The last two movies I reviewed here sucked: Monkey Fist Floating Snake was a plodding, boring kung fu movie, and Devil's Dynamite was an abysmal wannabe horror movie starring some kind of jumpsuited loser. I figured I deserved a little reward for having wasted so much time on these crappy flicks, so I took Ant's advice and borrowed a good film from him for a change: Sammo Hung's Spooky Encounters, also sometimes known as Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind. This movie turned out to be the perfect panacea, as it features far better fight scenes than anything in Monkey Fist Floating Snake and far better horror than anything in Devil's Dynamite (although admittedly the horror is all pretty goofy, slapsticky stuff ala Evil Dead 2). It's pretty cool.





The film stars Sammo Hung as Cheung (or Sammy in the English dub, which was what I watched), a good-natured coachman who claims to be the bravest man in town. His boasting leads his drinking buddies to play a prank on him in the beginning of the movie; they dare him to peel an entire apple in front of a mirror without being interrupted, telling him that if he succeeds he'll score whatever he wants but that if he fails, terrible things will happen to him. The prank seems harmless enough (one of his friends impersonates a ghost), but a real ghost shows up in the middle of things and almost drags poor Cheung into the mirror-world. Yikes. Strangely, the scene doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the movie, but I didn't mind; it was funny.

The real story kicks in after this: as it turns out, Cheung's wife -- a shrewish woman who is always putting him down and calling him "pig" -- is cheating on him with one of his rich customers, an older fellow named Master Tam. Tired of sneaking around behind Cheung's back with her, but afraid of what he might do if he catches them together (Cheung's got some kick-ass kung fu skills), Master Tam enlists the aid of an Evil Daoist Priest called Chin Hoi to kill him. Fortunately for Ceung, Chin Hoi's little brother happens to be a Good Daoist Priest named Tsui, and he's willing to help him stay alive. Cheung's first test comes when he foolishly bets a man he can spend a whole night in a certain temple, unaware that it's a trap set by Chin Hoi, who plans to kill him with one of those hopping Chinese vampires. It doesn't work, but the bumbling Cheung somehow gets roped into spending another night at the temple, and things just get worse from there: Master Tam eventually frames him for his wife's murder and has him thrown in jail, and later he winds up spending a night with an inexplicably reanimated corpse.

A few fight scenes later (there's a particularly good sequence at a restaurant between Cheung and a group of swordsmen attempting to arrest him), Tsui decides to make Cheung his student and give him some superpowers in a last-ditch effort to defeat Master Tam and the Evil Daoist Chin Hoi. In the final scenes, they face off at Master Tam's place, where an epic (magical) battle ensues between the brothers and an epic (physical) battle ensues between Cheung and Master Tam. The ending is curt, and more than a little weird, but it works.





The film is funny and fast-paced; it gets right to the point in the beginning and rarely slows down. The action scenes are all pretty fantastic, meanwhile, which shouldn't come as a surprise -- Sammo Hung knows what he's doing. (He pretty much carries the whole film, in fact, with his everyman appeal and manic approach to the comedy). The cinematography, as well, is quite good, and the quality of the film print excellent, considering its age (it was released in 1980).

Oh, and one more thing: the English dub is superb. The voice actors all give enthusiastic, smart performances, particularly the guy who dubs Sammo Hung's voice. Unlike most dubs, the actors seemed much more concerned with communicating meaning than with trying to get their lines to match up perfectly with their characters' mouths, and this results in a very even and sensible dub -- there's no blatantly stupid or grammatically ridiculous lines here. (Incidentally, my favorite line in the movie comes after Master Tam has just watched Chin Hoi cut off a chicken's head and collect its blood in a bowl for one of his insane magic spells. "Eww, that's gross," Master Tam complains. "It's sick." Then he turns to his assistant. "I can't take this shit -- it's getting weird." This, after Chin Hoi has been levitating objects and summoning vampires and doing who knows what else. Ha!)

In short: this one's a keeper. Check it out.

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