Good heavens. Why must every Hong Kong film since CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON be compared to it? That's like comparing Tim Burton's ED WOOD to Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE because they're both in black-and-white! They're both great movies, but it's ridiculous to stand them next to each other because they're so vastly different. To me, Tsui Hark constructed a BRILLIANT homage to the "hopping corpse," and "demon" movies of the 1980's and early 1990's while adding some great kung-fu sequences. I see hints of SWORDSMAN, I feel bits of MR. VAMPIRE, I hear parts of IRON MONKEY, I smell A CHINESE GHOST STORY, and it's all done quite well. Wu-shu, taoist warriors, hopping corpses, a creepy nod to HOUSE OF WAX, and silly jokes? Great fun to me! Art-house, said one reviewer? Don't know what art films YOU'VE been watching lately. This movie didn't try anything tremendously fancy or new, it took a lot of things we've seen before and turned out a movie that was more than the sum of its parts. Bad humor? Different humor. Hong Kong humor is usually quite different than American humor...I'm sure a lot of people missed when RAIN, CLOUD, THUNDER, and LIGHTNING (ridiculously stereotypical "hero" names) were renamed "Kung," "Hei," "Fat," and "Choi." Put those four words together and it says "Happy New Year" in Cantonese. Amazingly funny to us? Probably not. Good for a lengthy chuckle for chinese native? Definitely. Low-budget? Again, have we been so spoiled by movie producers throwing vast wads of cash at American films -- often to cover the fact that a movie is BAD -- that we can't appreciate a film that doesn't try to overachieve, but does what it can with what it has? How quickly people forget CLERKS, EL MARIACHI, etc. But then again, DESPERADO was so much better than EL MARIACHI, yes? Because it had BIG EXPLOSIONS and SEX! It's time people set CROUCHING TIGER up on its own shelf and stop comparing it to movies it bears no similarities to. Wanna say that Zhang Yimou's HERO was an overblown attempt to recreate CT,HD? Go for it, you'll be right. Wanna miss the fun of VAMPIRE HUNTERS entirely by refusing to watch it as its own film? Your choice, and ultimately, your loss.
Review of Vampire Hunters
