Sunday Matinee Premiere

Welcome, folks. Pull up a chair, lounge, bed, or pew - as suits you best - and settle in for our first weekend movie matinee. It will come as no great surprise to those who read the post for the 8th of this month that our star is Lam Ching-Ying in the movie that made him an international star. In fact, it almost made him a star in the USA, too. It was being remade with a couple of Hollywood actors brought over to join Lam Sifu in a Western edition. But they both turned out to be such whiny bitches, complaining about not getting the lavish Hollywood treatment and having to work with people who spoke Chinese instead of English (in China!) that the studio heads basically said, "Fuck this- kill it."*  So...   No Hopping Vampires For You!
That was 1989.

Meanwhile, back in 1985...

In this film, Lam Ching-Ying plays the iconic character type he developed with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo in Close Encounters Of The Spooky Kind II (AKA Spooky Encounters 2 AKA Spooky Encounters, and then it starts getting confusing). Uncle Kau is a Taoist running the local mortuary.
Now, one of the fun things about starting to watch Hong Kong Spooky Comedies, or other supernatural films from HK/China, is learning a whole new set of rules. Crosses against Vampires? Garlic? Running water? Throw all that stuff out. Add in Chinese legend & tradition, and you wind up with...

Man Choi (Man Chor), one of Sifu's assistants, is feeding incense smoke to the unburied dead.

Those yellow slips of paper are Talismans - prayers magically inscribed on the slips to keep the Kyonshi (Jiangshi) at rest. Without them, they might get hungry and start hopping around in search of living blood.
You might wonder about the way the dead are dressed. Rather than dressing as one did in life, they are buried garbed to meet their ancestors in clothing honoring them. So you'll see this type of outfit on most hopping vampires.

One thing similar between Eastern & Western vampires (beyond the obvious blood drinking) is the fact that they're pretty damn strong-

There's new sets of tools to use...

...as you might suspect, the first ingredients are for preparing talismans as seen above.
Another useful tool is the I-Ching Mirror, used to reflect evil spirits and capable of turning back the undead:

This movie doesn't get into the blood of black dogs or the urine of virgin boys, but we'll get some more lore as we go along. (But don't be fooled, we're not doing the whole movie here, only the opening and teases - go watch it!)

After some opening antics with Sifu's too playful assistants, we find Sifu heading to a meeting that sets up the events of the film. This sets up the semi-nebulous time frame of the movie, with the Colonial Tea Room giving something of an anchor to the rather timeless Chinese village life of much of the tale.

As it turns out, his father was buried in a manner designed to curse the family, and it was doing a pretty good job of it. At least the fortune teller who gave the advice told the family to rebury in 20 years so he only ruined one generation, eh? So, we're off to pull the (atypically vertical) coffin, but when opened, birds fly, a black cloud dissipates, and in the coffin...

...it's Yuen Wah! He's one of the Seven Little Fortunes, like Sammo and Jackie Chan, and he's always great. He's been all over, often as a villain, but might most likely be familiar from Stephen Chow Sing-Chi's 2004 film, Kung Fu Hustle. He was the lecherous husband of the legendary kung fu couple hiding out as apartment managers.

Sifu's assistants hustle the body back to the mortuary, but even they are bothered by it...

Those are stabbing nails. Definitely not a good sign.

Mr. Vampire is also an educational film in more than just lore. For instance, how to extract a poison gland from a snake when needed as an ingredient:

Another lesson is how to make an inkpot with (very) fresh chicken blood. This ink is painfully repellent to the undead, and Sifu has his boys seal the coffin with an inked grid. But, being young, foolish, and eager to go play, they didn't seal the bottom...

Of course, the first thing a kyonshi is likely to go for is family. I'm guessing especially family that had him buried in a cursed manner. The next morning...

Which leads us to seeing just what a sleazebag his nephew, the local police chief and luster of cousins, can be...

He's being played by Billy Lau, a very funny actor generally typed as playing sleazebags, dickheads, and assholes, and he does it with gleeful abandon. Of course, he's not the cop you want when you need one...

Unsurprisingly, he winds up arresting the only person who has a clue what's going on. Before he's taken away, he has a few quick words of warning for his assistants...

There's another bit of important lore. If a kyonshi is hunting you, Hold Your Breath! It's almost like a Doctor Who creature gimmick, eh?
But, you see, the undead don't typically have fully functional  eyes and so they detect the living by their breathing. I mentioned in a previous post how they like to dance around the line between horror and comedy in the Spooky Comedy genre, and this tradition can be the source of a great deal of such skipping back & forth. Like when Sifu accidentally gets his head stuck between the bars of his cell while a fresh corpse is stalking his first prey...

