Mr. Vampire

  Mr. Vampire is a classic Hong-Kong martial arts/comedy mashup with supernatural elements that doesn't lean as much on special effects as other, similar films of its style (though it doesn't do without them entirely).
 Instead it fills its runtime with farcical plotlines, very broad, very slapstick humour and some truly great fights and stunts; The humour... I'd say it's above average for this sort of thing but still pretty cringeworthy, but there's no denying the action.

 Master Gau (Ching-Ying Lam) is a Taoist priest with, as you'd expect, a sideline in ghost hunting. He's introduced putting down an octet of Jiangshi that his dumbass apprentices (Ricki Hui and Siu-Ho Chin) managed to free from their bonds.
 It's a brilliant fight, full of good moves and stunts and a couple of laugh-out-loud gags.

 That first scene barely factors into the plot, though, which involves a down-on-his-luck businessman (Ha Huang) who, tricked by a pissed off feng shui expert, needs to rebury his father. He contacts Master Gau, who quickly realizes that Mr. Yam's father is about to become a vampire, so he takes the corpse into custody.

 The script (by Ricky Lau, Cheuk-hon Szeto, and Barry Wong) quickly spirals in many different directions; both of Gau's dipshit students get into trouble - one is scratched by the vampire and starts turning, and the other one falls under the spell of a beautiful ghost (Moon Lee). Meanwhile, Gau himself gets incarcerated. As usual in these movies, the plot doesn't matter much, though - it's an excuse to stage jokes, chases and fights.

 The jokes, as stated before, didn't really work for me - a few made me laugh, and a few others are cute enough. They're mostly tied to the apprentices and their idiot hijinks, and can be pretty grating. The action though is outstanding. Lam Ching Ying is an excellent stuntman with a lot of presence, and one of the apprentices (Sheng) is not too shabby once he joins in on the fun.

 All the fight scenes are immaculately choreographed and shot, full of inventive and cool moves and stunts; There's one burning man bit in particular where we can see the vampire catch on fire, and then someone goes and throws a jar of oil at him, feeding the flames. Outstanding.

 There's all sorts of neat rituals and rules that the film sometimes takes the time to explain as it goes along. Prayer scrolls are affixed to foreheads, glutinous rice (but not long grain!) keeps the vampires away, and specially treated string is used to bind them. Oh, a couple of live animals (a chicken and a snake) are sacrificed on-screen, so if that's not your sort of thing you might want to avoid this.

 You many also want to avoid the sequels, which I remember as a pretty textbook case of diminishing returns, unless you can't get enough of this; In that case I'd throw in a recommendation for Sammo Hung's terrific Encounters of the Spooky kind.

*: Chinese folklore hopping vampires - a sort of undead that's so stiff with rigor mortis and decay it moves around hopping, arms outstretched, looking for victims to eat