The Musical Vampire

Lou (doesn't rhyme with booh! 👻)3.0

The Musical Vampire doesn't differentiate itself enough from the Mr. Vampire movies (and their countless knockoffs/clones) to make it really worth your time. Yeah, a jiāngshī getting thwarted by music is a fun new plot element, but everything else here we have seen done before (ad nauseum at this point).It doesn't really seem like Lam Ching-Ying is having a good time with the material. Maybe it's because his Taoist priest is more silly than fierce here?The inclusion of Loletta Lee does make up for some of the movie's shortcomings. Sadly she doesn't fellate a Coke bottle here.. :(

conceptualhenry5.0

I didn’t know they were allowed to make movies this good

se13an3.5

Name That Tune, Jiangshu EditionLow budget jiangshu offering, I know it is a low budget jiangshu offering because instead of staring Lam Ching Ying it starts Stanley Fung as the Taoist with the two apprentices who get up to hijinx and whose main characteristic is his nose itches. He must spend half the movie with a finger up his nose, or sneezing, or talking about his nose in this. Poor Stanley Fung, when you have a low budget Hong Kong horror movie in the 90s he was the first on the rolodex. Lam Ching Ying is a guest star, you don’t even meet him until twenty minutes in and then he really doesn’t get involved until half way through the movie when the movie actually starts. The movie has some pacing issues or too many plot threads because it doesn’t really start until after the 45 minute mark. You learn early on the vampire is injected with liquid mad science, which isn’t traditional day-glo green but white like it is being injected with Elmer’s glue, and thus making him impervious to traditional methods of stopping a jiangshu. That happens in the first fifteen minutes but then the plot feels obligated to march through the traditional Mr Vampire plot points of romancing Loletta Lee and dealing with the corrupt cop this time played by Charlie Cho. These feel almost like a distinct movie from the unstoppable jiangshu movie. It goes through the motions marking time before the plot can really start 45 minutes in. For all the complaints I have towards the slapdash plot and pacing go away when Lam Ching Ying is on screen, the middle bit where he pretends to be a jiangshu himself and goes leaping all over the place trying to stop the vampire is a highlight of the movie. Even in the lower end of the jiangshu productions he still brings all his energy and it really turned the movie around for me. A bit sloppy which is a same with a rewrite or two and a bit more polish could have been a great jiangshu movie. It is a really solid idea but it was handled with less care than required but it manages to save itself by having Lam Ching Ying swoop in the second half to save the movie from itself.A Blizzard of Wintery Trash 2024/2025 - 72/89Horrors of 2025 - 076Hopping Mad - Jiangshu Films Ranked