Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980)
'This movie has been rightfully described as a groundbreaking film
because it combines elements of horror, comedy and martial arts.
Probably the most successful package that has ever come out of the HK
Cinema. And I was talking about this film to Arthur Wong, who’s an
award-winning cameraman, working on many-many movies like Once Upon a
Time in China, Iron Monkey, Purple Storm. We were talking about
this film and he was saying that the reaction of the public when it
came out was really outsanding. People never really seen a film quite
like this before. It’s kind of an odd choice for a Xmas movie but it
was actually released 24th December, 1980 and it played on until the
new year and became the 6th highest grossing film of 1981 and has
done very well throuhout Asia.'
'Though this film is indeed
groundbreaking, Sammo, like everybody had influences that led him to
make Spooky Encounters. And he himself cites the ghost stories that he
and his fellow classmates would be told at the Peking Opera School by
his instructors there. Obviously these would be stories based on the
folklore of Southern China and they were typical campfire tales that
left quite an impression on the young Sammo. Also there had been in the
past films, martial arts action pictures, which had elements of
supernatural in them. Sammo himself had worked on King Hu’s A Touch of
Zen which very successfully brought in the idea that you could have a
martial action film with a ghost element. Also A Touch of Zen in one
of the primary influences of Tsui Hark’s later A Chinese Ghost Story.
There was a lesser known film, The Comet Strikes which was directed
by Lo Wei at Golden Harvest film starring Nora Miao. As a sword play
film it was very atmospheric and has about a kind of a feel of a Hammer
film done Hong Kong style. Sammo’s done the action for the film and
also if you look at that movie, some of the imagery is very similar to
the images he would use in his later comedy horror pictures. Es ever in
HK where really credit is assigned almost at will, even though Lo Wei
is the director of credit, I think Sammo had a lot of influence on The
Comet Strikes. It’s quite hard to locate this film these days, but if
you get the chance to take a look, it’s quite a unique film for its
era.'
'At this particular time Sammo was already a leading light at Golden Harvest. He established himself very early as a heavy in the films, as a bad guy, as a suitable opponent for various martial arts heroes of the day. And then he became an excellent choraographer and eventually an action director, then a director of his own right and when he was casting films he quickly put together a troup of stuntmen and martial artists and character artists and worked with them again and again. And to a certain extent if he works in HK he’s still working pretty much with the same actors. So you’ll have all of the major lights of HK Cinema have their own group around them. A lot of these people are working with him till this day.'
'Sammo is somebody who’s constantly looking for both new concepts, new faces, new people to bring out in films. What he will do, is really interesting, is to find people who are known in a certain tradition, in a certain way and try to reinterpret them on screen by giving them a role that’s kind of against type. And later in the film we see Lam Ching Ying who was another Opera School student. Not from the same school as Sammo but somebody who was respected as a practitioner of the Chinese Opera and Sammo really championed his career and was at this stage looking for a role that would really define him. It gets half a way there, because you got Lam Ching Ying in a supernatural movie but it was not till later in the film Mr. Vampire that Sammo actually cast Lam Ching Ying as a vampire buster... If you look at the other movies of this era, the 1980s, it was really interesting to see Sammo looking at new ways to tell stories and new levels of story-telling in HK movies. Because it has to be said, that through the 70s and the 80s a lot of the martial arts pictures were really very thin, very basic.'
'Sammo having established this horror-comedy genre to the level that he did with Spooky Encounters returned to the material later more as a producer than as a director. Maybe he felt that it'd be hard for him to capture the same success that he'd had with Spooky Encounters and so he produced The Dead and the Deadly which Wu Ma directed. He produced the Mr. Vampire series of which the first film was very much the best, which was directed by Ricky Lau and starred Lam Ching-ying. He produced Hocus Pocus, Spooky Spooky and it wasn't until 1989 which is like almost ten years later, that he directed an official sequel to Spooky Encounters which was called Spooky Encounters 2, and even though that film does have merit, it really is not anywhere near as memorable as the first film. So maybe Sammo was right to hold on for as long as he did.'
'And here we see our first clear view of a Taoist ritual and the Altar which is very important in the practice of Taoism... It's obvious when
Sammo set about making a research on the
film, making the movie with his normal.... approach, he brought in
genuine Taoist masters and Feng Shui masters and masters of this
kind of San Da practice and asked them to instruct him and the set
decorator and the production designer to make sure that everything
really conformed to the way that Taoism was actually practiced in the
real world.'