How will Lam Sifu deal with the Vampires?
With style, by the gods!

I mentioned previously that Lam Ching-Ying was a Wing Chun master, and that gave him an incredible precision of movement for his spells and rituals. Just being able to casually, with fluidly smooth movements, just stick his finger into a bowl of rice, pull up a single grain, run his finger through a candle to catch it on fire and flick it into the chicken blood ink mix to catalyze the potion...

...that precision gave him an almost unEarthly quality, especially combined with his bottomless font of wisdom in matters arcane. And this was a large part of why he was my #1 choice to play Doctor Strange while he yet lived.

And Sifu's assistants? Well, Chin Siu-Ho is one of my favorite assistants for Lam Sifu (and brother to Chin Kar-Lok, whom we saw as the Green Hornet in the Video Whozit quiz).
His character, Sang, is clever...

...and Ricky Hui's Choi is brave...

Yeah, it's gonna be a mess...

Besides having to deal with Mr. Vampire and any corpses he sets to walking, Sifu's got to cope with his own assistants and we've got a Lovely Ghost story going on. (That's a tradition we'll get to at another time, because entire movies are wrapped around that concept, going back to Pu Song-Ling's writings in his Liao Zhai Zhi yi.)

Moon Lee and Pauline Wong Siu-Fung, our lovely leading ladies, are barely seen here but both delights in their roles.

Mixing martial arts, Taoist magicks, and arcane knowledge to combat undead, ghostly and demonic menaces, Lam Ching-Ying creates a fun movie, sparks a genre and makes himself a star. Not a bad way to introduce yourself to his films. Mr. Vampire launched a host of sequels, including Mr. Vampire 2, Mr. Vampire3, Mr. Vampire 4, Magic Cop (My favorite), Mr. Vampire 1992, New Mr. Vampire, etc.,...

But, don't make the common mistake of thinking that's all there is to his works. They may have been his most popular characters ( He was about to start the third season of his Vampire Priest tv series when he died) but he's also played everything from chain-swinging supercop to maniacal military officer to tragic pedicab driver.

Here's the DVD cover, and the original Hong Kong movie poster for your bonus enjoyments-

frames from Mr. Vampire (1985)

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*(The actual quote is more akin to "We've barely begun. There's no reason to finish.")

Hero Of This World, And The Next

27 December 1951 - 8 November 1997

Today, as you might note above, is the 20th anniversary of the death of my favorite movie star. And you've probably never heard of him if you live in the USA. You may also have noticed that his birthday is seven weeks away. We'll be spending some time during the next seven weeks taking a look at some of his works. But today, let me introduce you to Lam Ching-Ying:

In the 1990s, he was my first choice to play Doctor Strange

While probably unfamiliar to you, you likely have actually seen his work. Well, indirectly, you've almost certainly seen his work. Behind the camera, he also trained others, including transforming Michelle Yeoh from a dancer into the top female action star in the world. But, while you probably never noticed his face behind John Saxon in the audience, you did see him fight in this little movie:

Shek Kin, the big villain of the film, was rather old by this time. Lam Ching-Ying is the one you see fighting Bruce Lee whenever you can't see his face clearly. Of course, since he was also Lee's fight coordinator, that wasn't really a stretch for him. You can see him in The Big Boss and Lee's other films, but where you should be seeing him is in his own films, and his work with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo. (Americans - remember that fat Chinese cop show from the 90s with the amazing action that made a joke of how Walker, Texas Ranger was filmed in the following hour? That was Sammo Hung.)
My favorite Lam Ching-Ying movie is probably the 5th in the Mr. Vampire series - Magic Cop:

He we have a modern cop who is also a Taoist, fighting a Japanese sorceress using undead thugs and evil magicks. It's a glorious mix of physical action and visual insanity. Lam Sifu was a master of Wing Chun (some of the finest on film is his work in The Prodigal Son) and his skills are on display again Billy Chow Bei-Lei (Billy Chong above) in fights, as well as the almost enearhtly precision it brings to his moves in magic rituals. We'll look more closely at Magic Cop later, most certainly.
But, for now, let's look at the life of Lam Ching Ying. Presented here is the biography i was able to assemble for my previous tribute site, from which the title of this post is derived.

