Sinnui yauman [1987]

Ning Tsai-Shen, a humble tax collector, is forced to spend the night in the notoriously haunted Lan Ro Temple. There he incurs the wrath of ghost-busting Taoist swordsman Yen Che-Hsia by getting in the way during a duel, and happens to fall in love with the mysterious and lovely Nieh Hsao-Tsing. It turns out that Hsao-Tsing is a ghost, bound in fealty to a 100-year-old hermaphrodite tree spirit with a deadly mile-long tongue, and that she has been forced to entrap passing men so the killer tree can suck them of their yang elements. The victims wind up in the cellar, as withered zombie / mummie / vampires. No sooner has Tsai-Shen got used to the idea that his beloved is dead than he suffers the further shock of learning that the evil tree has promised her in marriage to a particularly unpleasant demon, Lord Black, and that he might well have actually to go to Hell to rescue her.

If you've never seen a Chinese horror film before, be prepared to adjust your preconceptions of the genre and be generally astonished. Chinese ghosts leap around, bouncing of walls and trees like pinballs, and are possessed of ridiculous but deadly appendages like the fearsome tongue featured here or the cloud of long-haired, voraciously gnawing severed heads Lord Black unleashes against our hero. You also get a touching romance, spotlighting the winsome charm and very sexy ankles of Wong Tsu Hsien, gorgeous imagery as 20 foot veils flutter in supernatural winds while ghosts flit hither and yon, some farcical comedy involving cowardly humans, more-or-less useless subtitles (for instance 'she's in danger' is translated as 'she's dangerous'), and even a handful of songs. If you've grown tired of western horror movies, this will be a refreshing change of pace; and if you've been following the Chinese splatter scene, this is at least as much fun as Boxer's Omen, Mr Vampire or Chin Siu Tung's earlier The Witch From Nepal.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: City Limits no.329 [21 January 1988] p.25 [UK]

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