Will Sorg-
In movies, cheating on one’s partner is often shown as the final straw that ends a relationship. This is justifiably so; cheating is a horrible betrayal of trust and can be the cause of lifelong trauma or anxiety. However, it is rare that cheating in films sets off a series of events that lead to the other person having to fight hopping undead creatures psychically controlled by a priest who was hired by your boss to kill you so it would not be found out that your boss was sleeping with your wife. This is, however, the general scenario of Encounters of The Spooky Kind.
Encounters of The Spooky Kind is a 1980 martial arts horror masterpiece by Sammo Hung. Hung is a Hong Kong director, actor, producer, fight choreographer, and a highly respected martial artist. Hung is known in some circles as “Dai Goh Dai” (Biggest Brother) for his contribution to martial arts film and the way he has continually supported the genre and tradition and helped it grow. One of the stranger contributions to film by Hung is the popularization of Hong Kong Jiangshi films. Jiangshi are undead creatures from Chinese mythology that are controlled by Taoist priests and are usually equated to the Western folklore of vampires. After this film, which features the famed hopping vampires, there was a surge of martial arts horror comedies about Jiangshi. So what made Encounters of The Spooky Kind so appealing to Hong Kong audiences?
To start, Hung is a remarkably talented martial artist, although he may not fit the typical archetype of the lithe, calm and collected combatant he brings a level of talent and pure energy that is hard to find in nearly any actor or stuntman beyond the best of the best. The stunt work and fight choreography in this film is unbelievably entertaining with a lot of the fight scenes being some of the best action I’ve seen in a movie. This coming from a low-budget comedy film about hopping vampires makes the film not only visually and technically appealing, but also hilarious.
Hung stars as the lead character, an oafish man named Cheung who is the victim of the previously mentioned attempted murders via hopping, psychically controlled vampires. The whole film is oddly convoluted for its simple set up and there isn’t a good acting performance in the whole thing, but that does not matter. This is spectacle and comedy before anything else and it nails both of those wonderfully. There are so many scenes that have awe-inspiring martial arts that are also side-splittingly funny and to me, that is a mark that this movie knows exactly what it’s doing and succeeds wonderfully. Very few genres can pull off a fight scene involving monkey/god possession without making it devoid of anything but shock humor and yet martial arts films and their inherent goofiness make it so that it never feels out of place when Sammo Hung has to hold onto rafter by his legs and comically twist his body around to keep a hopping vampire from seeing him.
This is a great film to watch if you need an hour and forty minutes of easy entertainment, and October is the perfect time to see it. The Jiangshi are genuinely cool-looking monsters and while there are plenty of comical moments with them they also always keep a level of seriousness in their portrayal. I know this has hooked me on Hong Kong Jiangshi films, there’s a kind of fun that’s hard to find in non-martial arts action films and while I don’t love it all the time, it’s hard to not love watching a rigor mortis beset vampire battle Sammo Hung with the seriousness of a Scooby-Doo episode.