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Lam Ching-Ying was born as Lam Gun-Bo in the year of the dragon on December 27th, 1952 in Hong Kong. (Shanghai? I've found conflicting reports.) He was the third of seven children, with one elder brother whose name is unknown to me, and an elder sister named Ling-Chu. His younger siblings include two sisters, Bo-Chu and Wai-Chun, a brother named Chun-Hung, and one more of whom nothing is known to me.
He studied for 2 years at the Shun Yi Association Elementary School in Hong Kong before leaving school. About 1963-4 he joined what is usually refered to as the "other" Peking Opera School; that of Madame Fan Fok Fa (Fun Guk Fa). He studied at Fun Guk Fa's Chu Chau Opera School for 5 years, where he began his lifelong friendships with John Lone, Mang Hoi and Stephen Tung-Wai among several others. Less than a year later, he began to appear in his first public performance, White Beach. Madame is reported to have said that young Gun-Bo was disobedient, beyond her ability to handle. But he obviously learned more than she may have realized while her student.

At 17, he began his professional career as a stuntman and martial coach at Shaw Brothers. The slender build that had led to his playing many roles as females and old men at the opera school now served him as he doubled for female stars, as he did for Cheng Pei-Pei in his first movie, Gold (Silken?) Sabre Big Hero (Gum Doe Dai Hup) in which he appears onscreen as a young monk. He received a salary of HK$60 per day working on this movie, HK$20 of which went to his mentor. Half of what remained Lam spent on his "brothers" in those early times, a time that he once recalled as his happiest days.

Lam Ching-Ying in The Big Boss Lam Ching-Ying
In just two years he began Action directing, starting with Fist Of Fury (The Chinese Connection) in 1972 with Hong Ying-Kit. He was hand picked by Bruce Lee Siu-Lung as his assistant as well. On Enter The Dragon, Bruce insisted Raymond Chow bring Lam Ching-Ying in from Korea to serve as Action Director. He AD'd (with Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, with whom he would later share several HKFA nominations and wins) on all of Bruce's Hong Kong productions excepting Return Of The Dragon. He also had a supporting role in Lee's The Big Boss. Production on The Big Boss was delayed when he was arrested in Hong Kong for fighting.

Although from different schools, he was close friends with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo (close enough for Sammo to be there when he was arrested at some point when they were young - was this the Big Boss incident referred to above?)) and was a core member of the Hung Kar Pan (Hung Ga Ban), Samo's legendary action direction and stunt team. About this time (the mid-1970s) he moved from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest, where Sammo was under contract, and he was a stuntman/actor in many of their best films of the period, including such Sammo films as Enter The Fat Dragon, Warriors Two and Magnificent Butcher.

Lam Ching-Ying in The Prodigal Son Lam Ching-Ying
In 1981 the Hong Kong Film Award was created, and only a year later, in 1982 Lam Ching-Ying won his first for Action Direction on The Prodigal Son with Samo Hung Kam-Bo, Yuen Biao, and Billy Chan Wui-Ngai. Prodigal Son also picked up a Best Picture nomination, due in no small part to the work of the Hung Kar Pan. The following year the same team was nominated for another Best Action award for their work on The Dead And The Deadly (which was also nominated for Best Picture), but they lost out to Winners And Sinners. But, since the action team on Winners And Sinners was Lam Ching-Ying, Yuen Biao and Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, it wasn't really much of a loss, was it? More like a two-fold win.

Lam Ching-Ying in one of his earlier Taoist Ghostbuster roles. Lam Ching-Ying
He continued acting as well, appearing in a wide variety of roles over his career ranging from psychopathic villains to noble heroes to professional soldiers and weary men. Even his cameo roles in movies such as Pedicab Driver were memorable, but it wasn't until he began to play his "Eternal Sifu" character in Hocus Pocus that he began to ascend to international stardom. Movies like Close Encounter Of The Spooky Kind 2 and Mr. Vampire ensured his place in the cinematic heavens. In 1985, Lam Ching-Ying was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor HKFA, and Mr. Vampire for best picture. After that Lam became rather typecast in the role, appearing in many movies and two TV series playing his all-knowing Vampire Buster. Although this led to difficulty securing other roles, you couldn't tell it from his performances. Even in the worst of his films, Lam is always top notch, even if the rest of the material or production isn't.

1985 was a good year for Lam Ching-Ying. Besides his great success with Mr. Vampire and booming theatrical career, he and his then wife, Cheng Bing-Bing had their first child - a daughter whose name is, unfortunately, unknown to me. Three years later they had a son, Ka-Yiu. Both children were fans of his work and reportedly collected his films on video tape. (Not at that point in time, of course, but later when old enough to do so.)

