As you might be able to glean from the title and our review, Vampire Settle on Police Camp didn't exactly set the Hong Kong movie world on fire when it came out in 1990. So why did some of the same cast and crew reunite the very same year to bring out the similarly themed Here Comes a Vampire? One would think it was to make a quick buck, but judging from the onscreen results, everyone involved would be lucky if they made enough for a pack of ramen noodles.

Right from jump street, this movie reeks of the "flying paper" style of Hong Kong film-making, where basically everything is made up on the fly. Sometimes the style can actually work, but in most instances, we get awful cinematic messes such as this.

Here Comes a Vampire's dopey setup involves Hong Kong's police chief wanting to disband the SWAT department so that he can get a passport to England once the 1997 handover hits. So, two teams are sent to a camp so that their superiors can run rigged tests that will ultimately wash them out of the force. The camp is isolated and there isn't much to do, so the bumbling cops decide to bust out a oujia board and resurrect a vampire (which really seems more like a ghost) who begins wreaking havoc.

Actually, there isn't a whole lot of havoc wreaked. Most of the running time is dominated by awful excuses for jokes; it's basically bad Cantonese puns and toilet humor uttered at high volume, the sort of stuff that turns off many westerners to Hong Kong comedies. It's basically Sandra Ng acting like a ditz and Charlie Cho acting like a lech over and over again, with the occasional fake scare thrown in. Once the ghost/vampire (played by Kingdom Yuen) does show up near the end, things do pick up, but it's far too late to save this movie from being anything other than a Z-list clunker.

RATING: 3

Notes:

The version watched for this review comes from VideoAsia's Terror Tales Vol. 3 DVD. As with many of their releases, the packaging contains erroneous information. The cover says that this is a sequel to Thunder Cops, which it is not. There are two movies that go by the name of Thunder Cops. The first is a 1989 cop versus ghost picture that originally went by the name Operation Pink Squad 2, though it is a sequel in name only. Sandra Ng stars in both Operation Pink Squad 2 and Here Comes a Vampire, so with the similar themes, perhaps the person making the PR material for VideoAsia got confused, or maybe they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. I'll go with the latter, given their shady track record.

The actual Thunder Cops 2 is a 1989 release related in title only to either Thunder Cops/Operation Pink Squad 2 or Here Comes a Vampire, besides having some of the same cast and crew; Sandra Ng is again one of the stars here, playing a cop who crosses the line to being a vigilante. To further confuse matters, there was yet another movie called Thunder Cops released in 1999. Details on this movie are hard to find, but it appears to be a straight to video crime potboiler with no ghost/vampire elements to it.

Getting back to the DVD, like most of VideoAsia's releases, the picture and audio quality is sub-par. This looks to be a rip/bootleg of the Universe VCD, which means that it is actually in Cantonese with subtitles -- not the usual terrible English dubs VideoAsia DVDs sport -- but these are crappy burnt-in Chinese/English subs that are obscured or cut off for most of the running time.

The DVD is a "flipper", with another movie on the second side. The cover says it is The Living Dead, which "features creepy ghouls who can't get enough human sushi to satisfy their endless craving for flesh". There is no record of a movie called The Living Dead on the Hong Kong Movie Database, for good reason -- the second film is actually a low budget 1981 Italian slasher flick called Fear.