Your Daily Dracula – Frank Juhas as ‘European Vampire’, Yat mei dou yan (Vampire vs Vampire, 1989)
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Your Daily Dracula – Frank Juhas as ‘European Vampire’, Yat mei dou yan (Vampire vs Vampire, 1989)
A pendant to the series kicked off by Geung see sin sang (Mr Vampire, 1985), this was directed by series star Ching-Ying Lam, who also reprises his role as ‘One-Eyebrow Priest’, a Daoist Van Helsing who has the Basil Rathbone-as-Sherlock Holmes problem of being a multi-skilled genius but unaccountably keeps a couple of complete dolts – here, apprentices Hoh (Siu-Ho Chin) and Fong (Fong Lui) – around to get into slapstick trouble and foul up the early stages of any exorcism so badly that he has to put in a lot of extra effort to save the day. At this point, he’s also added Little Vampire (Jing Wang Lam), a pint-sized child jiangshi (hopping vampire) to his entourage, which leads to even more knockabout. In the opening scenes, a shaft of moonlight comes through a roof the novices were supposed to paper over with prayer parchments and affects a jar which contains what can only be described as a big angry turd with teeth. A female ghost also shows up to distract the young idiots. The plot kicks in with a clash between a corrupt general (Billy Lau) – those Charles Hawtrey glasses and jittery manner seem to be Chinese cinema shorthand for crooked official – and a Mother Superior (Maria Cordero) over a ruined Catholic church which might be a nest of novelty-on-a-string Hammer Films bats plaguing the neighbourhood. The general has a slinky cousing (Sandra Ng) who’s his minion and MS – to continue the Carry On comparison, she’s the Hattie of this film – has four pretty but feather-brained and easily frightened nuns to back her up. As in the Japanese ‘Bloodthirsty’ trilogy and the not-dissimilar Qu mo dao zhang (Exorcist Master), the arrival of ‘European’ Hammer-style vampires in the Far East is connected with Catholic missionaries. As if this were a sequel, the ruined church vault contains the corpse of a priest who died sticking a jewel-handed cross through the chest of another priest who is also a vampire – it perhaps says something about the history of Catholic missionaries in the region that several stories associate them with blood-drinking monsters. In a nice twist on the old pull-out-the-stake-and-bring-back-the-monster convention, the avaricious general yanks the crucifix because he wants the jewel in the hilt. The ‘European Vampire’ (Frank Juhas) wears several items which could have come from Christopher Lee’s Dracula wardrobe but also has a shock of 80s metal band hair and the mankiest set of fangs ever featured in a vampire movie. He bits the General’s cousin, who transforms into the sort of seductress seen in most Hammer Dracula films but proves comically inept in biting even total idiots.Perhaps in the line of descent from Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, this is one of several entries in the jianghsi cycle which pit Chinese hopping vampires against Transylvanian Dracula types … or, at least, that’s what the title promises. I suspect most fans sign up for this one in the hope of Mr Vampire vs Dracula, but the only hopping vampire in the film is the comedy relief brat (an unfortunately recurrent type) so we don’t get the promises v-on-v smackdown. We do get One-Eyebrow Priest deploying his usual bag of anti-vamp tricks against the agile, gurning, quite impressive Juhas, though. Like most films in this cycle, this is generally likeable but full of low comedy business of the type which is officially funny (lots of trousers are ripped off) but gets kind of tiresome after the first ooh-er-missis double take.