Somewhere around this time the Western world missed out on a tremendous oppurtunity. At Golden Harvest, David Chan decided that with the phenomenal success of his recent films the time was right to make an English language version of Mr. Vampire starring, of course, Lam Ching-Ying. The film went into production with the title Demon Hunters, and American actors Tanya Roberts and Jack Scalia were brought in to co-star. Unfortunately, the project rapidly fell apart. The production was plagued with difficulties, not the least of which were the Hollywood actors doing their best to play the part of Ugly Americans, with Tanya Robert's ego out of control Jack Scalia's inability to cope with Lam Ching-Ying's lack of English. Sadly, after viewing the dailies and reviewing the situation, Raymond Chow shut production down and we were all poorer for it. And after the unpleasant experience Lam Ching-Ying turned his back on the foreign film market. I still wonder at times what might have happened if he had become one of the early break-out stars from Hong Kong in Hollywood had the production been the smashing success it should have been... >sigh!< ... ah, well. And so it goes.

In 1988, Lam began his directing career with One Eyebrow Priest, a character he co-created (with Chua Lam) and portrayed on camera for the Dai Lo Film company the team co-created. Because production ran over budget, Lam didn't receive his director's fee on this one. But since it was his own company, that was probably his decision, at least in part.

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His martial coaching of actors continued as well, including helping to turn dancer Michelle Yeoh into the top female action star in the world, and mentoring rising star Chin Kar-Lok as a martial arts coach.

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In 1991, Lam Ching-Ying opened a bar in Sai Gung, where his parents and brothers reside.

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In 1993, Ching-Ying divorced from Cheng Bing Bing.

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In 1995, ATV approached him about developing a series based on his Taoist Priest character for television. Far from his early salary of $60 dollars a day, he signed a $1,000,000 deal to do this series, Vampire Expert (Geung Si Doe Jeung) which earned some rave reviews and spawned two sequels.

Lam Ching-Ying from Vampire Expert 2 Lam Ching-Ying (Vampire Expert 2)
Early in 1996, while filming Vampire Expert 2 (Geung Si Doe Jeung 2) for ATV, Lam Ching-Ying became romanticly involved with Yuen King-Tan, an actress on the series with whom he had first started to develop feelings the previous year during filming Vampire Expert. During the filming of the series, she moved from her home in Happy Valley to Sai Gung so she could be near Lam Ching-Ying.
Later that year he starred in another series, Coincidentally (Dun Jeuk Nei Wui Loi), and the following year he was featured in the series Flower Monk (Fa Wor Seung). He was signed to do a third Vampire Priest series at the time of his death, but the world was denied that pleasure. ATV, the network that was home to the Vampire priest series, aired a one hour special on Lam Ching-Ying in the month following his passing.

In 1997, Lam Ching-Ying developed Liver Cancer. A quiet and private man, Lam asked his family not to reveal his illness to the public to avoid suffering the sympathy of others. He dissappeared from the public eye and sought seclusion as he received herbal treatment for his condition. The more he deteriorated, the less he wanted others, his loved ones included, to see him. In early October, as Lam Sifu was succumbing to his illness, he tried to send Yuen King-Tan from his side, asking her to move from his Sai Gung home, but she refused to leave him. Instead, he retreated to his sisters house, where he remained until slipping into a partial coma at the beginning of November. In the last weeks, even his children were declined visits, Lam not wanting to scare them with his current state. He spent his remaining days at St. Theresa's Hospital in Kowloon until he passed away on the 8th; much, much too soon.

His liver cancer has been missreported as due to drinking, but it actually came on quite sudden, and is hereditary in his family. Ching-Ying's older brother had died of liver cancer earlier in the year.


On November 13th, 1997, just past 7:00 in the evening, 50 Buddhist Monks began a 3 hour prayer ceremony to honor Lam Ching-Ying's exit from this world. His ex-wife and children, his girlfriend and his many friends were in attendance, as well as the press, of course. Yuen King-Tan had to sneak in to the funeral, and Jackie Chan entered and exited through the back. Offerings on the altar included cigarettes, mushroom and vegetable dishes, fruits and cakes. Not on the altar were a large variety of paper offerings, the "Lam Gun Bo Mansion 1997" - a two-story high garden mansion resembling Lam Ching-Ying's residence in Tai Po, and his favorite priest shoes and top hat.

Pallbearers were Wu Ma, Samo Hung Kam-Bo, Cheung Wing-Hong, Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, Chin Kar-Lok on the right and Yeung Siu-Hung, Chin Yuet-Sun, Lee King-Chu, Ng Ming-Choi, and Chung Fat on the left. Lam Sifu was cremated, and his ashes returned to the United States, with Cheng Bing Bing and his children, for burial with his favorite clothing & sunglasses, and a caligraphy of One Smile Returns To The West from Chua Lam.

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Sifu, You are missed.

Join us over the next several weeks for less words and more pictures, maybe a game or two. Heck, you got your old NES emulators handy? I'll see if i can't dig out the ROM for the video game based on his undead fighting Taoist Priest movies - 

(found it)