So titled because I Married a Witch was already taken. Scholar-dropout-turned-copyist Shih Chun takes a gig to copy some holy sutras, heads to a quiet place in the country where he can focus, and that plan sure does backfire. First he gets wasted at the annoying neighbor’s house while her daughter Melody plays trance-drums, then he wakes up and Melody claims they slept together, so they get married. Now he has a new wife, an annoying mother-in-law and a contradictory host, and they’re all being circled by the host’s deranged servant Old Chang who looks suspiciously like a vampire, plus a disappearing hot flautist called Cloud, and a Lama.
Movie is good for its entire 3+ hour runtime – King sure knows how to frame a shot and set up a scene. And it gets slowly weirder and more unsettling, until after two whole hours of gradual build, we’re rewarded with a dance-fight wuxia scene. This is post-Star Wars but instead of using light beams to portray the magic, he sticks with flashbangs, colored smoke, and surreal reverse-film effects. It’s belatedly explained that Melody and Cloud are rival magicians, and even more belatedly demonstrated that everybody here except Shih is a ghost.
All the ghosts get backstories via drum-induced flashback (there is a lot of aggressive spiritual hand-drumming in this). Cloud, the Lama, the host, and even Old Chang appear to be our guy’s savior and/or evil conspirators at different points. Melody is banished to hell but easily escapes for a final showdown, and when Shih (whose primary ability until now has been to run away) gets fed up of all these ghosts, he throws his prayer beads into the air and everyone burns up. All these actors are from the same year’s Raining in the Mountain except the great Sylvia Chang as Cloud, who went on to Shanghai Blues and Office.
The most suspenseful scene to me, hoping drunken Shih wouldn’t break this teapot:
I recently discovered The Chinese Cinema site, where Sean writes: “As a wuxia mystery film, it feels more in the spirit of Tsui Hark’s debut The Butterfly Murders (also from 1979),” which sounds promising, so I’m watching that next.
Shih is terrific as the scholar, dogged yet constantly befuddled, but ultimately competent (you do feel for him when he finally discovers how much he’s been manipulated and the film’s final shots wouldn’t work if we didn’t know this man so well as he stands alone against a raging river). It’s a very different character than his ultra-confident swordsman in Dragon Gate Inn or even his not-as-clever-as-he-thinks scholar in A Touch of Zen.
This is what happens when ghosts mess with prayer beads:
