HUMAN LANTERNS

A little light murder

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1982 | 18 | Blu-ray

Director Chung Sun

Cast Lau Wing, Chen Kuan-tai,

Lo Lieh, Tien Ni

This Shaw Brothers horror/wuxia hybrid puts a gruesome spin on the Chinese tradition of paper lanterns. At first it looks to have a monstrous antagonist. However, a skulled face, shaggy limbs and claws are just a human villain’s costume.

It centres on two grudges: one between rich Lords Lung and Tan; the second between Lung and lantern-maker Chao Chun-fang, whom he defeated in a fight over a woman many years ago. When Lung hires the latter to make a lantern to best his rival he doesn’t account for the vengeful craftsman using skin flayed from kidnapped women, Ed Gein-style.

The resulting torture scenes are pretty hard-edged, although the skin-peeling effects aren’t likely to induce fainting. Indeed, they may give those of a certain vintage nostalgic flashbacks to peeling Gloy off their fingertips in primary school. A rape (intercut with the grinding of a mill’s mechanism, in a grim riff on the train-entering-atunnel cliché) is rather nastier.

While the film’s not as memorably weird as, say, Black Magic or Corpse Mania, it has well-choreographed battles, with all the impossible leaping about you’d expect. And the set for Chao Chun-fang’s basement workshop is very effective; with its whirling water wheel, a kind of period take on a serial killer’s industrial lair.

Extras There are interviews with male lead Lau Wing (51 minutes) and female victims Linda Chu (15 minutes) and Susan Shaw (14 minutes) – the latter from 2005, the others recent. Chu remembers being pressured to do nudity but refusing, and both Lau and Chu recall the director getting so carried away instructing his cast that he’d end up in shot!

Unfortunately, muffled sound on the Lau interview (plus what sound like high wind, bird calls and text alerts) makes it hard going. Plus: expert commentary; trailer; fold-out poster; booklet.

After going to Cannes Film Festival, Susan Shaw was accused of being a Chinese spy, and her films banned in Taiwan.