faces that just spells villain and he appeared in a lot of HK films - a few of note like Ninja in the Dragons Den, The Club, My Young Auntie and Killer Constable. This may be one of his bigger roles.




So where to begin with this lunacy. I wish I could sit down a few serious film scholars and force them to watch this and see if their heads exploded. Who knows? Maybe they would love it. A few crooks want to get revenge on Chong for stopping them robbing a bank a few years back. But rather than your typical boring revenge attempt, they decide to use a disreputable Taoist priest (Chan Lau) to reanimate corpses and have them fight Chong. Outsourcing to the dead. He does but it goes very wrong and the ring leader gets killed but his ghost sticks around and demands that the priest find him a dead body to comfortably slip into. You only get three chances the priest tells him. Choose wisely.





Finding a dead body that still looks good isn't easy but they come across what they think is one - that of Kwan's but he is actually a vampire sleeping who has come to kill Chong and his father (Chiang Tao) who has spent years beating the hell out of his son to make him tough enough for this day that he knew would come. It gets stranger and much sillier as the invisible ghost in his straw hat chases after the priest and then bodies get mixed up and only by wearing a hat full of plants can you hide from the ghost. Or is he a zombie? I lost track and the director may have as well. Fun if you are in the mood as I was but I imagine torture if you are not. This was dubbed. Badly. But in this case I am not sure if that helped or hindered the film. Or just didn't matter.