A poor worker's wife is cheating on him with his boss. The boss hires a magician to kill the worker, who is challenged to spend the night in a temple (A.K.A. morgue). The evil magician's former fellow student helps the worker to avoid the tricks and traps set for him.
Hilarious! The hour 38 duration went by too quickly because of fast pacing. The plot was easy to follow and held my interest all the way through. The characters were all identifiable and relatable, but 1 of the villains looked too much like the good magician. Most of the dialogue was jokes that managed to cross the language barrier pretty well. The rest was basic plot elements being told. I thought the actors did a great job of placing comedy where it belonged. The sets and locations were chosen well and the costumes were pretty decent. Standard kung fu style. The makeup on the corpse was disgusting and nearly terrifying, they did such a good job on it. I really didn't notice too much camera-work that caught my eye. I think that the thing they did best was framing and shot composition. The special effects were all physical with wires and such. One worth mentioning is the mirror ghost's extended arm reaching across the room. As with most kung fu, the audio was a little on the shoddy side and the swooshes and hits were foleyed too loud. The whole thing reeked of classic kung fu. This has a 7.1/10 on IMDB, but all of the user reviews rate it higher than that and have nothing bad to say about it. It was also referenced in 2 documentaries about kung fu movies. Apparently, this introduced the "hopping undead" concept in kung fu horror films. I tend to agree with the user reviews more than the C grade it got. I rate this good because it was funny, scary and held my interest.
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