Hua pi zhi yinyang fawang (Painted Skin, 1992)

King Hu

Hong Kong / China

95 min, color, Mandarin (English subtitles)

To get a concubine without much spending. Would you agree to that?

Based on the short story The Painted Skin by Pu Songling, the Hu's offering comes from the seemingly inexhaustible army of films starring Joey Wang as some sort of supernatural being in distress. Hu apparently took some of his clues from Tsui Hark's success with A Chinese Ghost Story and its sequels, and so piled high the creepy supernatural, while missing most of the ingredients that made the original so interesting.

As usual for this sort of film, there's a scholar --- Wang Hsi-Tzu (Adam Cheng) --- who has not been keeping up with his studies. In fact, he's positively talentless, having studied for the imperial exam for the last two decades but never passing it. Anyway, after a night of drunken revelry and excruciatingly bad Chinese music, he wanders off into the street where he buys dog meat noodles from Wu Ma. Of course, the vendor, the cart, and everything suddenly disappears, much to Hsi-Tzu's blunted surprise. He runs off into a dark alley where he runs smack into You Feng (Joey Wang), the wandering ghost in distress.

Possessed by You Feng's charms, Hsi-Tzu's sexual appetite gets the best of his admittedly mediocre cognitive skills, and he tries to make her a concubine. His No. 1 sort of agrees until they decide to spy on Feng taking a bath to find out if she's pregnant. Unfortunately, they uncover her secret: she's a demoness who wears a painted human skin to hide her grisly features (or the badly done mask). The scholar immediately goes to some inept Taoist priests and recruits them to help get rid of the demon. But why is the demon there in the first place?

Not for a stroll, that's for sure. She's escaped from the clutched of the evil King of Yin/Yang, who (forgive me if I don't get this part right) apparently rules the borderland between heaven and hell, steals souls on their way to either one, and prevents them from transmigration. That is, he basically runs the Chinese version of Purgatory although it looked pretty cool from everything I could see. This turns out to be the biggest problem in the film. The bad guy, who is supposedly the invisible incarnation of boundless evil, is actually pretty affable. I mean, sure, he had some dude boiled at one point, but other than that he seemed pretty harmless. With a taste for the arts, as well as finely tuned dramatic flair, he rules and it looks like a lot of fun. I mean, wouldn't you get a kick out of the Greek chorus rendition of his grand entry?

Anyway, so Feng has escaped and he's looking for her. He possesses Hsi-Tzu's body, and goes immediately where every normal demon would go, to the brothel, but not before strangling Hsi-Tzu's wife (who is miraculously resurrected later and no less miraculously gives birth). In the meantime, the two inept Taoist priests look for a skillful Taoist priest, and they eventually find the self-centered High Monk (Sammo Hung). Just so that you don't root for the "good" guys for even a second, he decides to help only to improve his pure yin/yang, which, for those not skilled in Chinese cosmogony, translates into self interest, the equivalent of doing it for money. So what if he sacrificed the peach garden? He still got the pure yin/yang, didn't he?

They, of course, defeat evil although not before Wu Ma dies with a sword in the back. The 90 minutes of almost endless chases and pointless encounters ends with a whimper when Hsi-Tzu and his wife become happy parents.

The film, although not nearly as good as the ones it rips, is actually far more entertaining than many allow it. For one, it has the feel of a Soviet fantasy film of the 1970s. It is slow, goes on with very little explanation, and there's a lot of oboe music in the background. The languorous pace works well in the several trips that various characters take. The film opens with a donkey ride along the Great Wall, through snowy valleys, and black trees. (I actually have no idea who rode or where.) Then there's the return of the Taoists and Feng from the visit to Yama (who I guess has a higher rank than the King of Yin/Yang although the latter seemed to disagree), where they meet with various attempts by the King to trick them. They are all pretty mild but again reminded me of the Slavic tales that have very similar encounters, in which you mostly never see the guy who's behind them.

Joey has a very uninteresting and timid role as the distressed demon. She also spends most of the film wrapped in some burkha-look-alike and we only get to see a shapeless form with two eyes peering from inside. Her talents were completely wasted by the director who really should have dressed her like Tsui Hark did. The fights are also pretty dull, although I like Adam Cheng in almost everything I see, so this was a plus.

The Tai Seng DVD is letterboxed, with burned-in English subtitles and has a Cantonese track in addition to the original Mandarin. The Mandarin mix is much better than the muffled Cantonese one. The picture is soft and exhibits damages to the print, although it's not unwatchable. It is also almost certainly cropped a little because the subtitles tend to run off the screen. My Malata's zoom makes it clear that it is indeed not the entire picture. The translation is mediocre, with mistakes and bad English all over the place. I don't understand why Tai Seng continues to release such badly done DVDs.

March 1, 2003