The Era of Vampires

Plot synopsis:
Prologue. In 17th century rural China during the Ching dynasty, when
a dead body isn't resting in peace, chemical and physical changes can
build up, allowing it to leave the grave in the form of a zombie, feeding
on the flesh of humans. Over time, the zombie will turn into a vampire. If
you are bitten or scratched by a zombie, you can recover. But if you are
bitten or scratched by a vampire, you will become a vampire. Only a
handful of skilled warriors dared to challenge these mystical demons of
the night. This is their story.Master Mao Shan [Ji Chun Hua] and his disciples are out hunting zombies and
vampires when they come upon the disturbed grave of a general. Master Shan jumps into the grave to see whether the general's body is still there and
to destroy it if it is. No such luck. The general has turned into an
immensely powerful vampire with the ability to suck the life and blood
from a human without even having to bite him. As the priests fight the
vampire, their torches suddenly ignite the methane gas around them,
sending the whole area up in flames.Three months later. Master Shan is still missing. Guided by their
vampire-detecting compass, four of his disciples -- Wind [Lam Suet], Thunder Ken Chang], Rain [Michael Chow], and Lightning [Chan Kwok Kwan] -- are searching the night for vampires when they come
across the Jiang estate. They notice wedding caterers going inside the
gates. Master Jiang's son is getting married. Wind, Thunder, Rain, and
Lightning follow the wedding caterers inside. Once inside, they are
mistaken by the butler for hired labor and put to work, right after being
renamed Kung (Wind), Hei (Thunder), Fat (Rain), and Choi (Lightning).
Young Master Jiang [Wang Zhen Lin] has been married six times. Each time, his wife
has died shortly after the wedding. The morning after this marriage to
Sasa [Anya], however, it is Young Jiang who is dead, bitten by a cobra. Master
Jiang [Yu Rong Guang] asks the four "workers" to remain in his employ and to find and
destroy the snake that bit his son. Thunder is most eager to remain. He's
seen and fallen in love with Sasa.Rumor has it that the Jiangs are fabulously wealthy and have much
gold hidden away somewhere in their house. In fact, even as the wedding
was underway, hired robbers were on their way to the Jiang's house,
planning to break in and make off with the gold. As they rode their horses
through the forest to the Jiang house, however, they were attacked by a
vampire. Of the half dozen robbers, only one managed to escape. Dragon
Tang [Horace Lee Wai Shing] isn't very happy to see him come back empty handed, for it was he who
hired the robbers and he who arranged for his sister Sasa's marriage to
Young Jiang. Dragon needs the money to pay off his gambling debts. He's
even more unhappy when he hears about the vampire.
Now that Sasa is a widow, she wishes to leave the Jiang house. There
are many strange things happening there, so she writes to her brother and
asks that he please get her out of there. When Jiang learns of Sasa's
desire to leave, he assumes she is lonely. You won't be lonely, he
explains and shows her how he has preserved her husband in wax. In fact,
all the Jiang ancestors have been preserved in wax. And so will you be
preserved in wax when you die, Jiang assures her. Sasa swoons.The vampire-detecting compass keeps reading that there are vampires
in the area, but so far Wind, Thunder, Rain and Lightning have been unable
to find them...until they make their way into the family crypt and find
dozens of Jiangs, all perfectly preserved in wax. Could one of these be
the vampire, wonders Thunder? While leaning on the wall, Rain suddenly
presses a lever that opens a chest filled with gold. They have stumbled on
the Jiang fortune.Meanwhile, the butler has sold out to Dragon Tang, giving him
information about the Jiang household, the gold, and the waxed ancestors
as well as the fact that it was Jiang himself who made up the story about
there being vampires around. The butler suggests that Dragon hire the
Zombie Wrangler to wake up the waxed ancestors. While all these dead
ancestors are hopping around, keeping Jiang busy trying to round them up
again, Dragon can simply walk in unnoticed and make off with the gold.
After meeting the Zombie Wrangler [Chan Koon Tai] and his chiang shih, Dragon goes along
with the plan.Jiang is angry with the four disciples for sneaking a peek at Sasa
while she was bathing, and he does a bit of fighting with them until he
realizes that these guys are too well-trained in the martial arts to be
simple servants. Now the truth comes out. They admit that they are vampire
hunters. Jiang scoffs at the idea of vampires in his area and informs them
that it was he who made up the whole story about vampires in order to keep
the robbers from his door. If they are really vampire hunters and if they
can help him eliminate the problems that shadow his family, Jiang says
that he will adopt one of them as his godson and heir to the fortune as
well as allow him to marry Sasa. Thunder immediately offers himself. Jiang
laughs.True to his word, the Zombie Wrangler awakens all the dead Jiangs.
