Director: Randy Kent
Release date: 2021
Contains spoilers
Chinese Speaking Vampires is a comedy/action film that predicates around one conceit that – from a genre fan point of view – was terribly amusing. However, the conceit was strange, so the film added an absurdist streak that might not work for everyone, and there is an undercurrent to the film that may have been meant to be social satire/commentary but was perhaps not used as well as it might have been and thus let itself down.
We start with some intertitles that suggest there was once a sect of kung fu vampires whose greatest power was to be fluent in Mandarin and that, if bitten and turned, their victims would become fluent in Mandarin. The sect was wiped out by the Japanese bar one adherent – who is Gengji Ma (Sean Eden Yi).
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| Tony and Susie |
This is the central conceit and rather wonderful, asking the question for every genre fan who has wondered how, certainly post-Buffy, all the recently turned seemed to become martial artists – this film takes that idea in an absurdist direction and makes the turnee fluent in Mandarin Chinese… more, we discover later, the new vampire forgets their original tongue and will have to relearn it. Indeed the ability to use martial arts is directly touched on when main character Tony (Davy Williams) reveals that he has had martial arts training previously.
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| Susie and Reika |
So Tony is our primary character. A delivery man who is an aspiring actor and we see him learning lines in Mandarin for an audition he is sneaking from work to attend. The audition goes well until he is asked to improvise and admits he doesn’t speak Mandarin and has learnt the lines by rote (actor Davy Williams actually does speak Mandarin). This is not acceptable as the director had asked for Mandarin speakers only. However, later, Tony’s agent says the casting has been moved a month to the right and so if he can learn Mandarin in a month he will get another audition.
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| flyer for the school |
Tony’s ex-girlfriend is a mandarin speaker but she refuses to help him. He had seen a flyer for the Gengji Ma language school, goes to get it but it’s gone and then mysteriously reappears. He goes to the school, manages to disturb the study of Susie (Daniela Brown) and Reika (June Lee), and then meets Gengji Ma who agrees to take him on at night school. The school aspect is normal night classes, at first, Tony falls for Susie and his friend Jim (Richard Gavigan) falls for Reika but soon Gengji Ma is turning students to build an undead army to take over the world…
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| Jeff McDonald as the pastor |
I mentioned an undercurrent and this comes to light through a group of vampire hunters led by pastor Roberts (Jeff McDonald) mostly made up of what seem like red-necks this is a commentary around the Trump-movement. Their poster actually uses the phrase “Make America Great Again” as well as “America First”. There is dialogue around taking the country back and about the vampires “spreading their virus”. This went close to the deliberately divisive rhetoric by the former president blaming China for Covid-19, calling it “Wuhan Flu” and in doing so stoking racist attacks on Asian-Americans.
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| Sean Eden Yi as Gengji Ma |
Now this, of course, might have been satirising such nationalism and rhetoric – indeed I think it was meant to be. The hunters are not drawn sympathetically (bar one character, Zara (Rezzan Denizmen), who joins them and is then redeemed by subsequently defending her erstwhile friends Susie and Reika), however the rhetoric in this is positioned as true as Gengji Ma has brought his vampirism into the country and wants to take over the country (and the world). This then obfuscates the satirising of MAGA to a degree by putting some credence in their narrative. For me it needed a bit more subtle drawing but, ultimately, I think the filmmakers were railing against the racist MAGA brand of nationalism.
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| punching through a hunter |
The film itself was fun, after the slow build around Tony, the school and Susie, it starts into a bit more action. Davy Williams is particularly good as Tony, making the character sympathetic and fun. Sean Eden Yi seems to be having a grand old time as Gengji Ma. The fight choreography was decent enough, though some of the effects slightly missed – the dusting of a staked vampire was perfunctory, the cgi of a punch through a slayer's chest was slightly off when paused but looked good enough in the flow of the film. Sometimes a film just tickles you, and this did. Satire aside, there was generally nothing too sophisticated, just a view to have some fun. It is a shame that the film wasn’t more nuanced around the satire but the absurdist humour carries this forward. 6 out of 10.
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