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Doctor Vampire
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th February 2025). |
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The Film
 In England for a medical conference, young surgeon Chiang Ta-Tsung (Hard Boiled's Bowie Lam) breaks down in the countryside and stumbles upon a castle while looking for a telephone. The castle turns out to be a brothel where he tries to resist temptation. When Tsung spots a Chinese girl being accosted by a man, he comes to her rescue, not realizing that Alice (Eternal Evil of Asia's Ellen Chan) is a vampire and that she was trying to feed off a client. At the command of The Count (Ninja Commandments' Peter Kjaer) who feeds off of his vampire courtesans once they have fed off of their male victims. Alice is touched that Tsung has lost his virginity with her so she spares him, biting him below the belt but letting him live. The Count feels invigorated by Tsung's blood, the quality of which he describes as being like ginseng, and demands that she get more of Tsung's blood. Unfortunately, Tsung has returned to Hong Kong where he works at a shoddy hospital alongside his two buddies Kim (Bullet in the Head's Lawrence Lau) and Chiang (The Bride with White Hair's David Wu) as well as his nurse fiancee May (Mortuary Blues' Sheila Chan). Refusing to sleep with Tsung until they are married, May – with the help of fellow nurse and roommate Joy (The Master's Crystal Kwok) – has been vigilant about any suspicion of her fiance cheating on her, noticing before he does the blood spots on his underwear. Tsung develops an aversion to garlic and sunlight and takes to wearing a cape around the hospital, leading his buddies to suggest that he was bitten by a vampire (which they believe happens often in England). Alice reveals to Tsung that she wants to help him cure himself before he is tempted to drink human blood, but a mishap involving a love potion May has slipped into Tsung's food has terrible side effects. Soon, Kim and Chiang are exploiting the ploy of the penny pinching assistant director (Iron Monkey's James Wong) to think up operations to meet their monthly quotas to secure a supply of blood for Tsung and his guest until May and Joy get suspicious and consult a Taoist priest (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin's Ni Kuang). When bloodless corpses start turning up on the hospital site, Tsung and Alice realize that The Count has come after them. In contrast to the long running Mr. Vampire series of jiāngshī or "hopping vampires" which were pretty much resurrected corpses that had fangs and drank blood only in some stories and were simply likened to vampires in translation, Doctor Vampire is like the Mr. Vampire series entiry Vampire vs. Vampire not only in making a European vampire the source of the pestilence back in Hong Kong; indeed, here Tsung puts on a jiāngshī costume as a joke. The film also borrows as much from Hammer Gothics as it does in this came from American vampire films of the eighties including The Lost Boys and most heavily from Once Bitten. The film is very broadly comic in the scattershot Hong Kong style with sex jokes, misogyny – a cleaning lady played by Yu Miu-Lin (Aces Go Places) is deemed too ugly to bite by a vampire with a blood-filled erection (The Blue Jean Monster's Lee Hin-Ming) who then fails to satisfy an uptight head nurse who is actually a nymphomaniac – multiple AIDS jokes (as well as a safe sex one when Tsung complains "I only fooled around once!" about his predicament), and the toxic relationship between Tsung and May is apparently funny as she holds his purse strings, inspects his clothes and his apartment for signs of cheating, and looks to Joy for talismans and potions to control him. There are some clever bits that suggest writer/director/action director Jamie Luk (Robotrix) watched some Hammer including The Count being held at bay by the rays of a surgical spotlight arranged in a cruciform pattern, The Count being overwhelmed by religious iconography (in this case, a Buddha statue that does not take kindly to being spat upon), and a wooden spear that becomes embedded upward in the ground during a scuffle that will come of use later. The Chinese performances are shrill but suit the broad comedy while the English-speaking actors have more fighting ability than acting talent (while Vampire vs. Vampire's Frank Juhasz appeared in the new scenes for a number of Joseph Lai films around the same period, Kjaer's other credits consisted of Godfrey Ho jigsaw productions). There are also guest turns by The Troublesome Night series Helena Law as a ditzy high society patient and Shing Fui-On (Prison on Fire) aka "Big Silly Head" plays a yakuza gangster submitted to multiple unnecessary operations including a circumcision for a cold and an appendix operation for a headache. Doctor Vampire might be off-putting as a vampire comedy for the casual viewer, but it is an interesting work for Hong Kong comedy and jiāngshī film fans. 
Video
Doctor Vampire appears not to have been exported outside of Asian territories but it could be found in English-friendly form upon release as a bilingual laserdisc with burnt-in English and Chinese subtitles from Mei Ah who also put out a VCD but apparently no DVD edition. Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a brand new 2K restoration – presumably the same one used for Shout! Factory's under-the-radar Golden Harvest Vol. 1: Supernatural Shockers six Blu-ray set from late last year – and it looks spectacular early on in that sterile nineties television look where only horror and romantic scenes are treated to any sort of moody lighting. Blue gels and bloody feds pop, and grain is fine apart from a few title opticals and a few shots involving opticals like The Count's red eye beams and a green surgical laser employed in the climax. The hospital climax has some shots that look rather soft and noisy but that is presumably due to the film stock and lighting. 
