DAY 8: Zombies!

Pang (Billy Chong), a skilled martial artist, lands a local thug, Lu Dai, in jail after foiling a robbery. Upon his release, a vengeful Lu Dai hires a bumbling Taoist priest named Wu Lung to animate a small army of zombies to take down Pang.

Lu Dai is killed by his own trap, and his ghost haunts the priest, demanding to be resurrected. The priest attempts to put Lu Dai’s spirit into the corpse of a recently deceased serial killer, Kwan Wei Long. Because the killer is so evil, he returns as a powerful, free-willed vampire.

After Pang’s father — the man who trained him brutally all of his life to be a killing machine — dies, the priest tries to use his body to host Lu Dai’s spirit. The ritual is interrupted, resulting in the thug and the father sharing control of the body, forcing Pang to battle his own father’s reanimated corpse while also fighting the vampire.

You may dislike this for being incredibly cheap and for its erratic subtitle translations, such as calling corpses “salted fish.” Not me. I loved it.

Chong (born Chuang Chen Li) had an extensive career in both Hong Kong and Indonesia. Some of his other notable martial arts films include Jade Claw, A Hard Way to Die, Kung Fu Executioner, A Fistful of Talons and Kung Fu Beyond the Grave. Later in his career, he became a major household name in Indonesia, where he wrote, directed, and starred in several popular television series, including Deru Debu and Sapu Jagad.

Why do I love it? It has the balls to rip off Morricone’s Exorcist II: The Heretic score, has someone kick a man’s head clean off his body, and a vampire bad guy who not only comes out to the Bond theme but also has hands on fire. How did they do that effect? They set a man’s hands on fire, that’s how.

Oh yeah — director Shan Hua also made Portrait In Crystal, Bloody Parrot, Dynamo and Inframan. He knew what he was doing.

You can watch this on YouTube.