ENCOUNTER OF THE SPOOKY KIND (Hong Kong, 1981)



Directed by: Sammo Hung
Starring: Sammo Hung, Lam Ching-ying, Chung Fat, Peter Chan, Wu Ma
102 minutes, 35mm, in Cantonese with English subtitles

Sammo Hung likes to do two things: play golf and kick ass. In Hong Kong, in 1981, there were no good golf courses, so he had to make do with unrelenting ass-kicking. Coming off of his early martial arts successes, and right before directing what's considered his greatest film (THE PRODIGAL SON) Sammo was eagerly looking for more targets for his crazed martial fury. Shaw Brothers had been a veritable soft serve ice cream machine of gloppy worm-eating with a series of sticky, icky horror films in the 70's at the same time that it was dispensing whup ass in large quantities of kung fu films. Sammo figured that these two tastes would go great together, and that instead of venting his kung fu hissy fits on pig-tailed Ming Dynasty nasties he could resurrect a legion of the undead and start beating them up, too.

And so, ENCOUNTER OF THE SPOOKY KIND, Hong Kong's first modern horror film, was born.

Ground zero of a spooky detonation, ENCOUNTER OF THE SPOOKY KIND combined martial arts with ghosts; made Taoist priests a new kind of leading man; and at the half-hour mark, the coffin creaked open and out rose Hong Kong's first modern on-screen gyonshi: the Hopping Vampire. This rot-faced fiend would be the grand-daddy for thousands, if not millions, of imitators (and would star in his very own Sammo Hung movie four years later: MR. VAMPIRE). There had been ghosts in Hong Kong movies before, but until Sammo Hung wrote, produced, directed and starred in his brainchild, audiences had never seen rotted, desiccated husks un-tomb themselves and - mean as snakes and dusty as a mummy's ass - run after full-figured martial artists only to be kicked into pulp and reanimated yet again with copious applications of chicken blood. It was a revelation.

Because it came first, ENCOUNTER OF THE SPOOKY KIND avoids some of the traps the genre later got its leg caught in. The heroes emerge from their spooky encounters drooling, catatonic wrecks, and the Taoist priests require marathon chanting to raise the dead, an effort that leaves them dehydrated, weak, and kind of crazy. There's a frunky, ethnographic edge to the Taoist rituals, and there's an unhealthy concern with the height of one's altar. But, best of all, Sammo Hung's Stunt Team is in full effect. The front end of the movie is stuffed with ghostly visions and creepy creeps, but the back end is heavy with dust-ups, possession brawls, and faceless flying fiends wielding rusty, razor-sharp pigstickers.

Courageous Cheung (Sammo Hung) is a rickshaw puller who's not the most attentive husband. His wife is up to no good, as we can tell from her high-pitched, whiny voice. His best customer, a local official, is also up to no good. In fact, he's up to no good with Cheung's wife!!! He hires an evil Taoist priest (Peter Chan) to take out Sammo with a hopping vampire, and although he's not entirely successful, that doesn't stop him from dusting off his cherrywood sword and trying again. And again, and again. The evil Taoist priest has a good Taoist priest brother (Chung Fat) who decides to stop the madness, and poor Sammo is stuck in a running black magic battle between the two of them, bouncing back and forth like a big rubber ball and trying to elude the grasp of the tight-butt local constable, Lam Ching-ying, in his first major role.

Like a fabulous evening spent trapped in a museum basement full of flesh-eating zombies, EOTSK evokes in one's heart both the thrill of the new, and the sincere desire not to get killed by monsters. Full of "Dude, that chicken exploded!" moments, it is the first of its kind, the kind of fantastic flick that forces the audience to its feet, chanting "Fight, fatboy! Fight!"