Billy Chong | Monster Zone

Starring Billy Chong, Lo Lieh, Sung Gam-Shing and Fang Mien, directed by Lee Chiu for The Eternal Film Company.

During the annual Ghost Festival, bare-chested hero Chun (Chong) is visited by the eyeless, green-faced spectre of his dead dad, who informs his son that he was a victim of murder. Chun decides to go to Yellow Dragon Town to get revenge for pops, but it won’t be easy as the villain controls a bunch of henchmen and is aided by a black magician priest (Gam-Shing). After Chun is pestered by hopping undead corpses in a playful scene, he’s inspired to go back to the location of a book of magic, which he uses to raise a group of mangle-faced undead to do his bidding.

These undead know how to make their own crucifix

This film is a great deal of fun!

Just to illustrate this, let’s look at what happens in a nicely-mounted confrontation between Chun and his ghosts versus the bad priest, who uses a magical cape and two long-tongued spirits in pointy hats to fight back. Chun stands his ground, retaliates by using his glowing magic book, turning the black magician’s spirits into puddles. But the movie’s weird factor is now suddenly turned up a notch as the priest piles on the pressure… by summoning Count Dracula! Wonderful stuff!

Billy Chong’s fight moves are a joy to watch, plus we get to see a deadly ghost with stretching arms, a long-range flamethrower breath attack, women’s underwear thrown at the wizard to weaken him and a scene where the main villain (Lieh) is chased by the burning scalps of his victims!

These surreal elements, added to fine action courtesy of martial arts directors Alan Hsu and Sung Gam-Shing, make this a very entertaining kung-fu-horror-fantasy yarn.

Chun's eyeless, green-faced dead dad — Chun’s eyeless, green-faced dead dad

Directed by Hwa I Hung, starring Billy Chong, Chan Lau, Chang Tao and Cheng Ka Ying .

A renegade priest brings the dead back to life as eyeless, hopping zombies to help a bad guy called Mu Tai kill his opponents, but the villain dies in one of his own boobytraps, so his ghost demands to be reincarnated in another body. Mu Tai’s spirit ends up residing in the corpse of hero Pang’s father, but a faulty ritual turns him into a white-faced, part-human & part-ghost being, who’s hellbent on murdering several folks. To make matters worse, Pang (Chong) is also targeted by scar-faced undead villain Long, a guy so tough he even carries on fighting when his hands and feet catch fire! Fortunately for Pang, the handy intervention of a Buddhist monk imbues him with the power to defeat Long, who is finally lynched with prayer beads and stabbed to death with a tree branch.

Is Pang's dad dead or unwell or a zombie? — Is Pang’s dad dead or unwell or a zombie?

This Eternal Film Company production is a comedic fantasy-horror-actioner, starring the likeable Billy Chong, which merges lively bouts of kung fu, humour and supernatural hijinks with music borrowed from the likes of MOONRAKER and EXORCIST II. The movie informs us that spirits need to be nailed to the corpses they are going to inhabit and reveals the fact that a hat constructed from leaves can make its wearer invisible to the living dead!

This leaf hat will make you invisible to vampires and zombies, honest! — This leaf hat will make you invisible to vampires and zombies – honest!

There’s some super-fast editing for several fight scenes, plus speeded-up farcical chases, though this all actually works out fine within the context of this film, which is, after all, an exaggerated comedy kung fu horror flick.

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