Let’s get this out of the way first. If I was being casually dismissive about the plot of the 1990 Hong Kong horror-comedy Doctor Vampire [Jiang shi yi sheng] I would describe it thus: “A man gets bitten by a vampire and starts turning into one himself. And he’s a doctor.” Flippant that may seem, but that’s the essence of the story, much as “a man is bitten by a werewolf and starts turning into one, but he’s played by Jack Nicholson” is a shallow but essentially accurate description of the plot of the Mike Nichols directed 1994 Wolf. Then again, man gets bitten by werewolf and transforms into one is the premise for the vast majority of werewolf movies. Although the vampire subgenre tends to have a tad more variety to its storylines, It’s still bound by a string of well-established and ever-evolving codes and conventions. In early vampire movies, the vampire was there primarily to threaten the heroine and be defeated by the hero (ironically, the gender-reverse is true of the granddaddy of vampire movies, F.W. Murnau’s magisterial Nosferatu). French filmmaker Jean Rollin was instrumental in taking the genre down a different path by making his vampires sympathetic and often female central characters. The tagline for the 1987 The Lost Boys even proposed that it might be rather fun to be a vampire. I’ll be coming back to that particular movie in due course. Doctor Vampire certainly takes its cue from these earlier works but doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. And if you know your Hong Kong genre comedy movies, you’ll be aware that subtlety is not going to be the name of the game here.

It starts unexpectedly on a backroad somewhere in the English countryside, along which Hong Kong-based surgeon Dr. Chiang Ta-Tsung (Bowie Lam) is driving. Only later do we learn that he is in Blighty for a conference, and judging by the small and unreliable Volkswagen he is saddled with, he wasn’t given much of an expenses allowance. Indeed, the car stutters to a halt just seconds after we meet him, forcing him to abandon it and set out on foot. After electing to follow a secluded pathway, he finds himself at the door of a castle, and when he knocks on the door he is invited into what looks less like a castle interior than a bustling pub,* one frequented by attractive women with 80s hairdos, all of whom seem very interested in this stranger. Not being a drinker, Tsung settles for a Coke and takes a wander round, and has to almost step over women who are going down on the necks of seemingly submissive men. When one of these very friendly females makes a serious move to seduce him, he dodges through a doorway that leads down to the castle basement, where he encounters what looks like a man attacking a pretty Chinese girl named Alice (Ellen Chan). What Tsung fails to notice – lord only knows how – is that Alice is a vampire, and the man is trying to prevent her from sinking her fangs into his throat.

After chasing the lucky man away, Tsung returns upstairs to the bar with Alice, who not so subtly encourages him to leave, despite reproachful looks from the hard-ass barmaid (Lorraine Kibble), who hands Tsung a drugged coke that he thirstily swallows. The next thing he knows, he’s losing his virginity to Alice in front of a roaring fire in one of the castle bedrooms. Both he and she appear to have enjoyed the experience, but looking down at Alice from the balcony and egging her on is the mullet-haired male head vampire known as The Master (Peter Kjær), a man who bites the hands of the female vampires when hungry and sizeable chunks from the scenery when angry. A reluctant Alice gives in to his commands and sinks her fangs into the unfortunate Tsung, and not into his neck, if you get my drift. A few hours later, the petulant Master calls his girls in one-by-one to gnaw on their hands and is repeatedly disgusted by the flavour of their blood. When he snacks on Alice, however, he’s left wide-eyed with delight, instantly realising that it’s the innocent young man she’s just bitten that has made her blood the tastiest in the land. “It’s like your Chinese ginseng!” he proclaims, presumably with little understanding of what that actually means. He wants Tsung brought to him immediately, and when he learns that he has already departed he loses his rag and orders the subservient and frightened Alice to find him and bring him back to the castle. Unfortunately for her, Tsung is already on his way home to Hong Kong to be reunited with his long-term girlfriend May (Sheila Chan), as yet unaware of the gradual transformation that he is soon to undergo.

Doctor Vampire [Jiang shi yi sheng] was released in 1990 at the tail end of a run of jiangshi ‘hopping vampire’ films from Hong Kong that included Sammo Hung’s Encounter of the Spooky Kind (Gui da gui, 1980), Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire (Geung see sin sang, 1985) and its three sequels, Lau Kar-leung’s The Close Encounter of the Vampire (Jiang shi pa pa, 1986), and Lam Ching-ying’s Vampire Vs Vampire (Yat mei dou yan, 1989). This coincided with a vampire movie revival in the west whose share of notable titles include Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), Tom Holland’s Fright Night (1985), Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), Richard Wenk’s Vamp (1986), Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) and Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). By the time Doctor Vampire hit Hong Kong cinemas, however, interest in the subgenre was seriously waning, and its domestic box office performance was surprisingly tepid. I’m not going to claim that Doctor Vampire is an unfairly overlooked masterpiece, or that it’s the best that this very localised subgenre has to offer, but it’s a long way from the duffer that this lack of initial commercial success might suggest.