'One thing about Sammo in action when he’s fighting in a movie is that you never have any doubt – or I don’t anyway – that if you were standing there where the stuntman and he hit you, you would fall down, you would get knowked out. I mean, the one element to Sammo’s, obviousl
y he has this incredible physicality and gymnastic skills from
his days at the Opera, but one element he brings to it that not all of
those guys have is power. He’s probably one of the most powerful
fighters on screen. I remember watching a movie, somebody said to me,
you have to check out this film, you gonna see real stick-fighting. I
won’t mention the guy’s name, it was like a very good real-life martial
arts exponent, a master of different style of Philippino
stick-fighting. And I watched the film and even though technically,
classically the movements were correct, it was just not the best,
didn’t look powerful on screen. And I said to this person: you know
what? You definitely have the real ability in real world, but film is different. If
you wanna see the stick on film, you should look at Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon or
take a look at the scene in Shanghai Express when Sammo comes up in
front of a hotel with these 2 sticks, just slam, bang! That is the
stick on screen.'
'I always admire Sammo’s ability to look at elements of society or elements of culture and then find imaginative ways to reinterpret them. He’s somebody who... you can’t really say enough of his ability, in terms of every aspect of filmmaking. Whether it’s conceiving new concepts, finding new talents, choreographing the action, supervising the cinematography of the films, which on many of the movies he’s credited on, in Golden Harvest films, he seriously credited on every GH movie or action, even on the comedies of this era he gets a credit as action coordinator. You really wonder how much influence he had. Cause please bear in mind, that in HK during this era if you had a movie with action scenes, when the action director came on the set the main director, or director of credit would maybe not even there. And it’s constantly been a problem in HK film history that the end of the day when the editor was cutting the movie together you’d have scenes shot by the first unit director, and scenes shot by the action unit and they wouldn’t necessarily match up.'
'This is a great reaction shot of Courageous Cheung, as he realizes
that he’s inadvertedly brought this decaying creature back to life. And
the side-gag that follows always gets a big laugh and it’s again
another example of how if you can make your humour visual, then you can
cross over into different markets.
'The comic flair of that character is a lot of fun to watch and makes us realize what a loss Lam Ching-ying’s death to HK Action Cinema was. Because not only he was a terrific
martial arts exponent as we get
to see a little bit of that in this film but he’s also a fine actor to
boot. And never better than when he’s directed by Sammo. Like many
people from this era, I mean they just did never look look as good as
when Sammo Hung was directing them. Speaking of Sammo’s discoveries,
Yuen Biao was actually one of the stunt-team on this movie, one of the
action choraographers and he did some stunt-doubling.'
'This is one of the highpoints of Sammo’s career as a screenfighter, and for people who’re not really familiar with his work – people always saying to me it’s amazing a big guy like that moving like he does – but of course he had learnt many of these physical movements when he was build more regular size, when he was thinner, in his younger days, and for whatever reason, genetical predisposition, he had an injury, he couldn’t train for a while, he loves to eat, he gained weight but he already had the physical prowess and he never really stopped doing all the stuff that he could do. As he gained weight he just kind of like adjusted his movements accordingly. This sequence was featured quite prominently in the Best of Martial Arts documentary and a lot of people are saying, gee, this is incredible to see a guy moving as Sammo does here… You see him use the bench with this kind of timing and he’s just great. When he went to do Martial Law people said: Gee, would it work in America? And I’m like of course it will because all the good old boys, most of the guys in America who fight or who think they can, who’re in the audience, they look like Sammo Hung. He’s somebody who really, he’s the american dream came real, this kind of big burly Chinese guy came to America and became a star in American television. But I certainly had all the confidence that he would and could break into the American market if given the right vehicle. Now of course Sammo is more focused on being a director and I think he can probably enjoy more success internationally as a filmmaker than he can as an action star.'
'Here we see Sammo possessed by the Monkey God, and is demonstrating the fighting techniques of a monkey. It’s an amazing performance
and
one of his most memorable fight sequences.
