The Bride from Hell
Marriage is rarely an easy road. There are many
misunderstandings, irritations, issues with the wider family and adjustments
have to be made over time. In one of my favorite lines from Elvis Costello,
he sings “Two little Hitler’s will fight it out; until one little Hitler
does the other one’s will”. This is especially true if the newly married
couple doesn’t really know each other all that well before taking their
wedding vows. That is certainly the case in this 1971 Shaw film. They meet,
they fall in love and get married faster than it takes to prepare a can
of instant soup. For example, the husband knows very little about his new
wife’s background – nothing about her family, her education, her habits,
her political party, her favorite color, what flowers she likes or if she
is an Aaron Kwok fan – and he also missed the small fact that she has been
dead for twenty years and is a ghost coming back for revenge. These are
the kinds of things that they need to work out if this marriage is to last.
But they have love so everything is possible.
Yunpeng (Yang Fang) and his manservant Dahuozi
(Got Siu Bo/Ko Saio Pao) are on their way home in the countryside one evening
when it begins to get dark and worried about robbers or ghosts they go
up to a house and ask the maid (Carrie Ku Mei) for lodging for the evening.
Without receiving permission they still make themselves at home – but before
going to sleep for the night decide to snoop around. Yunpeng walks into
the bedroom of the mistress of the house and chances upon her naked form
in bed. Oops he says sorry about that – and Anu (Margaret Hsing Hui) replies
– hey I am still a virgin and you have ruined my reputation by having seen
my naked body. Now of course he has to marry her – fortunately for him
she is a bit of a hottie, which probably made the decision a whole lot
easier. Meantime, the servant has done the same thing with the maid and
they too agree to get married. This sure is easier than Internet dating.
So they rush back to his home and get married
immediately – Anu behind the wedding veil of course and when he finally
presents her to all of his uncles and aunts, they get up and run out of
the house. Was it something I said? No they were simply able to see the
ghost in her – the green coloring is always a dead giveaway – also the
fact that three of them were responsible for killing and raping her (in
that order) twenty years ago was a good clue. But no one bothers to tell
Yunpeng – the husband is always the last to know. So they go about their
happy home life until a Taoist priest (Seung Fung) tells him that from
the dark shadows under his eyes he must be hooked up with a ghost. But
Yunping doesn’t really seem to mind all that much – everyone has their
faults. Still when his uncles begin to die and they try and burn her at
the stake he begins to wonder if this is such a good thing – a ghost is
one thing but a revengeful ghost is quite another matter – what will the
neighbors think. So their bonds of love will have to be tested, as is the
case from time to time for all married couples. One small helpful hint
for all those who may suspect that they are married to a ghost – bite yourself
and spit the blood on your spouse – if they shriek in pain you may be getting
it on with a dead person.
This film has the feel of a complete throwaway
from the Shaw Brothers – it clocks in at around 75 minutes, the production
values are rock bottom for the Shaws, the special effects are dreadful
and generally consist of giving her a green bad meal glow and the actors
are definitely on their “B” list. There isn’t anything good to say about
the script either – it still feels long at its running time and generates
zero excitement or tension. I am surprised Margaret didn’t use being in
this film as part of her defense years later when she was tried for killing
her mother. Another interesting actor within the cast is Carrie Ku Mei
– she was a very popular singer in the 1950’s – got into film – then for
a while she made films for the Thai film industry before returning to Hong
Kong. She provides the singing voice for Betty Loh Ti in the Chinese film
opera “Dream of the Red Chamber” and was the singing voice in other films
as well. Her brother was Joseph Koo who was one of the biggest composers
of Cantopop and wrote many music scores for films also – four of which
were Bruce Lee films.
I suppose though that one has to give the film
some credit for simply covering the subject matter that it does. Ghost
stories were not the huge staple of Hong Kong films back in 1971 that they
are now. According to the HKIFF book “Phantoms of Hong Kong Cinema”, ghost
movies in the 1950’s and 60’s were quite rare and often in the end they
denied that ghosts even existed – i.e. it turned out to be a person pretending
to be a ghost. It states, “Mandarin cinema shared with its Cantonese counterpart,
the same psychological reservations towards the horror genre”. It wasn’t
until after the world wide popularity of “The Exorcist” in 1974 that Hong
Kong cinema took this genre to heart and it wasn’t really until the 1980’s
when the supernatural took a hold of popular cinema with films like “Encounter
of the Spooky Kind”, “The Dead and the Deadly” and a little later the series
of Mr. Vampire films. Prior to this film one of the best-known ghost films
was the 1960 “The Enchanting Shadow” that had been culled from the stories
of Pu Songling. This film falls into that same tradition that the book
terms “Liaozhai” after Pu’s book of short stories. In these a man often
falls for a beautiful female ghost and is opposed by society – often in
the form of a Taoist priest – this same theme was to be played out many
more times after Tsui Hark’s “A Chinese Ghost Story” was a huge hit. Unfortunately,
this film was just a quickie production that apparently vanished down a
hole after its release.
Thanks to Michael Kistner for identifying the
servant as Got Siu Bo/Ko Saio Pao - I knew I had seen him in other films
but could not recall where - here are some that Michael provided:
Dragon Gate Inn (1967)
Swordsman at Large (1971)
Desperate Chase, The (1971)
Tournament, The (1974)
Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (1976)
Eagle's Claw (1977)
Instant Kung Fu Man (1977)
Fatal Needles vs. Fatal Fists (1978)
Filthy Guy (1978)
Young Dragons - Kung Fu Kids IV (1987)
Fist Full of Talons , A (1983)
My rating for this film: 3.0