The basic setup is as old as the genre itself, but that also goes for just about any vampire movie. What makes or breaks any new title is what original ideas it brings to the table and how it plays with or usurps the standard genre tropes, and on this score Doctor Vampire easily earns its fangs. This gameplaying with convention starts over in Merrie England, with what is effectively a brothel populated by vampire sex workers overseen by a bad tempered and controlling male pimp. The first genre rule is broken here when the vampires are shown moving around in daylight with no adverse effects. No explanation is provided for this, it’s just how it is in the world of this movie. Then we have the Master, who although fine with biting the necks of his human victims, when he fancies a quick snack, he instead sinks his teeth into the hand of whichever female vampire is called to service him. Precisely where Alice bites Tsung is never confirmed,** but the mix of extreme pleasure and startled pain that crosses Tsung’s face clearly infers that it was delivered midway through a blowjob. The fact that Tsung was a virgin until he was bedded by Alice is also a neat gender flip of that favourite genre trope of the virginal girl who becomes the object of desire for a predatory male vampire.

Once Tsung is back on home turf, the film moves into sex comedy territory, with young but experienced surgeon Tsung behaving like a giggling teenager as he reveals to his goofy hospital colleagues Doctor Chang (David Wu) and Doctor Chin (Lau Shek-Yin) that he has finally ‘”done it” with a woman. The discovery of a perfume smell on his clothing and lipstick on the collar of one of his shirts, meanwhile, is all the jealous May needs to start throwing accusations of infidelity. This blows up into a row in Tsung’s apartment, and leads to one of the film’s funnier gags when May decides to leave and Tsung offers to see her home and… no, you’ll have to see that one for yourself. That May shares a flat with the superstitious and distrustful-of-men Joy (Crystal Kwok) probably doesn’t help, and the fact that both work as nurses in the same hospital wing in which Tsung is stationed provides ample opportunity for either one of them to walk into rooms at inopportune moments and misread what they see. A couple of these unfortunate encounters are quite close to the mark for a Hong Kong film of the day, notably when Chin and Chang are examining Tsung’s genitals for bite marks in the staff lounge and are alternating their preposterously choreographed shocked reactions in a way that it looks to Joy as if they’re taking turns kissing Tsung’s plonker.

That Doctor Vampire is influenced by the jiangshi movies that preceded it is hardly surprising, but borrowings are also visible from western horror works of the 1980s. These include a dream sequence that has echoes the woodland nightmare from John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981), from which Tsung wakes to an admittedly well executed sleeping-on-the-ceiling gag that comically reworks a memorable moment from The Lost Boys. The film is also a little inconsistent with its gameplaying with vampire lore. Having established that these vampires don’t need to sleep during the day, I was left wondering why they still need to nap in sometimes makeshift coffins and why Tsung finds himself becoming increasingly sensitive to light. And while full-blown vampire Alice mocks the very notion that a crucifix could ward off her kind (“That’s a bit old fashioned,” she tells Chin and Chang when they nervously wave one at her), Tsung is later able to temporarily hold The Master at bay with an operating table light whose lamps are arranged in the shape of a cross. Not sure how practical that would be for operations, but hey. I also found myself wondering why a surgical laser would have a setting that, if accidentally selected, could burn a hole through a human body and even puncture steel. It’s introduced a little too late in the story for it to be properly labelled Chekov’s Laser Scalpel, but let’s face it, that’s essentially what it is.

Not all of the humour has aged with dignity, and there’s a crude adolescent snigger to a handful of the comical moments. Leading the way here is the amorous revived corpse (Lee Hin Ming), who wakes from the dead with a monumental hard-on, with which he approaches and recoils from a female cleaner (Yu Mo-Lin) because he regards her as middle-aged and ugly. Instead he has his way with a more attractive young nurse who, although initially startled, seems to ultimately enjoy being sexually assaulted. That both emerge from the experience puffing on post-coital cigarettes really does nail the film as a product of its time. It’s a similar story when it comes to the reaction of the hospital staff to the idea that Tsung might be homosexual after Joy reveals what she saw in the employee lounge, and the moment when Tsung distracts the over-inquisitive May by telling her he spotted a mouse running loose in the room, prompting her to squeal in terror and jump into his protective male arms.

