Director:
Yuen Chor/ T. F. Mou Tun-fei
Year: 1980
Rating: 5.0
Here are two
supernatural tales from the Shaw Brothers and from two of their more well-known
directors - Chor Yuen and T. F. Mou Tun-fei - and neither tale is very good.
Chor Yuen was famous for his Wuxia films for Shaw and tries his hand at horror.
It doesn't go well. T. F. Mou at this point had not done much but he was
to direct four extreme films later on that have gained him some notoriety.
Those being Lost Souls, Men Behind the Sun, Trilogy of Lust and Black Sun:
The Nanking Massacre. None of that extreme element makes it into this film
other than some really pervy nude scenes.
The first story is from Chor Yuen and is
titled Haunted Tales and it is a mess though I found myself sticking with
it just out of curiosity as to where it was going to go. A just married couple
- Li Fan (Ling Yun) and Ya-li (Ching Li) have just moved into their new home
out in the country, far from the city. It is a cavernous home with a very
a ghastly taste in décor. The husband goes off to work each day leaving
Ya-li alone and strange occurrences begin to happen. A red ball crashes through
the window and she hears the voices of children and then sees them in the
mirror - but only in the mirror, one day furniture begins to jump up and
down - and of course the husband thinks she is seeing things. Don't they
always. Their neighbors (Lau Luk-wah, Len Chen-chi) show up but act very
oddly. A dead friend keeps telephoning her asking for his eye. What is "real"
and what are dreams seem to merge together. A wandering Taoist priest's (Yang
Chi-ching) ghost radar goes off and he tries to get to the bottom of this.
This has no scares - just seems hectic and chaotic and gets loonier as it
goes along.
The second tale is from T.F. Mou and is
titled The Prize Winner. Hard to tell what the point of this one is
other than to show some nudity and perhaps give us a moral lesson. I was
more interested in the nudity. Chen Shen is a maintenance man in an apartment
building and encased in a long-haired messy wig. He is always leching after
women in the building but has no money to "date" them. He takes away a Chinese
Ouija board from some children along with their cup. In his room the cup
begins to move and gives him the numbers for the next Mark Six lottery -
1,2,3,4,5,6. The board tells him that it is a lonely Fox Spirit and says
through the board just don't have unchaste sex or gamble or murder and he
will be ok. Of course, after he wins a huge amount of money, he goes nuts
- pays people to allow him to slap them, has sex with a prostitute in the
elevator and makes another working girl pick up the money on a glass tabletop
with her naked breasts as the camera films lasciviously from below. So, he
broke the first prohibition but still has two to go.
