Encounters of the Spooky Kind

Bold Cheung takes a bet and agrees to spend the night in an abandoned temple. What he does not know is that the men who arranged the bet want him dead and that a sorcerer is involved. Sammo Hung directed and starred, and put the hopping dead of Chinese folk belief into a martial arts comedy on this scale for the first time; an entire subgenre came out of it in the years that followed. The fights are built with real martial arts while the horror runs entirely on traditional talismans, rice and cockerel's blood. Hung combines physical comedy with dangerous stunt work, and the temple sequence is the best-paced part of the film. It is one of the marker films of the period when Hong Kong cinema began exporting its own mythology. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong action comedy and the hopping vampire genre. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone of horror.