Hello Dracula – review

Director: Chiu Chung-Hing

Release date: 1986*

Contains spoilers

*IMDb lists this as 1985 but the Hong Kong Movie Database lists it as 1986 and the more detailed release dates list on IMDb concur and do not show an ’85 date.

A Taiwanese film that was originally called Jiang Shi Xiao Zi or the Jiangshi Kid, the VHS carried the English title Hello! Dracular. The film is now commonly known as Hello Dracula and spawned a series of films behind it.

ready to play Mahjong

It starts with a horse drawn wagon, driven by Master Sha (Huang Chung-Yu) who runs a troop of child performers who do kung fu and acrobatic tricks. They are all sleeping in the wagon. They stop for the night and one of the kids Xigua Pi cooks as the other three, Xiao Hu, Bao Ya and Xiao Hei have a bath behind a curtain. The Master wants to play Mahjong with them – which is a lead in to the fact that he is a gambler, but bad at it.

the little kyonsi

Close by is a corpse herder (Lin Kuang-Yung, Kung Fu Zombie) taking his charges home. They hop along but he doesn’t notice a child kyonsi appear and start to sing at them – he is looking for his daddy and entices them to turn and hop away. The Taoist eventually realises and gets the corpses back under control and we discover that he has previously lost some of his wards to the child – though the boy is not much in the film, to be honest.

corpse herding

Master Sha hears the chant of the Taoist and tells the boys to hide as he is herding corpses. The herder stops at the camp and notices the mahjong, sends his wards to stand away from the camp and suggests a game with Sha. Meanwhile the boys have snuck to look at the kyonsi and, messing around, they remove the spell scroll from the forehead of one, who animates and attacks. They run back to camp and Sha fights with the kyonsi but ends up paralysed until pushed by the Taoist, who then subdues the vampire with another scroll. The reason he couldn’t move was because the kyonsi stood on his shadow and he is subsequently likely to receive bad luck.

struck with ghost hitting powder

In the nearby town Tian Tian (Shadow Liu Chih-Yu), a young girl, is putting rice out with incense put into the bowls. She is in a funeral parlour and the bowls are for the kyonsi who are resident there because they had no family to receive them after their deaths. It was interesting to see this variant of the hopping vampire as they eat rice and do not wear prayer scrolls. They are (mostly) well behaved guests – I say mostly because we do see the hand of one in a solitary confinement later but also because in this scene one large vampire bullies another for his rice. This is subject to punishment by the little girl, who puts ghost hitting powder on a hand-shaped swatter and belts the miscreant. Her grandfather (Chin Tu, Magic of Spell) is a Taoist who runs the parlour and offers a side business giving Feng Shui advice.

Grandpa and Tian Tian

Anyway, the performers lose their gig and Sha gambles the horse and loses. He then ends up arrested for child endangerment. The kids blame the kyonsi and, as the herder passes through town, play a trick and drop one of them into the sewer, missed by the herder who is drunk, and which eventually resurfaces in the jail and so, in an act or heroism whilst saving the police captain (Pang San, Mr Vampire), Master Sha is bitten and killed. The kids are sent to live with Grandpa and Tian Tian and, of course, Sha returns as a vampire.

Master Sha menaces Tian Tian

This was fun – there was some interesting lore, like accidentally (and later deliberately) turning the kids into ghosts that can defeat kyonsi. We get very deliberate bites and old staples like covering up the nose to hold breath and hide from the vampire. There are some fun fight moments too. There are also some not-so-great bits that are uncomfortable making. The kids trying to romance Tian Tian, given their ages, might have been portrayed innocently but the direction became a tad inappropriate, for example in a scene of her with wind blowing her hair that seemed to want to make it less innocent and portray her in a more adult way. There was some humour that just doesn’t hold up to modern sensibility. The worse of this was around Xiao Hei who has a complexion darker than the rest and so is referred to as black kid – it felt like colourism – and body shaming references to little fatso were also there, directed at Xigua Pi. The kid humour (there were a lot of mishaps followed by scene freeze for comedic effect) wasn’t as great as it might have been.

For the action and the interesting lore I think 6 out of 10 is fair but with a health warning around the moments, and they are just moments, that felt socially off. The imdb page is here.