Jackie Chan was talking about Sammo Hung (The Medal press conference)
and he says: „Look at Sammo, he’s built like an elephant but he moves
like a monkey”. I think probably only Jackie could get away saying
that. But in this sequence that certainly born out, you have a guy who
built more like an elephant but can move like a monkey. And actually
Jackie, even though he did a movie Snake in the Eagles’s Shadow, he’s
done films where he’s played monkey type characters, he never really
showed monkey boxing in the way that Sammo does. Probably because Sammo
did it quite early on, like in 1980 in this film, so there was a sense
of “OK, we don’t wanna copy that”.'
'Sammo now is coming in as a spear-playing female immortal and it’s incredible to watch the timing here… Sammo probably is the greatest
on
screen exponent of weaponary, you see him in Odd Couple which is the
film fans always cite as his finest hour, but this is the second finest
hour, if you take Odd Couple as the best. Kind of tricky to do it
because you get the straight sword which is close to medium range
weapon and the spear which is long range weapon so it’s tricky to
choreograph because you actually have to keep the spearplayer within
sword distance, but Sammo does that, I mean that comes from the Opera…
they always had weapon sequences, scenes when spears are being flipped
back and forward across the stage with great dexterity. So this was not
really a lay to a specific martial arts style but it gave people a real
sense of the timings and dynamics of using weapon in a spectacular
manner. People were asking what style of spearplaying is that. I don’t
know if this is a specific style but it really reflects the fact that
Sammo has developed an ability to feel the dynamic of a weapon on
screen, it’s a moving in such a way that it would work visually and it
doesn’t really matter whether this is a movement that can be used in
real life because this isn’t real life, it’s a movie.'
'It wasn’t really common to see firegags this time in HK films, so as ever, Sammo breaking new ground showing this kind of action. And there’s
enough shots here that we can actually see that it was Chan
Long himself who got burnt.
Now up on the other tower we have this, the typical sardonic Sammo
flair, as he comes running forward and of course you think, oh, he’s
gonna catch him and then he goes down and boom! ... So this unique
blend that Sammo has, bringing horror and comedy together. And now
comes the wife. And this is a moment… you know people remember 2 things
about this movie: the altar and this thing at the end. Out she comes
and you have this moment you think, OK fine, everybody else is dead,
he’s gonna get back together with her and they live happily ever after.
And then it’s like… I don’t know why, it shouldn’t work, it’s horrible,
I mean the fact he’s going to react the way he does, but within the
context of this exaggerated piece it kind of works…
(Klara: and what’s that? Are you curious? Then go and get the movie guys! Comedy, horror, shock guaranteed. It’s worth every penny and much more! Mr. Hung, it’s a masterpiece!)
'Though this film is indeed
groundbreaking, Sammo, like everybody had influences that led him to
make Spooky Encounters. And he himself cites the ghost stories that he
and his fellow classmates would be told at the Peking Opera School by
his instructors there. Obviously these would be stories based on the
folklore of Southern China and they were typical campfire tales that
left quite an impression on the young Sammo. Also there had been in the
past films, martial arts action pictures, which had elements of
supernatural in them. Sammo himself had worked on King Hu’s A Touch of
Zen which very successfully brought in the idea that you could have a
martial action film with a ghost element. Also A Touch of Zen in one
of the primary influences of Tsui Hark’s later A Chinese Ghost Story.
There was a lesser known film, The Comet Strikes which was directed
by Lo Wei at Golden Harvest film starring Nora Miao. As a sword play
film it was very atmospheric and has about a kind of a feel of a Hammer
film done Hong Kong style. Sammo’s done the action for the film and
also if you look at that movie, some of the imagery is very similar to
the images he would use in his later comedy horror pictures. Es ever in
HK where really credit is assigned almost at will, even though Lo Wei
is the director of credit, I think Sammo had a lot of influence on The
Comet Strikes. It’s quite hard to locate this film these days, but if
you get the chance to take a look, it’s quite a unique film for its
era.''At this particular time Sammo was already a leading light at Golden Harvest. He established himself very early as a heavy in the films, as a bad guy, as a suitable opponent for various martial arts heroes of the day. And then he became an excellent choraographer and eventually an action director, then a director of his own right and when he was casting films he quickly put together a troup of stuntmen and martial artists and character artists and worked with them again and again. And to a certain extent if he works in HK he’s still working pretty much with the same actors. So you’ll have all of the major lights of HK Cinema have their own group around them. A lot of these people are working with him till this day.'
