Gui wu li ren

I bought this on DVD because the blurb a the back compared it to House (1977). Beyond both being ghost stories there are no similarities.

It takes a very long time for any ghosts to appear in this film. I would not call it a ghost story at all. the ghosts themselves are presented with mixed results; sometimes effective, sometimes unintentionally comical.

It's well photographed and nice to look at. Beyond that it doesn't have much going for it. I'd rather have not spent the money on the DVD.

THE ENCHANTING GHOST (1970, original title Gui wu li ren) is a Shaw Brothers ghost story that sits as a midway point between Shaw's 1960s-era huangmei operas and their full-blooded horror offerings of the second half of the 1970s. The storyline involves a scholar who finds himself evicted from his home by an unscrupulous landlord. He moves into an abandoned house with a haunted reputation and there falls in love with a mysterious young woman.

There's going to be a lot here that'll make modern audiences scratch their heads, such as the male protagonist being played by an actress (a convention from Shaw's opera days). The pacing is glacial and the supernatural elements kept few and far between, aside from some familiar tropes in the last ten minutes or so. For the most part, this is a romance combined with minor tragedy and revenge elements. The film has interesting things to say about gender and class, but you do wonder why Waddell picked it as part of his Shaw package for 88 Films as there are a lot more vibrant Shaw horror films out there, notably their work from a decade later.

Turfed out of his gaff by an evil uncle, penniless scholar Lang (Li-Hua Yang) sets up home in an abandoned haunted house, where he meets a beautiful young woman, Ruyu (Mei-Yao Chang) and her mother, who has been seriously wounded by bandits. After the old woman dies, Lang and Ruyu fall in love and make a spot of dosh weaving cloth. The couple's bliss comes to an end when Ruyu is kidnapped, raped and poisoned. While Lang hunts for his missing partner, Ruyu comes back as a ghost to seek revenge.

Shaw Brothers' tragic romantic ghost story is definitely one of their lesser supernatural flicks. The film's biggest problem is the casting of Li-Hua Yang as scholar Lang. I know there is a tradition of female characters posing (unconvincingly) as men in Chinese cinema, but Lang isn't a woman in disguise - she is a he in this film, but still very obviously a woman, which makes the scholar's romance with the beautiful Ruyu both unintentionally funny and impossible to swallow.

The other big hurdles for me are the pacing, the film seriously dragging while Lang pines for his missing wife, and the actual ghostly content, which doesn't arrive till very late in the day, and which really isn't that great, the spooks (for there are more than one) not at all scary, unless one has a serious phobia about women waggling their long finger nails in your face. The end is a big damp squib, Lang never finding out what happened to Ruyu.

The Enchanting Ghost is mildly interesting in that it may well have influenced the far superior A Chinese Ghost Story, but the film really isn't worth going out of your way to find.