Jiang thinks that the vampire hunters have awakened his family in order to
create a diversion while they steal his gold. But it's not the corpses he
should be worried about...it's the powerful vampire who has suddenly shown
up. Thunder grabs Sasa, and the two attempt to flee on horseback, hoping
to outrun the vampire. Unfortunately, they take a wrong turn and end up at
the vampire's grave. Just as the vampire is about to suck out Thunder's
blood, Thunder is hit by water. (Vampires can't see you if you're wet.)
Thunder looks up to see Master Shan. Thunder places Sasa in a pool of
water, then he and Master Shan jump into a well. Unfortunately, there is
no water in the well. Just then, it starts to rain.Meanwhile, Jiang is sitting in the family crypt when he hears Dragon
and the butler come in. They are looking for the gold, but Jiang is not
about to let them get it. As Jiang and Dragon fight, the butler scoops up
the gold, but he is bitten by a gold snake. The vampire shows up and kills
Dragon and Jiang. Master Shan and Thunder take Sasa to shelter. While she
sleeps, Thunder tells Master Shan that he has just married Sasa. Shan
tells Thunder how he's been following the vampire for the past several
months. Suddenly, they smell smoke. It's coming from a wound on Sasa's
leg. Master Shan concludes that Sasa has been wounded by the vampire and
will turn into one herself within the next seven days unless she is
treated with coffinwood.Meanwhile, back at the Jiang house, the servant girl Ling [Zou Na] stumbles
into the family crypt and comes face to face with the vampire. Lightning
protects Ling (he's become sweet on her) as Wind and Rain fight the
vampire. Just then, Master Shan and Thunder show up. Master Shan notices
that the Jiang zombies have been feeding and will soon turn into vampires
unless they are destroyed by exposing them to sunlight.
Thunder and Sasa see the vampire and run out into the night where
they meet up with Master Shan et al. Shan says that the vampire knows
they're looking for him. Thunder orders Sasa to find a safe place in town
to hide, then they all go off in search of the vampire. They go to the
Jiang crypt. Lightning makes the mistake of touching the gold, which is a
trap. A net drops over them. Jiang and Dragon then appear, obviously dead.
Jiang tells Dragon that he can have all the gold if he'll kill the vampire
hunters. As they fight, the vampire shows up. Master Shan says that the
vampire has been feeding on Jiang and Dragon and is now superpowerful.
After a long, hard battle, Master Shan blows up the vampire with
explosives. Unfortunately, Shan gets blown up, too.Epilogue: Now that the vampire is destroyed, it is time for Wind,
Thunder, Rain, and Lightning to go their own ways. Thunder and Sasa are
returning to her village. Lightning and Ling are going to move into the
Jiang house, now that it's empty. Wind and Rain will be staying with
Lightning just until they get jobs of their own. [Original synopsis by bj_kuehl]

Tags: paranormal

Review:
To me, Tsui Hark constructed a BRILLIANT homage to the "hopping corpse," and "demon" movies of the 1980's and early 1990's while adding some great kung-fu sequences.
Hong Kong humor is usually quite different than American humor...I'm sure a lot of people missed when RAIN, CLOUD, THUNDER, and LIGHTNING (ridiculously stereotypical "hero" names) were renamed "Kung," "Hei," "Fat," and "Choi." Put those four words together and it says "Happy New Year" in Cantonese.
It's time people set CROUCHING TIGER up on its own shelf and stop comparing it to movies it bears no similarities to.
Wanna miss the fun of VAMPIRE HUNTERS entirely by refusing to watch it as its own film?
Awesome if you like the Hong Kong 'hopping vampire' genre..
I also really like the Hopping zombie/ghost/vampire sub-genre of HK 'horror'.
Now, in case you aren't familiar with these- they feature 'vampires' and 'zombies' that return from the grave (Usually due to some sort of improper burial) and hop about (Or in the case in Vampire Hunters- fly about).
The seminal film in this genre is the mid-eighties comedy/horror masterpiece 'Mr. Vampire'.Now, Tsui Hark's 'Vampire Hunters' plays alot like a much more serious version of Mr. Vampire- basically, the comedic elements usually found in these films are almost non existant in 'Vampire Hunters'.
