Director – Ricky Lau, Screenplay – Lo Wing Keung, Producer – Yip Wing-cho, Photography – Lam Fai-tai, Music – Benson Fan & Anders Nelsson, Production Design – Chung Lai Sing. Production Company – Grand March Movie Production Co., Ltd..
Cast
Ricky Hui (Man Choi), Siu-Ho Chin (Chou Sheng), Lam Ching-Ying (Master Lam Ching-Ying), Billy Lau (The General), Sandra Kwan Yue Ng (Birdie), Hoi-Yan Tam (Mi Nian Ying), Suki Kwan (Mi Qi Lin), Man-Wah Tsui (Servant)
Plot
Master Lam Ching-Ying sends his two bumbling apprentices Man Choi and Chou Sheng to Birdie, who works as a medium and exorcist, so that she can deal with some Holy Babies, statuettes that contain the souls of unborn children. While Birdie is occupied, one of the statuettes is innocently opened by the servant of Mi Qi Lin and possesses her. Master Lam is taken to see Mi Qi Lin, a girl he once desired, who is now married to The General. Master Lam realises that The General has been bitten by a vampire. They wait in the family crypt as The General’s vampire father rises from his coffin and try to stop him. At the same time, the Holy Baby possessing the servant tries to enter the pregnant Mi Qi Lin’s belly and be born as her child.
The Mr Vampire series was a popular series of Hong Kong fantasy films of the 1980s/90s. The series started with Mr Vampire (1985), which proved a hit that blended traditional Chinese hopping vampires (jiangshi) and religious elements with an adept mix of comedy and fantasy. In rapid course, director Ricky Lau made Mr Vampire II (1986), Mr Vampire III (1987) and Mr Vampire 4 (1988). This was followed by Mr Vampire V (1990) from another director but Lau returned for the final film Mr Vampire 1992 here. The series was so popular that it is also inspired an unauthorised rival series with New Mr Vampire (1987) and New Mr Vampire 2 (1989).
Mr Vampire 1992 is regarded as the only real sequel to the original in the sense that it is the only one of the sequels to follow on and tell more adventures from the characters that appeared in the first film. It also brings back the principal actors from that film, Lam Ching-Ying, Ricky Hui and Chin Siu-Ho, as well as Billy Lau who is cast as a different character of a pompous, possibly tyrannical general. The other sequels feature many of the same actors but are not connected beyond featuring more hopping vampires and similar slapstick supernatural antics.
Mr Vampire is a comic masterpiece but I felt less enthused about any of the sequels where the slapstick comedy element became increasingly broader and more silly. Although he directed all the sequels, Ricky Lau seemed to lose the inspired touch he displayed on the first film and each of them seemed to be stumbling to climb back towards the heights of the original. As the last of the series, Mr Vampire 1992 seems to be trying to get everything together for a worthwhile note to go out on. And Lau gets there – somewhat.
The General (Billy Lau) (l) and Buddhist master Lam Ching Ying (second from right) help subdue a hopping vampire
As in the first film, we have the Buddhist master (Ching-Ying Lam) and his two comically inept apprentices (Ricky Hui and Chin Siu-Ho) facing various supernatural threats. As with the original, there are two plot strands – one where the trio deal with a man whose father comes back to life as a vampire. In the original, there was a second plot strand about a ghost girl. This is replaced here by an ardent Right to Life plot about souls of aborted children turning into malevolent entities – with the ghost babies at one point beating the novices up and peeing in Ricky Hui’s mouth! One of the babies seeks to incarnate in the unborn foetus of The General’s wife (Suki Kwan). There are additional complications with Suki Kwan who happens to be Master Lam’s ex love and Sandra Kwan Yue Ng as a medium who has the hots for Master Lam.
All of this comes delivered with a series of frenetic set-pieces, sometimes exhaustingly so. After some manically silly scenes with Sandra Kwan Yue Ng trying to entice Ching-Ying Lam to her bed, we get an extended sequence with the vampire hunters locked inside a crypt with the vampire father about to rise. This scene seems to have been modelled on the Nikolai Gogol story The Viy (1835), which has been multiply filmed, most faithfully as Viy (1967). It is filled with mad scenes with the trio, locked in with soldiers stationed outside that have orders to shoot anyone trying to leave, trying to hold down the risen father and wrench his teeth out and then file them down at the same time as the partially infected Billy Lau is down on his hands and knees licking up the shavings. It becomes a madcap slapstick piece conducted with enormous energy that at the end you can only applaud. The climax of the film becomes an extended sequence running around the house with people trying to imprison the vampires in red cords, as well as a sequence with two of the characters inside a lion dragon dance costume luring the babies from a playground.
