April 13: (Evil) Plant Appreciation Day — It ain’t easy being green. Pay tribute to all the plants with a movie starring one of them.

Also known as Haunted House Elf, this Hong Kong/Taiwan crossover has a rich Hong Kong family move to a new home in Taiwan, where poor kid Wang Chi-Chiang convinces Shiao-Ming (Lin Hsiao Lan) and her brother Shiao Tai that the new place is haunted. He’s not kidding, as Tong-Tong, a jiangshi, is hopping around in the basement, stuck there for three hundred years. Then, as if that’s not enough, Shiao-Ming and Chi-Chiang decide to jump into a comic book and battle jungle monsters — A real tiger! A real swamp! Intelligent vines! — and cannibals to rescue a princess. Then, they battle a witch doctor (Wu Ma!) who can transform into a stone idol that spits out skeletons, a tiger, a rat, a dog, a witch, the Monkey King, Dracula and even Jesus, at which point the kids chase him with a cross, yelling “We’ll crucify him!” in total joy.

No, I did not make that up.

There’s also Tong-Tong’s vampire parents, who somehow have finally found him across decades of time.

Lin Hsiao Lan was in a ton of these films — Kung Fu Wonderchild, Magic of Spell — usually as a little boy. She gets to play a little girl this time, even though she was in her 20s when it was filmed. I’m on the side of Chi-Chiang in this, an impoverished half-orphan stuck with a gentrifying neighborhood and rich kids who have it all instead of what he has, which is a drunk dad. So he does what any of us would: he bullies them with tales of the undead.

A movie that steals the theme from The Shining, most of the third Mr. Vampire movie and so many other films to basically jump all over the place and often forget where it’s going. No notes, 10/10.

You can watch this on YouTube.