This alone makes it one of the only HK vampire films to play like 'action horror' instead of 'horror comedy'.Now, this distinction alone makes Vampire Hunters worth a look.
So ask yourself: Do you want just a good, action packed film?
Well if you just want great action, there's like, A THOUSAND good action films out there, ok?
CHINESE VAMPIRES versus TAOIST WARRIOR PRIESTS???Well, check out Tsui Hark's 'Vampire Hunters'.
So- if you're a 'norm' who thought Erin Brokavich or maybe the Ocean's 11 remake was good, well stay FAR AWAY from Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters, it's not for you, you won't get it, understand it's appeal or be able to appreciate it.If you're the kind of person who likes the idea of a Mr. Vampire/Chinese Ghost Story double bill, well, strap yourself in- cause Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters will satisfy your desire to escape from reality for an hour and a half or so..
I think Vampire Hunters is a pretty good movie.
Although it isn't breaking new ground, for most american viewers it will seem a little odd that the vampires in the movie are more corpse like than you expect to see, but in most if not all accounts of vampirism in the middle ages and earlier periods vampires were refered to as animated corpses, not strikingly beautiful creatures with tragic stories.
So if you're looking to see a decent horror movie will "realistic" vampires, this would be worth seeing.
A group of martial artists / vampire hunters find themselves employed by a very rich - and very insane - old man who has kept everyone of his relatives preserved in wax and not buried.
I don't think I've seen any other HK vampire movie that actually tried to be serious instead of an action / comedy.
I would have expected a better action movie from Tsui Hark, but what am I gonna do?
The special effects aren't all that good, but I've never been one to care about bad special effects.'Vampire Hunters' is a decent action movie, but really only for anyone interesting in Hong Kong vampire / action movies - 5/10.
Perhaps it's having Tsui Hark's name attached to it, thus giving people the wrong idea about the film as they go into it.
While I don't think it's the best film ever made by any stretch of the imagination, Vampire Hunters does serve it's purpose.
The one thing you can say about this film is that it's definitely not slow moving!While it does suffer from the lack of in depth characterization that seems to be the downfall of many martial arts films, in general I found the acting to be up to par -provided you watch the film subtitled as opposed to dubbed.
The wooden voice acting of the English translators is highly reminiscent of the hilarious goofy bad dubbing of 70s martial arts flicks, and really detracts from the genuine scariness of the vampire scenes.
STOP CUTTING HONG KONG FILMS!However, I must admit that even if the missing footage was put back in, the movie wouldn't be that much better.
The vampire villain looks unbelievably cheesy - in fact, despite the expensive use of CGI for a few effects, the movie looks like it was made on a tight budget.
When four hunters of the undeadThunder, Wind, Rain and Lightningare separated from their master during a battle with a King Vampire, they continue their hunt for the bloodsucker, using a magical Taoist compass to lead the way.
Master Jiang informs Sasa that she need never be parted from her husband, because the family tradition is to preserve dead relatives with wax and store them in vaults below the house; she can visit him anytime she likes!!
With Master Jiang busy rounding up the zombies, he hopes to search the place for the hidden loot.Unfortunately, for everyone involved, the King Vampire shows up at the end to cause additional mayhem and chaos and it is up to the four heroes to save the day.Whilst this is no classic of the genrethe plot is far too messyit does contain many elements which will prove to be of fun to fans of 80s Hong Kong vampire movies: the martial arts are of a reasonable standard, with some impressive swordplay and a bit of nifty wire-work, there is some fairly cheesy gore, and the reanimated bodies do the old hopping routine we all know and love.
Best of all is the King Vampire, who has supernatural powers that enable him to suck blood at a distance and fire flames from his mouth.My main gripe with this film is that everything is just too dark.
I can ignore some dodgy CGI and iffy make-up effects, but I'd like to be able to see what the hell is going on.Despite the advances in film technology, Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters remains an average production that does nothing to improve on the films that it emulates.
It's obvious that the person with the negative view either expects a 'kung fu' film and didn't get it, or more likely never saw MR VAMPIRE...In order to enjoy this film I should think a little background on both Chinese mysticism and Hopping Zombie films are in order.
In the 17th century China, a group of warriors attempting to find the vampire that abducted their master find themselves caught in a feud with their new hosts whose enemy raised an army of vampires to destroy them and must fight them together in order to save themselves.This here was quite the fun if slightly flawed effort.