Audio
The film was never dubbed into English but the original mono track is a mix of post-dubbed Cantonese and (poorly-acted) English. Eureka includes both a Cantonese LPCM 2.0 mono track and a "restored" Cantonese LPCM 2.0 mono track. We did not compare them closely but could not detect much of a difference. The music was always punishingly loud in the mix and there is some high end "crunch" evident during the end credits on both tracks. Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors. 
Extras
Extras include pair of commentary tracks. The first is an audio commentary by East Asian film experts Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and John Charles – last paired together for Mr. Vampire III in Eureka's Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels – in which they discuss the Hong Kong vampire genre being on the wane and trying out different things including dropping jiāngshī altogether in favor of Western vampires here, the aborted and buried Mr. Vampire Western television spin-off, the unauthorized New Mr. Vampire, and A Bite of Love, another 1990 vampire comedy starring another singer George Lam (King of Beggars). Djeng attributes this to both the oversaturation as well as competition from the comedys of Stephen Chow who released twelve films in 1990, five of which were box office hits (Doctor Vampire was number ninety-two in the charts). Charles points out that the film's meager Cat. II sexuality was still censored in mainland China with Chan's bare shoulders and covered cleavage blurred (although not the equally-revealing outfits of Western actresses). They provide plenty of background on the cast, from TV star Lam to Kjaer who was cast for his martial arts abilities back then but later became an economics professor and is chairing a nature conservancy agency. Next up is an audio commentary by Hong Kong cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who reveal that the opening sequence was indeed really shot in England – as well as noting other Hong Kong films that shot in the U.K. during this period – mixing populary shooting location Allington Castle, London's Black Friar's Pub, and the Gore Hotel into one with a few Hong Kong locations. They also discuss the borrowings from other vampire cinema but the most interesting part of their track is all of the additional background information on the cast, noting the experiences of all three female stars who got stuck being typecast in sexy or bitchy female love interest roles – along with their surprising careers outside film – writer/director/composer/scandalous "Celebrity Talk Show" host Wong, actor/editor Wu, and Shing Fui-On who was the village leader where Leeder was living in Hong Kong and worked with him during on film during his days of waning health before his death form liver cancer.  "A British Vampire in Hong Kong" (20:11) is an interview with Stacey Abbott, author of "Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World" that also looks at Doctor Vampire as part of a transitional period in Hong Kong vampire cinema and its borrowings from international vampire films, particularly those more action-oriented than the more youth-directed ones of the earlier decade as well as the more classic references. She also discusses how these borrowings coalesce into a film about anxieties over crossing borders, immigration, colonization – it is not an unsubtle touch that Alice is the only Asian vampire as that the female vampire are "trafficked" sexual slaves – and sexually-transmitted diseases. She also notes that although the Daoist priest proves useless, the joint actions of the Tsung, Alice, and his fiancee, her friend, and his buddies represent a triumph of traditional Chinese values over a foreign interloper. "Vampire Slaying 101: Remixing Monster Traditions in Doctor Vampire" (22:11) is a video essay by gothic scholar Mary Going who discusses the different characteristics of vampires and dealing with them in different countries and how those have proliferated through literature and cinema into hybrid forms – along with the jiāngshī which have come to be associated with vampires in China – referencing the film at hand in terms of how the vampires conform to and violate certain Western conventions along with the methods of dispatching them, noting that like Fearless Vampire Killers, Salem's Lot, Fright Night, and the later Dracula 2000, the efficacy of a religious icon to ward off vampires can depend both on the faith of the wielder or vampire. 
Packaging
The limited edition of 2,000 copies comes with a O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Graham Humphreys and a collector's booklet featuring new writing on Hong Kong vampire films from "Mr Vampire" to "Doctor Vampire" by East Asian horror expert Katarzyna Ancuta who discusses the difference between the Western vampire and the jiāngshī which actually means "stiff corpse" as well noting that George Soulié de Morant's translation of Pu Songling's "Shibian" transforms a revenant into a vampire – indeed, Djeng pointed out in his commentary that the Chinese title translated as "Stiff Corpse Doctor" – as well as how the jiāngshī of the Mr. Vampire films are very different from those of folklore and literature, the practice of transporting corpses, as well as the Vampire vs. Vampire and Doctor Vampire both featuring western vampires.
Overall
Doctor Vampire might be off-putting as a vampire comedy for the casual viewer, but it is an interesting work for Hong Kong comedy and jiāngshī film fans.
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