Your Daily Dracula – You huan dao shi/Jiang Shi Xiao Zi (Hello Dracula) (1985)
I get the impression this was pitched as a more kid-friendly cash-in on the success of Mr Vampire, since it scrambles a lot of elements from that franchise-spawning hit but with much younger central characters. It was once released on video as Hello Dracular, but the general English language title is now rendered as Hello Dracula – not that it’s had much of an official showing outside Asia. It did well enough to be followed by at least five sequels. An unrelated Korean TV series is also called Hello Dracula. It’s also known as Son of the Vampire or The Jiangshi Kid.
The deal is that four orphans – a fat speccy one, a toothy one, a tallish one and a darker-skinned one – live in a wagon and perform as comedy acrobats in a troupe led by mah jong fiend/bad gambler Master Sha (Huang Chung-Yu). Early on, in the sticks, the squabbling gang encounter a corpse-wrangler who has a whole train of hopping jiangshi (with binding parchments stuck to their forehead) in tow. This crowd of jiangshi include one bratty kid version, as seen in a lot of Mr Vampire spin-offs, but he isn’t in this film much – though he seems to be the Jiangshi Kid of the title. We move to a town where the undertaker (Chin Tu) has a more elaborate set-up looking after jiangshi who were ‘bad boys in life’ and need to be disciplined with a ghost-swatting device by moppet Tian Tian (Shadow Liu Chih-Yu).
Things get dicey for the non-Taiwanese viewer, and perhaps some Taiwanese viewers after 1985, when the four elevenish brats all fall in love with Tian Tian, who gets some odd underage glamour close-ups … though there’s less romance than childish knockabout, with kids made fun of for their distinctive features. There’s a fat, inept police chief (Pang San) around too. Master Sha loses the horse gambling and has a feud with a theatre owner who rats him out for exploiting children because the tumbling show draws patrons away from his ‘Japanese topless’ attraction (which we don’t see). A jiangshi gets loose and attacks the jail and Sha dies after a redemptive burst of heroism, only he’s bitten so it’s likely he’ll rise from the dead and attack his pupils. In an unusual development, the quartet of sub-Goonies get turned temporarily into sad-clown-made-up spirits so they can venture into the afterlife to save Sha – though things get back on a familiar track of jumping, parchment-slapping, kicking, biting, breath-holding and screeching in a not-remotely-frightening, not-terribly-inventive slapstick horror finale. It gets by on amiability, though there are winceworthy moments.
Written by Ching-Kang Yao and Hiroe Yu; directed by Ching-Hsing Chao.
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