'Sammo is somebody who’s constantly looking for both new concepts, new faces, new people to bring out in films. What he will do, is really interesting, is to find people who are known in a certain tradition, in a certain way and try to reinterpret them on screen by giving them a role that’s kind of against type. And later in the film we see Lam Ching Ying who was another Opera School student. Not from the same school as Sammo but somebody who was respected as a practitioner of the Chinese Opera and Sammo really championed his career and was at this stage looking for a role that would really define him. It gets half a way there, because you got Lam Ching Ying in a supernatural movie but it was not till later in the film Mr. Vampire that Sammo actually cast Lam Ching Ying as a vampire buster... If you look at the other movies of this era, the 1980s, it was really interesting to see Sammo looking at new ways to tell stories and new levels of story-telling in HK movies. Because it has to be said, that through the 70s and the 80s a lot of the martial arts pictures were really very thin, very basic.'
'Sammo having established this horror-comedy genre to the level that he did with Spooky Encounters returned to the material later more as a producer than as a director. Maybe he felt that it'd be hard for him to capture the same success that he'd had with Spooky Encounters and so he produced The Dead and the Deadly which Wu Ma directed. He produced the Mr. Vampire series of which the first film was very much the best, which was directed by Ricky Lau and starred Lam Ching-ying. He produced Hocus Pocus, Spooky Spooky and it wasn't until 1989 which is like almost ten years later, that he directed an official sequel to Spooky Encounters which was called Spooky Encounters 2, and even though that film does have merit, it really is not anywhere near as memorable as the first film. So maybe Sammo was right to hold on for as long as he did.'
'And here we see our first clear view of a Taoist ritual and the Altar which is very important in the practice of Taoism... It's obvious when
Sammo set about making a research on the
film, making the movie with his normal.... approach, he brought in
genuine Taoist masters and Feng Shui masters and masters of this
kind of San Da practice and asked them to instruct him and the set
decorator and the production designer to make sure that everything
really conformed to the way that Taoism was actually practiced in the
real world.''One thing about Sammo in action when he’s fighting in a movie is that you never have any doubt – or I don’t anyway – that if you were standing there where the stuntman and he hit you, you would fall down, you would get knowked out. I mean, the one element to Sammo’s, obviousl
y he has this incredible physicality and gymnastic skills from
his days at the Opera, but one element he brings to it that not all of
those guys have is power. He’s probably one of the most powerful
fighters on screen. I remember watching a movie, somebody said to me,
you have to check out this film, you gonna see real stick-fighting. I
won’t mention the guy’s name, it was like a very good real-life martial
arts exponent, a master of different style of Philippino
stick-fighting. And I watched the film and even though technically,
classically the movements were correct, it was just not the best,
didn’t look powerful on screen. And I said to this person: you know
what? You definitely have the real ability in real world, but film is different. If
you wanna see the stick on film, you should look at Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon or
take a look at the scene in Shanghai Express when Sammo comes up in
front of a hotel with these 2 sticks, just slam, bang! That is the
stick on screen.''I always admire Sammo’s ability to look at elements of society or elements of culture and then find imaginative ways to reinterpret them. He’s somebody who... you can’t really say enough of his ability, in terms of every aspect of filmmaking. Whether it’s conceiving new concepts, finding new talents, choreographing the action, supervising the cinematography of the films, which on many of the movies he’s credited on, in Golden Harvest films, he seriously credited on every GH movie or action, even on the comedies of this era he gets a credit as action coordinator. You really wonder how much influence he had. Cause please bear in mind, that in HK during this era if you had a movie with action scenes, when the action director came on the set the main director, or director of credit would maybe not even there. And it’s constantly been a problem in HK film history that the end of the day when the editor was cutting the movie together you’d have scenes shot by the first unit director, and scenes shot by the action unit and they wouldn’t necessarily match up.'