Yet this shouldn’t take away from the string of far more inventive gags that acknowledge key genre tropes and then run their own sweet way with them. After accepting that their friend and colleague is a vampire, Chin and Chang are quickly persuaded by Alice to help them procure the blood they need to sustain them, which triggers an amusing run of scenes in which the two shovel bloodied post-operational swabs into bags, draw unnecessary amounts of blood from patients for tests they do not need, and even steal test tubes full of blood samples from a lab, the potential consequences of which do not bear thinking about. The comic crowning glory is a scene that made me laugh out loud in which the Tsung and Alice formally dress for a vampire dinner, and Tsung presents his guest with a bottle of AB blood in the manner of a waiter recommending a fine wine, then uses a bloodied cotton swab as a teabag while Alice spreads congealed blood on bread like strawberry jam. And while Tsung’s gradual transformation from human to vampire may also take its cue from The Lost Boys (there are more borrowings that film later), it’s still wittily handled, from his repeated yawning during daylight hours to his sudden aversion to his former favourite snack of garlic prawns. Having a surgeon develop a craving for blood is a potential goldmine for vampire-related humour that actor turned writer-director Jamie Luk does well by, with Tsung becoming dismayed at the blood being spilt on the floor from the body of injured mobster Boss Tai (Shing Fui-On), pausing an operation because his face mask has become soaked in ravenous drool, and (my personal favourite) distractedly asking for a fork instead of a scalpel. The oddest aspect of this metamorphosis comes after Tsung has persuaded May to buy him some sunglasses to combat his increasing sensitivity to sunlight, only to then find himself mysteriously drawn to a Dracula-style cape on display in the same store, one that he suddenly has the money to buy and that he parades about in as if announcing to the world that he is out and proud as vampire.

Sophistication and silliness collide in Doctor Vampire in a manner that really is hard to resist, especially if you are familiar with the jiangshi sub-genre, which the western influences here gradually give way to as the story progresses, first through some comical piss-taking and later in the magical combat and Peking Opera of the increasingly bonkers multi-sequence climax. In common with Hong genre films of just about any description, the story is delivered at a belting pace that intermittently shifts into nitrous-fuelled overdrive. Bowie Lam makes for an engagingly befuddled lead, Ellen Chan brings seductive air of exotic temptation to Alice, and although they play their roles with all the subtlety of overexcited circus clowns, I really liked David Wu and Lau Shek-Yin as Tsung’s friends and sidekicks Doctor Chang and Doctor Chin. The scene in which all three are called into the office of the hospital director (James Wong) and balled out for their incompetence reminded me irresistibly of the one in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) in which Bluto and his chums are hauled before Dean Wormer, an association that does this film no harm at all.

In the end, I had a great time with Doctor Vampire, a film so good natured, so energetic, and so intermittently inventive that I found it easy to turn a blind eye to its silliness, occasional overacting, and moments of dated puerile humour. There is, however, one thing that continues to bug me, one that I can’t really talk about without dropping – or at least heavily alluding to – a whopping great spoiler. I’m going to do it anyway, so hop forward to the sound and vision section if you want to avoid it.

Here’s the thing. When Alice arrives in Hong Kong, ostensibly to procure Tsung for the Master but in truth to help protect him, a love triangle develops between her, May and Tsung. By this point, Tsung has had a glorious night of passion on his first, albeit drug-induced date with Alice after ten years of dating May, who insists they stay celibate (thinking about it, I’m not sure they even kiss) until they are married, whenever the hell that will actually be. As the film progresses, Tsung seems torn between the two women, protectively caring for May but repeatedly drawn back to the more seductive Alice. He thus has a choice, to spend a sexually and emotionally rewarding eternity with the devoted Alice, or continue his abstinence with the prissy and judgemental May until they finally marry, and risk her discovering on their wedding night that she actually finds sex rather disgusting. Given that this was the product of late twentieth century mainstream Hong Kong cinema, which do you think the filmmakers opted for?

Sourced from a new 2K restoration and framed in the film’s original aspect ratio of 1.85:1,  the 1080p transfer on this Eureka Blu-ray is up to the standard we’ve come to expect of this fine label’s Hong Kong releases. The image is clean of dust and any traces of former wear, the contrast is generously graded with solid black levels that have not been crushed, and the colour palette is pleasingly subtle, with brighter colours (the Peking Opera costumes, the orangey light outside of Tsung’s apartment) handsomely reproduced. Film grain is clearly visible, and while the image sometimes feels a whisper brighter than I’d normally regard as ideal, I have to presume this was intentional, and it’s certainly in keeping with the film’s jovial tone.

Two soundtracks are on offer, both in Cantonese and both Linear PCM 2.0 dual mono. What’s the difference? Well, they’re essentially the same track, but one is before the restoration, the other after. The differences are subtle but clearly detectable, with more treble clarity to the dialogue and music on the restored track. Neither displays any obvious damage or background hiss or hum, even on the unrestored original soundtrack, but the restored track definitely has the edge.

