Obviously created to piggyback on the success of Mr. Vampire, Magic Story is a low-budget production that fails to recreate much of the action, scares, or comedy from Lam Ching-Ying's classic ghost-busting epic. Still, there is a sort of schizophrenic charm to the proceedings, mostly brought forth by wonderfully awful subtitles that talk about stuff like "the magic Ding-dong".

In this case, Ding-dong is actually a little vampire, who is being pursued by a evil Taoist priest (played by Mars) so that he can use the undead kid to scare a village into buying overpriced protection talismans. Ding-dong is found by a friendly scientist (Bill Tung), who is trying to create a way to control vampires to get rid of them. But Bill takes pity on Ding-dong and decides to try and save him from the priest. Complicating matters are a trio of powerful vampires who are looking to bring Ding-dong back to the underworld at any cost.

Magic Story's producer was Lo Wei, who was fairly big during the Shaw Brothers era, and the person who gave Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee their first major starring roles. But at this point in his career, Lo was regulated to mostly bottom-of-the-barrel B-list stuff, and Magic Story fits this to a tee. Besides Bill Tung and Mars, there's no one else really of note in the cast. And, based off of their almost sleep-walking performances, one gets the sense that they only participated in this production as a "favor" to Lo Wei, who was known to sometimes use Triad muscle to "convince" people to work on his movies.

There's no one else really of note on the crew, either. For more asute viewers, it should bring up a big red flag that Magic Story's writer and director, Lau Bing-Gei, only has this film to his credit. In a day and age when even schlocky film-makers like Godfrey Ho could put out several pictures a year, the fact that Lau's career began and ended with Magic Story should tell you an awful lot about the movie's overall quality. By no means is this a total bomb, and veteran fans might want to check this out for the curiosity factor, but there are a hell of a lot of other movies out there, especially in the ghost/vampire genre, that deserve your time more than Magic Story.

RATING: 4