Vampire Strikes Back
Director: Wang Chih-cheng
Year: 1989
Rating: 6.0
Aka - The HK Database
says this is the Tai Seng video title but they have it as Chivalric Tornado
- also Chess Boxing Matrix also Labyrinth of Death. And the year released
as 1989. It was produced in Taiwan. Very confusing.
What a bizarre film. Even for a vampire
movie. Even for a HK vampire movie. It was almost incomprehensible.
This was possibly due to the subtitles often falling below the screen, but
I don’t really think that mattered all that much in this case. But I will
try to explain what little I understood anyway. The film starts off in ancient
times in a castle and a cute little hopping vampire kid is trapped and being
used as bait for his parents. The vampire parents show up and are about to
be killed when a good fairy type shows up and saves them - explaining that
it is not nice to kill poor vampires. Instead, she transports them to a cave
and imprisons them in comfy coffins. At the same time, this good fairy
battles the Evil King who is also a vampire and imprisons him in the cave
- but in a not so comfy hole in the ground.
Seven hundred years pass and a Taoist priest
and his tamed vampires (he teaches them to play mahjong with him) wanders
into the cave and accidentally frees the Evil King and the vampire family.
From that point on there is practically nothing but fighting, flying, magic,
monsters and lots of other stuff. People join in the fight on the good side
and on the bad side. The vampire family is actually good with the little
kid spending most of the film yelling out “Mommy, daddy help me”. When some
of the bad guys are killed they turn into bats or tarantulas. Strange, but
kind of fun.
