Doctor Vampire (1990)
Directed by: Jamie Luk
Written by: Jamie Luk
Starring: Bowie Lam, David Wu, Ellen Chan, Sheila Chan
AKA JIANG SHI YI SHENG
HONG KONG
AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY: NOW, from EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT
RUNNING TIME: 97 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
Dr. Chiang Ta-Tsung, on business in England, unintentionally visits a brothel in the grounds of a castle to find help after his car breaks down. Despite several rather obvious warning signs, he fails to realise that the establishment is staffed entirely by vampires, headed by the Count, who feeds off of his vampire courtesans once they’ve fed off of their male victims. Tsung sees Alice fighting with a client and mistakenly saves her; she sleeps with him. Touched when he tells her he was a virgin, she bites him but doesn’t kill him. The Count feels invigorated by Tsung’s blood, the quality of which he describes as being like ginseng, and demands that she get more of Tsung’s blood. But Tsung has escaped and returned to Hong Kong and his fiancee, where he begins to develop vampiric aspects, while the Count sends Alice after him….
When one thinks of Hong Kong vampires, one automatically thinks of the ones that hop, the Jiangshi of Chinese folklore, but filmgoers over there did occasionally get to see the type that’s more familiar to us westerners onscreen. You may recall my review of Vampire Vs Vampire which was one of the four films in Eureka Entertainment’s great boxset Hopping Mad: The Mr Vampire Sequels, and which featured some more traditionally western vampire elements, though not nearly as many as Doctor Vampire, which will probably remind viewsers more of several American films, most notably Vamp, My Son Is A Vampire and especially Once Bitten, while echoes of a few Hammer Draculas also pervade this uneven but extremely entertaining effort which is essentially a comedy bookended by lengthy sections of more seriousness, the first Gothic horror, the second more martial arts dominated but with a bit of horror included. Confident enough to have its main character try and fail with the hopping and briefly wearing a Jiangshi outfit, not to mention also have its Taoist priest be rather incompetent, the often crude, not to mention un-PC, humour, is patchy but at times really does hit the funny bone, though the performances are often shrill in nature, with even Peter Kjæs the film’s Dracula substitute hamming it up as much as he can and therefore not causing much in the way of fear in the viewer, even though his reappearance three quarters of the way through is when the terror is supposedly ramped up. There’s a distinct slowing of pace around the middle too, though to be fair this is the case with many other Hong Kong movies, and we get some nice twists on familiar conventions and even a fair bit of invention.
We begin with lush shots of the English countryside, before cutting to our Jonathan Harker variant Dr. Tsung’s car breaking down. The story wastes absolutely no time in getting going, though I wouldn’t have minded at all a bit more time before Tsung reaches the castle, perhaps some villagers warning him not to go near the place! Said place seems deserted at first in a nicely atmospheric minute or so before he hears music and is welcomed and all but dragged inside by a woman. He finds himself in a strange cross between an English country pub and a very obvious brothel – well it’s not obvious to him! All Tsung wants is to make a phone call, until, after seeing two men looking suspiciously like they’re being bitten by the women that they’re with, he sees another woman who he thinks is being attacked. In fact the struggle is taking place because he’s her victim and we even see her face go vampiric, though he doesn’t. He “rescues” her though she’ s not very grateful. Then she takes a shine to him and suggests that he go right now because “they bully Chinese people”. “What are you afraid of, they’re just foreigners” he replies, after which we cut to a pill being put in Tsung’s coke. One of those movie drugs which take effect instantly, he feels drowsy and she taker him away “to feel better”. They have sex, and it’s actually his first time, though seeing as he’s drugged can it totally be called consensual? He gives him a pendant he wears around his neck, and she gives him her necklace. “The first time was quite short, but quite fun” he says, to which the reply is “then would you like to try a longer one”? She’s really keen on him, but the sight of the strange man who seems to be her boss watching from a balcony causes her to bite him – but on the penis. It seems that the victims of these vampires generally die, but Tsung is left alive and gets away, though unfortunately this happens offscreen. Why couldn’t this have been shown?
