Windy’s father faces death for criticizing the ruling group and Lau Shun’s High Priest, a genuinely unnerving monster amidst the rubber ghouls, enchants his followers with devilish incantations and uses visions of the Golden Buddha to mollify the protagonists.īut despite such grand ambitions A Chinese Ghost Story II fails to successfully dramatize its political allegory. The corrupt government is presided over by despotic demons. Pre-97 worries also informed Tsui’s Once Upon A Time In China a year later, and a fearful distrust of government lies at the center of A Chinese Ghost Story II. Or maybe this batty scholar is the Hong Kong film industry, whose irreverent movies seemed threatened by the 1997 Chinese handover. Who is Chu? Perhaps he is Pu Songling, the seventeenth-century author of Liaozhai Zhiyi, on which A Chinese Ghost Story was based. In prison, the elderly, iconoclastic Chu wryly notes how shifting political sands alter the meanings of his works, labeling him subversive, disrespectful or dangerous. Although more expansive and politically pointed than its predecessor, unfortunately this sequel is not the ghost with the most. Scheduling problems may have been a factor, as A Chinese Ghost Story II reunites most of the major players. By comparison, producer Tsui Hark made five Once Upon A Time In China films in four years.
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Surprisingly, for the commercially savvy Hong Kong film industry, a sequel to the 1987 Hong Kong smash and crossover Western favorite A Chinese Ghost Story was three years in coming.