Optional English subtitles kick on by default, as expected. Less expected is that the English language dialogue is also subtitled in English, which seems a bit redundant, and there is no option to have subtitles appear on the Cantonese dialogue only. Fortunately, the English dialogue is limited to a couple of scenes, so it’s easy enough to live with. But still.

Audio commentary by Frank Djeng and John Charles
Eastern cinema commentary stalwart Frank Djeng is joined here by film critic for Video Watchdog and author of The Hong Kong Filmography 1977-1997, John Charles, for a typically busy and enthusiastic look at what they label up front a “wonderfully witty” film. They note that it only reached number 92 in the Hong Kong box office that year and that the public was losing interest in the vampire genre in favour of the comedies of Stephen Chow, whose films occupied the two top slots of that year. There are plenty of screen-specific comments about the film, including the occasional question about its narrative logic, but the lion’s share of the chat is focussed on discussing the actors, and while it’s always nice to know what else they’ve appeared in, it’s what they achieved in their work outside of the field of acting that proves the most interesting. There’s also some surprising info about the optical blurring out of some material for the film’s release in mainland China and the reasons behind China’s banning of movies featuring ghosts, which include Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) and Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015).

Audio commentary by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema
The always entertaining pairing of Asian cinema experts and enthusiasts, Big Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, risks duplicating a whole chunk of the Frank Djeng and John Charles commentary by once again focussing primarily on the actors and their alternative careers, but somehow this never seems to be the case. Being based in Hong Kong and having worked for years in the business himself, Leeder is also able to add a few personal recollections involving the personalities under discussion. We also get plenty of info on director Jamie Luk, and enough mentions of his 1991 follow-up film Robotrix [Nu ji xie ren] to have me itching to see it. Other areas covered include the filming locations, the sometimes crude humour, the appearance of Dracula in Hong Kong movies, and the various western genre movie influences, with Leeder picking up on the An American Werewolf in London and The Lost Boys references I noted above, and also citing the early Jim Carrey movie, Once Bitten (1985), which I’ve curiously never seen. Some vampire movie fan I am. They also claim that having a single film location made up of several; real-world ones in the opening England castle/pub scene is a very Hong Kong way of filming. Hate to say it, but that’s a common technique in filmmaking the world over – check out John Carpenter’s commentary on the Blu-ray of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) at the point when Ethan Bishop arrives at the police station he is to be stationed at for the night.

A British Vampire in Hong Kong (20:11)
Author of Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World, Stacey Abbott, made me feel like a dimwit from the off for not twigging that by travelling to a foreign land and being bitten by a vampire in a castle home, Tsung is effectively Jonathan Harker from Dracula. That’s it, I’m handing my vampire movie membership card at the door as I leave. It’s a parallel that Abbott explores in some detail (making me feel even dumber in the process), as well as discussing the differing roles played by Alice and May, the role played by the comedy, and how the film weaves its western and eastern influences. Embarrassed it may have made me, but I still found this a really interesting watch.

Vampire Slaying 101: Remixing Monster Traditions in Doctor Vampire (22:11)
In this new video essay, Gothic scholar Mary Going looks at how vampires differ depending on the culture and traditions of the country in which the stories about them are told. She traces the origins of the vampire myth in Eastern Europe, looks at the various methods cited as ways to kill vampires and the artefacts used to protect against them, and examines how these elements made their way into gothic novels and genre films, as well as discussing the jiangshi subgenre and, of course, Doctor Vampire. I also got the feeling that she shares my views about how the love triangle at the film’s core is ultimately resolved.

Booklet
Film credits and the usual viewing notes aside, the sole content of this booklet is an educationally scholarly essay that focusses primarily on the history and development of the jiangshi as a supernatural creature that evolved to become a vampire over the course of various literary and cinematic works. A fine and revealing read.

A film that manages to be alternately silly, witty, sophisticated, crude and inventive, often in the space of a single sequence, Doctor Vampire may have fallen victim to changing tastes on its initial release, but its unbridled energy, good-natured silliness and witty tinkering with the tropes of both the vampire and jiangshi subgenres ensure that it’s a consistently fun watch. Unsurprisingly, Eureka has done well by the film, with a strong restoration and transfer, two lively and informative commentary tracks, a pair of useful featurettes and a solid booklet essay. For vampire movie fans who enjoy watching comical games played with the genre, it really is hard to  resist. Recommended.

* That’s because it is. The exterior shots and the basement sequence were filmed at Arlington Castle in Kent, while the bar is the Blackfriars Pub in London. Believe it or not, the castle bedroom is a suite at the too-perfectly named Hotel Gore in South Kensington in London.