80's Asian Horror Part Sixteen

THE GATE OF HELL

(1981)
Dir - Pao Lun-Lu
Overall: MEH

Beginning as Hong Kong's answer to the early 80s slasher boom with a bunch of college students camping in the woods, (and running into a local yokel spouting ominous warnings, this one played by the country's perpetually never funny and cross-eyed character actor Tan Wan Yue), The Gate of Hell, (Gui Ho, The Gates of the Hell), ultimately ends up being a Gothic vampire film, albeit one with a contemporary setting.  The first of only two movies from director Pao Lun-Lu that was made for the short-lived Yee Lung Film Company, it was allegedly shot in 1977 and features both local and Caucasian actors, which furthers its trajectory as an Easter and Western hybrid of genre styles.  Despite some colorful lighting, gloomy set design, and spooky music, the film is unintentionally moronic and wretchedly paced.  Warwick Evan's undead baddie occasionally speaks in a hilarious accent, but he usually just groans really loud at people, plus the dubbed dialog for all involved is particularly lousy.  Pao Lun's screenplay is too bare bones for its own good and his amatuerish chops from behind the lens simply cannot sustain people slowly walking around and sporadically getting also slowly attacked by blood-suckers.

 

REIBYO DENSETSU

(1983)

Dir - Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Overall: MEH

 

The 100th episode of the Tuesday Night Suspense Theatre television series, Reibyo densetsu, (Legend of the Cat Monster), is an incomprehensible melodrama instead of a conventional kaidan ghost story as the title would suggest.  Not that director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi would ever make something that could be described as "conventional" and even for a TV movie, he interjects his usual brand of head-scratching narrative choices, except strips them of their otherworldly wackiness.  What is left is meandering nostalgia and incoherence, sort of like an arthouse version of Billy Wilder's seminal Sunset Boulevard with only some mild supernatural feline mischief occurring in the last fifteen minutes.  While there are interesting ideas here hovering on the surface, (such as people being haunted by their happier days and those who are infatuated by their perceived admiration for a bygone era that they were never a part of), the presentation is frustrating and inadvertently boring.  As is always the case, Ôbayashi allows for whimsical romantic music to play uninterrupted throughout the entire thing, even when he punctuates it with startling piano screeches and introduces more surreal elements.  This makes such scenes go by unnoticed as it all feels stuck in a flowery haze, with characters endlessly repeating themselves and bringing us no further to unlocking whatever is going on here.

ABRACADABRA

(1986)

Dir - Tai-Kit Mak

Overall: MEH

 

Hong Kong loved their horror comedies and Abracadabra, (Tian ling ling, di ling ling), from director Tai-Kit Mak and producer Raymond Wong fits in line with dopey/never-funny humor and ridiculous supernatural set pieces.  It opens strong with a crack team of ninjas who arrive at a construction site to trap a bunch of pesky jumping ghosts in a mirror.  They do this with flips, rope nets, and by sticking swastikas to the spectre's faces because sure why not?  Sadly though, the proceeding movie is not kung-fu mercenaries vs the undead as they are never seen again.  Instead, this settles into a bunch of annoying scaredy-cat young adults who work at a mall and find said possessed mirror.  Besides barely being worth paying attention to, the story is monotonous and lacking in imagination.  A ghost lady called Pinkish Red just invisibly toys with our protagonists for no other reason than to have something "funny" happen, and this goes on for at least a hour until we venture into a colorful and macabre underworld where now the good guys have found a way to be invisible and tip-toe around while making dumb faces.  The budget is thankfully sufficient enough to afford some solid set design, as well as one quick moment where a ghost's face is melted off with a blow-dryer because electricity is deadly to the dead in this universe, but this is otherwise cutesy, juvenile, and forgettable stuff.