Director Hsu-Chiang Chou's first venture into horror The Enchanting Ghost, (Gui wu li ren), takes its narrative from one of the entries in Qing dynasty author Pu Songling's collection of ghost stories Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. One of numerous films in the genre to be produced by The Shawn Brothers that decade, the most noticeable angle taken was in casting Li-Hua Yang as a male "master"; a scholar who gets evicted from his/her family home by a shady uncle, only to stay the night in an alleged haunted house where he/she meets a beautiful female love interest. The gender reversal of the central character is never addressed, so it inadvertently plays out as a lesbian romance between two women that are just trying to live happily in a dilapidated abode without gossipy townsfolk interfering and insisting that Yang's bride is of supernatural origin. While the movie looks lovely and has an amusing theremin score that creates the correct spooky mood, the soundtrack also makes that unfortunately common and annoying mistake of having blaring brass noises every couple of seconds for jump scare purposes. The plot line is also monotonous and despite a lighthearted, macabre atmosphere that suggest otherwise, the supernatural set pieces do not emerge until the third act and lead to a dour, unsatisfactory ending.
Dir - Shan-Hsi Ting
Overall: MEH
An anthology horror outing from one of Hong Kong's lesser known production companies, Blood Reincarnation, (Yinyang jie), seems like a slapdash effort with three unrelated stories of inconsistent length thrown together without a linking narrative. While this was nothing new to the formula, it is jarring that the first segment is just over ten minutes, the second twenty, and the third a whopping hour long. They also vary in tone with the opening story coming off like a barely comprehensible fever dream suffered by a woman in labor, the next a lighthearted vengeful spirit story with a murdered husband inflicting supernatural drowning gags on his wife and her lover, (and making the guy unable to stop peeing), all leading to the final, feature-length tale involving a wrongfully accused doctor who comes back from the dead via the movie's title ritual. As a whole, it is a disjointed mess and begs the question as to why it was structured as such, but there are at least some amusing and surreal moments to be found in the first two tagged-on segments. Sadly, the closing one that gets the prominent emphasis is tortuously sluggish and grows unbearably obnoxious by its conclusion which is nothing more than a repetitive series of melodramatic whaling as characters repeat the same dialog over and over again while inconsolably, (and loudly), crying.
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