Like the vast majority of Hong Kong vampire efforts, the fact that there's such an endless array of high-quality martial arts scenes in here is the biggest attribute to this one, keeping the film charging along at a frantic pace for the majority of the film.
The opening assault on the main vampires' grave, which includes plenty of the usual aerial martial arts-based acrobatics as they lure the creature out of the tomb and combat it while it drains their life-force and brings about the explosive final part of the confrontation where they steal away the body into the forest gives this a fantastic opening, a later encounter where the looters find the creatures out in the woods and get torn to pieces is another gruesome highlight and the hand-to- hand fighting in the dojo where he finds that his opponents are the reanimated creatures is a lot of fun and gives this a great deal of action to run throughout here.
Other great battles come from the resurrected vampires' attack on the small village as their hopping through the streets causes a great deal of destruction, and the fine follow-up confrontation in the woods is a lot of fun with the atmospheric location and raging thunderstorm providing plenty of set-up for the masterful hand-to-hand combat within and giving this all a great deal to like about it and sets up the ending confrontation with the master controller at his temple which is a wholly spectacular fight generating plenty of stand-out wire-fu tactics to bring about a fantastic and engaging sense of energy within the scene while utilizing plenty of inventive and unique tactics to combat the creature.
Still, there's more than enough straightforward horror elements to work here, mainly centering around the rotting zombie-like look of the vampires filled with demonic visages and even maggots falling off their faces which makes for a rather fun and chilling-looking villain that really makes this appropriate which lets the scenes of them hopping around the villages casting plenty of shadows makes for some really suspenseful moments.
The only real thing that holds this back is the fact that there's just not a whole lot of coherence in the story about what's going on, as there's just not a great deal of logic in why they're coming out or why they're targeting the family and as a result it makes the first half seem somewhat slow and uncoordinated.
Take the typical wuxia martial arts film and add a horror element in the form of vampires.
The inborn grace and elegance of vampires seems like an excellent fit for wuxia.Unfortunately we end up getting very little of that.
It's more of a force of nature, an unstoppable monster that rips into pieces everything standing in its way, visually more of a zombie lord than an aristocratic vampire.
Fantastic horror villain, even if it means that the fights are not as grandeur as they would have otherwise been.What really fails this movie is the lackadaisical nature of the script.
Making this a film that's fine to check out if you're really into wuxia or you want to see a radically different take on vampires.
If Vincent Price could do kung fu, that is.Wellson Chin may have directed the film, but as with any Tsui Hark movie, if he's on it, then it means he's the de facto director.
This is likewise, though his usual flourishes of the imagination show through, as in a scene where a necromancer scales a wall using only two small dirks, the overall tone of the film seems to be a showcase of excess, right down to the "predator"-style shots taken from the vampire POVs. A toss-up of hits and misses is what this film is, and it's all the more encumbered by Tsui's (ironically) trademark fast pacing that causes him to subvert the all-important "visual-aural-verbal" rule of screenwriting.
I felt that this movie could have been better if i had focus more on the scares, however this is much of a neutral film, which is not that scary, nor frightening.The people focus are not that much, and the scare effects could have been better, but seeing that the film director is Hark Tsui, his films are usually made more for plot rather than characters.Somehow, i keep remembering the name of this film back in my mind, because it gives me the creeps sometimes when trying to remember it.However if you don't understand Asian (chinese) horror creatures, then its not really worth watching it.-Alright film to watch / can be creepy-.
Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters.
I do like some of the classic Asian horror movies but combining it with martial arts and over the top action has never greatly appealed to me.
There's non stop action throughout and the zombie/vampire make ups are pretty good, they reminded me of the maggot invested walking dead from bygone Italian horror cinema.
Failed attempt at arthouse-ifying the classic Chinese vampire horror-comedy genre.
At the onset, I didn't know whether this movie was in English or Chinese and whether it was a U.S. production or a Hong Kong one.
In selecting language, I opted for Cantonese and the words seemed to match the mouths so I guess it is a Hong Kong production.As the movie progressed, I realized what veteran Hong Kong director/writer/producer/actor Tsui Hark (who writes and produces here) was trying to do with Vampire Hunters.
Most likely, he wanted to break into the western market by introducing one of the Hong Kong movie industry's most beloved genres - the campy vampire horror comedies, just as how Ang Lee brought the classic kung-fu movie to the West with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.Ultimately, Hark fails in his attempt to arthouse-isfy his movie, and Hunters doesn't even come close to the opulence of Crouching Tiger.
