Your Daily Dracula – Peter Kjaer as ‘Vampire Master’, Jiang shi yi sheng (Doctor Vampire) (1990)
kimnewman
Your Daily Dracula – Peter Kjaer as ‘Vampire Master’, Jiang shi yi sheng (Doctor Vampire) (1990)
After the success of Mr Vampire, the Hong Kong film industry let loose a flood of ‘hopping vampire’/jiangshi horror comedies. This came late in the cycle, and plays more with the traditional Western image of the vampire – the cloaked, fanged, levitating Vampire Master (Peter Kjaer) is plainly Dracula or close relation, though it turns out he has Superman-style laser vision and kung fu skills too. I’d suspect the martial arts ability is what landed Kjaer the role since in other ways he’s one of the least fearsome Dracula clones in the movies – he looks like the lanky dork best friend in a slacker comedy rather than a blood-drinking super fiend, though he does model several bizarre outfits which offer variations on ‘80s pimp and vintage Hammer horror looks.
Dr Chiang Ta-Tsung (Bowie Lam) is on holiday in the UK when his car breaks down – he drops into a castle which turns out to be a vampire brothel for a coke and the use of the telephone (the locations are Allington Castle, Blackfriar’s Pub and Hotel Gore). Finding a middle-aged guy struggling with Alice (Ellen Chan), Tsung gallantly intervenes to save the wrong person – the guy was a potential victim and Alice is out to bite him. He gets roofied – with what looks like an Alka-Seltzer – in his coke, and Alice seduces and bites him intimately. Tsung goes home, where his nurse girlfriend May (Sheila Chan) is annoyed at the lipstick on his collar and the bloodstains on his underpants, and Alice lets the Master bite her hand to sample the blood she’s taken (an unusual vampire m.o.). Though other johns’ blood is unappetising, Tsung’s pure blood is like ginseng to the Master and he orders Alice to go to Hong Kong to get more of it.
In jokes we saw before in Once Bitten or My Best Friend is a Vampire and would see again in Thirst and Dr Abdulla (bloody cotton wool used as a teabag), Tsung is suddenly allergic to garlic and sunlight, has bad dreams and wakes up on the ceiling, is overcome by a desire to lick blood while performing surgery, and feels compelled to buy a black cloak and dinner jacket. In a new wrinkle, he eventually has a bit of Asian pride and ditches the Granpa Munster outfit for a proper jiangshi robe and hat – though he doesn’t get the hang of hopping. There are a lot of farcical complications: Tsung takes his best buds (David Wu, Shek-Yin Lau) into his confidence and the trio keep being surprised by nurses in what look like gay threesome sex situations; garlic shrimp and love potions and the blood of the recent dead are sloshed about in an attempt to cure Tsung; Alice inevitably falls for the nice guy hero; a semivampire zombie lurches around the hospital with a huge erection and does a Young Frankenstein rape joke which most audiences will lose patience with before the cigarette-smoking punchline; the Master’s Amazon minion (Lorraine Kibble) gets a sword through her breasts; an inept Taoist (Kuang Ni) does Mr Vampire type stuff to exorcise Tsung but is outclassed when the Master shows up, etc.
It’s mostly silly slapstick with a few nightmarish images. The finale gets complicated and wild as the big bad chases a crowd of good guys through the hospital doing a lot of damage, then gets into a scrap on a stage erected to perform a blessing ceremony for the hospital – when someone tries that thing Peter Cushing suggested in Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and holds up a Buddha to ward off evil, the Master spits blood on the statue which angers some higher power who transforms Tsung and his pals into super-powered stick-fighting vampire killers … with explosive results. Written and directed by Jamie Luk.
