Starring Lau Kar-Leung, Tang Lai-Ying, Mark Cheng, Wong Jing, Hsu Shu-Yuan and Stuart Ong, written by Wong Jing and directed by Dennis Yu.

An evil cat demon-spirit reappears every 50 years and a descendant of the demon-fighting Cheung family has always been there to combat it, in a cycle of events that spans the past 400 years. Now the final cat spirit has been set free on the Earth and Master Cheung, who is suffering from cancer, enlists the help of young chauffeur Ah Long (Cheng) to destroy the evil once and for all. Armed with a bow and three charmed arrows, Long & Cheung hunt down the energy-absorbing feline entity, which first possesses Long’s boss Mr Fan and then his personal assistant, Tina.  

Evil Cat is standard 80s Hong Kong horror-fantasy fare, with the requisite amounts of humour and suspense, with decent action scenes overseen by master martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung, who also plays spirit-fighter Cheung.

Written by Wong Jing, the film gains momentum once Tina (Shu-Yuan) gets possessed, triggering scenes in which she bites off the tongue of a pop star during sex in a car, rams her hand through a policeman’s body, and withstands multiple gunshot hits when cops blast at her during an energetic police station rampage. 

The plot’s supernatural lore is patchy at best, with the cat-demon easily jumping from host to host, even when it is stabbed by the supposedly lethal magic arrows, but the movie doesn’t worry itself too much about the fuzziness of its mythology, concentrating instead on supplying incident after incident, intent on reaching its climax, where the evil spirit finally reveals its true form: a pale, white-haired cat-woman.

Evil Cat doesn’t really stick in the memory, but it is never dull and certainly passes the time nicely enough.