It runs like a drama, but throws in gratuitous scare scenes that aren't scary, and tries to instill humor that isn't humorous.
The special effects, while certainly more ample and advanced than the vampire movies of old, are largely overdone and blatantly unrealistic.
PLEASE DO NOT SEE THIS FILMSeriously, the most pointless piece of crap I have ever seen, the story didn't make much sense, the effects were D-grade, they were that bad and the fighting has nothing on a B-grade Hong Kong action flick.
I must say if your even thinking about watching this movie, your already doing the bad thing.
How can you take something so pure as kung-fu, Chinese Vampires and gore and make it so wrong...The film starts out ok enough but then just gets worse and worse.I can safely say there wasnt anything really redeeming in this film..
usually in bad movies there is at least one scene where you say to yourself..
And "Era of Vampire" reminded me a lot of Hark's last film, "Time and Tide".
The two films had nothing in common in terms of plot, but both movies tried to cover up their weak scripts with frenetic action sequences, cacaphonic noise, and Baz-Luhrmannesque editing.
The film starts off interestingly enough, diving right into an action sequence involving the first of many appearances of the monster, in this case it is a vampire/zombie.
But in fact, the action from the first sequence was not only as thrilling as the rest that followed, but it was also far superior to the anti-climactic final showdown.Director, Wellson Chin, also does a good job of putting over the human characters after the initial opening battle.
But unlike action films from Hollywood, this film's final showdown is a huge, anti-climactic letdown.Where most films save their best for last, "The Era of Vampire" gave it all away in the first 15 minutes.
This Film truly is awful, i bought it expecting a good HongKong Zombie-Vampire flick!
the zombies don't even bite the neck from what i saw, i managed half hour & that was painful enough, really 1 of the worst vampire genre movies, & possibly the worst film i own.
But the action scenes are pretty good.
And while this is among my least favorite Tsui Hark films, that's more a statement of how much I enjoy his movies than an indictment of this one.
I've seen bad HK vampire movies before and I have to say this is probably one of the worst.
And sometimes new characters would just pop out and try unsuccessfully to integrate into the movie.The master vampire was not scary at all.
Otherwise, you'll end up like me and spending 5 hard earned dollars on renting such a piece of crap as "Vampire Hunters" just cuz it looked totally awesome in the screenshots found on the back of the box.
I feel almost ripped off, so much in fact, I want to take it back to BlockBuster Video and ask for my money back for wasting my time, energy, and money."Hunters" was like a mix of "Iron Monkey", with it's crap comedy elements, crazy unrealistic fight (and flight) sequences, and medieval Asian setting, and "Blade", for it's vampire/zombie hunting story, and a bit of "House of 1000 Corpses", being kind of a throw-back to classic horror cinema (in "Hunters" case, horror/kung-fu), and having so much cut out of the final release that most of it doesn't entirely make sense.
"Vampire Hunters" is all this, plus underdeveloped characters, god awful dialogue, poor poor poor dubbing (even in the its original language!), sh*t for make-up, and an obviously low budget.
Not that there's anything wrong with low budget films, but when trying to make a movie about high flying warriors fighting off decaying, flying zombies and vampires, you're gonna need a little more money than what these guys did with "Hunters".Everyone commenting on this flick so far is complaining about the look of the demons/vampires, but I have much respect for the way the creators of this film portrayed them as creatures who actually looked like they had died and come back to life.
The demons in "Hunters" look like they were actually pulled out from six feet under, and tied up with strings like puppets to move around."Vampire Hunters" was edited SOOOOO bad, and in the end, that's what makes "Hunters" so f*cking awful.
This love element is what makes "Hunter" totally over the top, even if it doesn't have that much of an impact on the film as a whole.
Maybe it's a Chinese thing, but the dead becoming zombies becoming vampires?
Vampires that suck blood like a Hoover?
If you want to make a martial arts movie, than don't try to be a spooky picture at the same time.
TSUI HARK'S VAMPIRE HUNTERS is very much a film of the 2000s, an update of the classic MR VAMPIRE genre of filmmaking but updated to the new millennium with slick visuals, heaps of dry ice, and some basic computer effects to depict the movement of the undead.
The CGI used does not even begin to redeem this detestable smack-fest of sugar-coated zombies/vampires/whatevers, the main monster looks like something an 8 year old put together for the front porch on Halloween, and the four main characters are totally indistinguishable from one another.