Nonetheless so far it’s all worked fairly well, evoking Hammer: you can really imagine one of their movies beginning like this. The Count ain’t happy that Tsung has got away, particularly because he likes his blood. The blood of his women’s victims ain’t tasting much good anymore, but, when biting at Alice’s wrist, he feels revived, her blood is like Ginseng and makes him “high”, so he orders Alice to go and get Tsung back. However, he’s returned home, to his job as an operation assistant in a hospital. He can proudly tell his two main workmates Kim and Chang that he’s finally got laid, but he can’t say too much because fiancee May also works there and is therefore often around. Tsung settles back into his job but his penny pinching boss [James Wong doing his usual rude shouty act] isn’t happy at there having been not many patients of late and is even going to deduct Tsung’s pay for his time in England. Even worse, Mary notices that a talisman her friend Joy gave her to prevent him cheating is no longer around his neck, smells perfume and sees lipstick, even a blood stain, on Tsung’s clothes, and fails to believe the silly excuse that he gives her, so she asks May, who often relies on a certain Master de Wan to help her out with things, to aid her in catching Tsung out, which shouldn’t be hard because he only lives opposite May. Indeed Tsung, who’s taken to wearing a cape and sun glasses, not to mention waking up floating just under his ceiling, and no longer liking his garlic, soon has to hide Alice, who soon turns up. He soon also needs blood, but thankfully he, Kim and Chang work in a hospital so this should be easy to arrange, yes? And Master de Wan can help out also, can’t he?
A lot of the gags really did make me laugh, such as our trio being surprised twice by nurses, one being Mary, in instances where it looks like they’re having group gay sex. Then there’s the gangster who’s subjected to multiple unnecessary medical operations for very minor things. Of course not everyone will like the section where a vampire with a hard-on goes to bite someone before finding her too ugly, then finds a prettier but supposedly uptight victim who turns out to be a nymphomaniac, in a variation on a gag in Young Frankenstein. At times the antics of Tsung, Kim [who says that he’s had so many women he could have aids] and Chang get a bit tiresome, as well as the interplay between May and Alice, though that’s largely because of the extremely ripe performances by Sheila Chan and Ellen Chang which hardly ever clam down, though to be fair Sheila Chan does display some good comic timing. By contrast, there’s not much serious horror, though there is a nice dream sequence which ends with a shock where we see one half of someone’s face brunt and with an eyeball hanging out, not to mention a woman’s breasts being sliced not once but twice in the climax where the action and the fantasy both hot up, with Chinese Opera, giant syringes which contains some green substance just sitting around in a vat in the hospital , and a statue of Buddha all playing a major part. We get some some pretty good fighting involving most of the main characters, with Peter Kjæ being the star of the show in this respect, pulling off some nice moves and only occasionally looking like he’s being doubled. Seeing as he’s dressed as Dracula and no doubt would have been called Dracula if the first section hadn’t have been set in England [for some reason], it’s very cool for this Dracula fan to basically see him doing Kung Fu.
Despite some inconsistencies and things not being explained, such as these vampires being perfectly healthy in daylight, not to mention the elements taken from western vampire movies, the idea of vampirism is played with in some inventive ways, such as the sit-down-dinner comprised entirely of food and drink made from blood, and when Tsung takes all the clothes out of his wardrobe then lies it down so it’s a coffin to sleep in. I also likes the way that these bloodsuckers don’t just bite people in the neck; the Count goes for the hands of his ladies to feed. They also – or at least some of them – have superpowers, the Count being able to fire lasers out of his eyes. And does this film feature the largest vampire bites in cinema? A lot of foreshadowing is employed, such as an early scene taking place where a stage is being built which will later feature majorly in the climax, though of course we just know that, for example, when a pointed object is stuck in the ground, someone’s going to fall on it. What we don’t understand is how Mat fails to notice that her boyfriend is gradually getting whiter and whiter. But then this is a film where, on occasion, performers actually seem to be trying not to laugh onscreen, while May isn’t really that. One can respect a couple’s decision to wait until marriage before sex, but Tsung and May have been together for ten years and she’s still making him wait. Small wonder perhaps that she’s paranoid about him cheating. We could have done with more scenes of May and Alice together, seeing how total opposites they are.
Seemingly shot mostly on location, with cinematographer Jim Yeung doing a good job throughout and here showing a penchant for high angle shots, and a solid musical score from Alan Tsi which plays a variation on John Carpenter’s Halloween theme at one point, Doctor Vampire is a rather intriguing film for vampire lovers and deserves to be more widely seen for that fact alone, ignoring the fact that it’s often just pretty funny!
