Spookies

The Mr. Vampire films of the 1980s may be the most familiar examples of a unique Hong Kong subgenre, the knockabout horror comedy. But here, as elsewhere, the true pioneer turns out to be the Fat Dragon, Sammo Hung. He worked out all the basic moves (sticky rice as a ghost repellent; the frantic use of spells scribbled on slips of paper) in this 1980 ghost farce. It's a fancy-dress period film in which a gang of clowns, pretending to be spooks in order to terrorize each other, inadvertently invoke the real thing. Pretty soon everyone in sight (including Sammo's foxy but unfaithful wife) is conjuring up a hopping corpse or a nasty poltergeist, and a supernatural traffic jam ensues. (The same basic idea was recycled, much less effectively, in 1982's The Dead and the Deadly.) Hung's world-class kung fu skills prove to be as well adapted to slapstick horseplay as to knockdown action, and in the best scenes they work both ways at once. In the finale, Hung fights off several attackers as his body is possessed by one ectoplasmic intruder after another, each with a distinct personality. Sammo is never more graceful than when he's pretending to be a clumsy oaf. --David Chute