Directors: Chen Chun-Liang & Ulysses Au-Yeung Jun
Release date: 1988
Contains spoilers
I have, as I post this, jumped the third Hello Dracula film as, although I have access to it, I have never found subtitles for it and so we move to the fourth film of the series and it is kind of a reinvention or reboot almost. The Chinese title in English is King of the Children.
The film starts with kids on a beach and the sands start moving. From them jumps… I want to say Vampire Thor, but actually he is a demon (Chiang Long-Sheng). He goes around stealing children and killing parents. He is challenged by Yu Tien (Ku Kuan-Chung) though the ritual he uses does not succeed…
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| one of the thieves |
Elsewhere his pregnant wife is worried about Yu Tien. She is the daughter of Grandpa Chin (Chin Tu, Magic of Spell) and he has been entrusted with the Golden Shield Vampires, who he has in the mortuary. Two thieves have broken in, dressed like the vampires (they wear colourful armour-like robes, rather than the traditional funeral garb), trying to steal the controls for the vampires (and thus the vampires themselves). They work out what the controls are as Grandpa manipulates the vampires.
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| the demon |
However, Yu Tien returns and he is possessed by the demon who turns its attention to his wife and the baby in her womb. Grandpa fights for his daughter and manages to stick a sacred nail into the demon’s head, but not far enough (it seems) and the demon gets away dragging Yu Tien into a portal. The daughter has died but Grandpa knows that, as a pregnant woman who has died at full term, her spirit will remain with her body for one hour so that Taoist magic can be employed to allow the baby to be born. He delivers Tien Tien (an alternate spelling from the earlier films' subtitles) but, in the chaos, the thieves have stolen the Golden Shield Vampires.
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| Lin Hsiao-Lu as Tien Tien |
So, this is a new origin story for the pair of Grandpa and Tien Tien. We see her growing up played by Shadow Liu Chih-Yu, who plays her in the earlier films, but the core film has her older and played by Lin Hsiao-Lu. Even as a new born baby she demonstrates that she has powers and as she grows Grandpa trains her to temper the use of them. She also befriends a little vampire child (Hong Ching-Yuan) behind his back. When she is older they hear of a vampire sighting (which is the thieves using the Golden Shield Vampires to rob people) and they go out to find them.
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| the con man goes looking for kyonsi |
Into the mix comes a con man (Chu Ke-Liang) who has a troop of martial arts kids (three boys and two girls who, mostly, are not drawn as characters beyond being martial arts kids). After the snake oil scheme he's running goes wrong, he decides to dress himself and the kids as vampires to rob people (during the day – this works once but the second attempted victim is Grandpa). Also, without his memory, Yu Tien reappears, still host to the demon who, when he manifests, is trying to get the nail removed (though only grandpa can actually do this). There is also a hotel/restaurant where the lady owner is romantically sort after by both a guard captain and the chief robber.
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| Chin Tu as Grandpa |
These disparate threads do come together at the end but feel a bit convoluted through the running time. The con man is drawn for comedy mostly and the kung fu kids are turned into ghosts, as in previous films, to help fight the demon – however no explanation is given as to how and why, and what the dangers are, and I guess the filmmakers just assumed that four films in the audience would get the gist. Of course, as explained, this reboots the story and ignores the already drawn life of Tien Tien, Grandpa and the previous orphans. There is some slapstick, some comedy and a whole lot of the martial art vampire fighting one would expect. In some respects, it is derivative of itself but, then again, it is certainly entertaining enough. 6 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
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