SPECIAL FEATURES
Limited Edition (2000 copies)
Limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Graham Humphreys (2000 copies)
1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a brand new 2K restoration
Shout! Factory released this in North America last year, and Eureka have probably used the same restoration but given it a new encode. The colours pop out and blacks are strong. Grain is more plentiful towards the end and in a few scattered shots earlier, though the opticals look better than you might expect.
Optional English subtitles, newly translated for this release
This film was barely released internationally so therefore didn’t get an English dub, though these original tracks [which aren’t very different from each other] contain a mix of post-dubbed Cantonese and very badly acted English.
New audio commentary with East Asian film experts Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and John Charles
Djeng tends to have good interaction with all of his commentary collaborators, and Charles, whom I last heard, appropriately, on the Mr Vampire 3 disc from Eureka in their Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels set, is no exception. As is often the case, Djeng leads, and provides the biographies of the people involved; I sometimes moan when talk tracks are full of these things, and this one does have a lot, but I knew very little about many of these folk so I was more interested than I normally would have been. Djeng also typically points out things that us westerners wouldn’t pick up on, such as Tsung’s name being a play on David Chiang’s Chinese name, discusses box office – this film only came 92 in the charts and you can guess who was both 1 and 2 – and tries to answer why ghosts are banned in Chinese movies but not vampires. Meanwhile Charles says how the mainland Chinese version blurred Alice’s bare shoulder and had the gory shots in black and white – the latter being something they often did on TV, properly translates an insult on the subtitles from “sissy” to “ass goat”, and makes a minor mistake by saying that Hammer films often had vampires climbing up walls; it only actually happened once. I say this as a huge Hammer fan! This is still a great commentary!
New audio commentary with Hong Kong cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema
The above track was only sometimes screen specific; this one is even less so. Nonetheless Leeder and Venema provide their usual light-hearted conversation; watching these tracks with little gap between them often makes it seem as if I’ve had a couple of drinks by the time I commence the second one – and I most certainly don’t mean that in a bad way. In addition to covering a few careers in greater detail than in the previous track, Leeder corrects some false IMDB details of Ellen Chan who he once saw training hard in a gym and was given a – shall we say? – glimpse, translates the afore-mentioned insult into something else – “bottom ghost” – and says that ghosts were banned onscreen in China [though this was often got around] because they were “promoting superstition” which the Communists hated, Meanwhile Venema reveals that three separate English locations formed the Count’s lair, recalls a time at a hospital where police suddenly swarmed the place and loads of cut up Triads were wheeled in, and wonders why this wasn’t a Category 3 film. The pair are as fun to spend time with as ever.
A British Vampire in Hong Kong – new on-camera interview with Stacey Abbott, author of Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World [20 mins]
This featurette sees Doctor Vampire as existing in an important transitional period for the vampire movie, when a cycle of often youth-orientated films which were very knowing about conventions were being replaced by a more action-orientated approach, and where filmmakers were borrowing tropes from the films of other cultures which brought with it themes of uncertainty, such as the idea of people returning form foreign places having changed for the worse, while this film showing a triumph of traditional Chinese values over foreign influence, the latter being something that dominated the country for many decades in the past. Abbott provides a lot of context and thematic material to digest.
Vampire Slaying 101: Remixing Monster Traditions in “Doctor Vampire” – new video essay by gothic scholar Mary Going [22 mins]
Here, we have discussed the differing way of how to deal with vampires in different countries, which often differ but also often mix and match, with Doctor Vampire offering an odd mixture of borrowing some tropes and ignoring others. Faith and ability to just do things properly are usually key, though concerning the first point, I’m surprised that Going didn’t mention the scene in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave where an atheist can‘t kill Dracula with a stake, seeing as she looks at similar moments, but, for balance, I hadn’t noticed that the Count loving Tsung’s blood could be a “critique of a racist and colonialist tendency to fetishise Eastern objects in the West”. And I learned of an American film from 1989 called The Jitters which has hopping vampires. Need to see!
A limited edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing on Hong Kong vampire films from “Mr Vampire” to “Doctor Vampire” by East Asian horror expert Katarzyna Ancuta (2000 copies)
While no classic, there’s plenty of interest in this comedy-with-some-horror-and-action, and it receives the usual strong Eureka treatment. Recommended!
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