Review by cauwboy

After having watched the very dark and depressing Rigor Mortis, I soon found out about this film, with Siu-Ho Chin back as a badass vampire fighter and his old sidekick played by the forever funny Richard Ng. I complained about Rigor Mortis that it took itself too serious and that stripping out every little piece of humour might only have harmed the film more. As for this film, you get an idea at once what you're in for, a comedy with some spooky elements, not horrific, I was never scared during this film, this is more like a kindergarten horror if anything. There's also something with the way this film is filmed and lit that makes it feels like a direct-to-DVD film, it's too clean and too smooth, like the young actors having way too much makeup making them look artificial.

Anyway, after Rigor Mortis ended up being too dark, this film was just too light-hearted, our main protagonist Tim ending up falling in love with a girl vampire (although she looks like a normal girl) and has to hide it from the Vampire Cleanup Department (VCD) while he learns to become a vampire fighter like them. The VCD crew is a bunch of silly/crazy/cool group of people like the Ghostbusters, fighting vampires and do it really well too. And during the film, Tim gets trained by the different people at the Department to be a vampire fighter himself, including swiping the floor and throwing the waste in the trash bin, which took me a couple of seconds to figure out where it was leading to *coughs* Karate Kid *coughs*.

The main threat of the film is a bad, powerful vampire attacking the city they live in and the film had such a light-hearted tone to it that I never feared that anyone would really end up die - like I said, Kindergarten Horror. I did however have a bigger problem with the sugar-sweet love story going on between Tim and the vampire girl, because of movie, she ended up sucking some of his vampire-immunity from him in the beginning of the film, making her look like a super-cute model girl, more or less. Why not make her a ghost instead of a vampire? The film-makers obviously must've seen Mr. Vampire and could probably find a way to make it work better than having her just jump around. We even got a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo of Ching-Ying Lam in a photograph handed to Richard Ng's character.

Still, it could've been a much worse film, I can actually see myself watch this film again in the future, it was an easy watch, even if the romance between Tim and the vampire girl made me want to hug a big teddybear and "squee" like a teenage girl, which is not the way I would've wanted it as a fan of 80s HK Horror Comedies - I'm still happy though that Hong Kong is keeping the Chinese Vampire franchise alive, even if it never will reach the same level as Mr. Vampire or Spooky Encounters.