'This is a great reaction shot of Courageous Cheung, as he realizes
that he’s inadvertedly brought this decaying creature back to life. And
the side-gag that follows always gets a big laugh and it’s again
another example of how if you can make your humour visual, then you can
cross over into different markets. 'The comic flair of that character is a lot of fun to watch and makes us realize what a loss Lam Ching-ying’s death to HK Action Cinema was. Because not only he was a terrific
martial arts exponent as we get
to see a little bit of that in this film but he’s also a fine actor to
boot. And never better than when he’s directed by Sammo. Like many
people from this era, I mean they just did never look look as good as
when Sammo Hung was directing them. Speaking of Sammo’s discoveries,
Yuen Biao was actually one of the stunt-team on this movie, one of the
action choraographers and he did some stunt-doubling.''This is one of the highpoints of Sammo’s career as a screenfighter, and for people who’re not really familiar with his work – people always saying to me it’s amazing a big guy like that moving like he does – but of course he had learnt many of these physical movements when he was build more regular size, when he was thinner, in his younger days, and for whatever reason, genetical predisposition, he had an injury, he couldn’t train for a while, he loves to eat, he gained weight but he already had the physical prowess and he never really stopped doing all the stuff that he could do. As he gained weight he just kind of like adjusted his movements accordingly. This sequence was featured quite prominently in the Best of Martial Arts documentary and a lot of people are saying, gee, this is incredible to see a guy moving as Sammo does here… You see him use the bench with this kind of timing and he’s just great. When he went to do Martial Law people said: Gee, would it work in America? And I’m like of course it will because all the good old boys, most of the guys in America who fight or who think they can, who’re in the audience, they look like Sammo Hung. He’s somebody who really, he’s the american dream came real, this kind of big burly Chinese guy came to America and became a star in American television. But I certainly had all the confidence that he would and could break into the American market if given the right vehicle. Now of course Sammo is more focused on being a director and I think he can probably enjoy more success internationally as a filmmaker than he can as an action star.'
'Here we see Sammo possessed by the Monkey God, and is demonstrating the fighting techniques of a monkey. It’s an amazing performance
and
one of his most memorable fight sequences.
Jackie Chan was talking about Sammo Hung (The Medal press conference)
and he says: „Look at Sammo, he’s built like an elephant but he moves
like a monkey”. I think probably only Jackie could get away saying
that. But in this sequence that certainly born out, you have a guy who
built more like an elephant but can move like a monkey. And actually
Jackie, even though he did a movie Snake in the Eagles’s Shadow, he’s
done films where he’s played monkey type characters, he never really
showed monkey boxing in the way that Sammo does. Probably because Sammo
did it quite early on, like in 1980 in this film, so there was a sense
of “OK, we don’t wanna copy that”.''Sammo now is coming in as a spear-playing female immortal and it’s incredible to watch the timing here… Sammo probably is the greatest
on
screen exponent of weaponary, you see him in Odd Couple which is the
film fans always cite as his finest hour, but this is the second finest
hour, if you take Odd Couple as the best. Kind of tricky to do it
because you get the straight sword which is close to medium range
weapon and the spear which is long range weapon so it’s tricky to
choreograph because you actually have to keep the spearplayer within
sword distance, but Sammo does that, I mean that comes from the Opera…
they always had weapon sequences, scenes when spears are being flipped
back and forward across the stage with great dexterity. So this was not
really a lay to a specific martial arts style but it gave people a real
sense of the timings and dynamics of using weapon in a spectacular
manner. People were asking what style of spearplaying is that. I don’t
know if this is a specific style but it really reflects the fact that
Sammo has developed an ability to feel the dynamic of a weapon on
screen, it’s a moving in such a way that it would work visually and it
doesn’t really matter whether this is a movement that can be used in
real life because this isn’t real life, it’s a movie.''It wasn’t really common to see firegags this time in HK films, so as ever, Sammo breaking new ground showing this kind of action. And there’s
enough shots here that we can actually see that it was Chan
Long himself who got burnt.
Now up on the other tower we have this, the typical sardonic Sammo
flair, as he comes running forward and of course you think, oh, he’s
gonna catch him and then he goes down and boom! ... So this unique
blend that Sammo has, bringing horror and comedy together. And now
comes the wife. And this is a moment… you know people remember 2 things
about this movie: the altar and this thing at the end. Out she comes
and you have this moment you think, OK fine, everybody else is dead,
he’s gonna get back together with her and they live happily ever after.
And then it’s like… I don’t know why, it shouldn’t work, it’s horrible,
I mean the fact he’s going to react the way he does, but within the
context of this exaggerated piece it kind of works…
(Klara: and what’s that? Are you curious? Then go and get the movie guys! Comedy, horror, shock guaranteed. It’s worth every penny and much more! Mr. Hung, it’s a masterpiece!)