Honourable Mention: Wolf Devil Woman

This was a 1982 Kung Fu Fantasy film starring and directed by Pearl Cheung Ling in 1982. The version I watched was the awfully dubbed version – I have seen it suggested that the bad guy, Red Devil, sounds like Yosemite Sam in dub and its entirely true!

The film starts with a married pair of warriors escaping Red Devil and his evil, along with their baby. They are nearly captured and so commit suicide, dousing the baby with their blood to protect her from the cold (they are in snowy mountains) and burying her in said snow. The baby is rescued by wolves (who eat the corpses of her parents).

wolf head fur clothing

Jump forward and the Red Devil is threatening various kingdoms. Young Rudolph (actually that might have been the Chinese Yung) and his ever complaining servant Rudy are sent by Rudolph’s father to find the 1000 year old Ginseng that will protect them from Red Devil’s icy spell. They find the girl, now grown up and wearing (rather macabrely, given she has been raised by wolves) a wolf’s head fur. After misunderstandings, injuries and some brutal chiropractic treatment for her posture she quickly learns English (or Mandarin in the original, I guess).

hopping forward

They discover that she has already eaten the ginseng. Rudolph heads home, attacks Red Devil’s fortress in a pre-emptive strike and is forced into evil servitude. She ends up following eventually, destined to take down Red Devil and rescue Rudolph… so, where are the vampires? Well, these are kind of proto-kyonsi. The Red Devil keeps the corpses (it turns out) of his enemies as statues, paralysed by golden pins stuck in fetish dolls. Remove the pin and they come alive.

pinned with a golden arrow

They are unleashed on the heroes at the climax of the film. Their faces are covered but occasionally we see enough to see that they are corpses. They move like kyonsi – arms straight out and hopping. They are stopped by being staked with golden arrows by Rudolph, but some decapitation takes place as the wolf woman and Rudy fight them. They are on screen for a couple of minutes at most.

So a fleeting visitation. The imdb page is here.