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DIRECTED BY: Chiu Lee
FEATURING: Billy Chong, Lo Lieh, Chin-Lai Sung
PLOT: When martial artist Chung Sing learns that his father was murdered by the sinister Kam Tai Fu, the young man seeks revenge, but he’ll need a book of magic and the help of ghost warriors to defeat his enemy.
COMMENTS: Part of the glory of late 70s/early 80s low-budget martial arts cinema is its joyful lack of seriousness. Sure, there may be people fighting each other in a brutal death match, but the whole thing just feels so darn lighthearted. We’re here to enjoy ourselves, not to worry about life and death. So why should we expect anything less when the subject turns to horror? The narrator of Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave informs us that, once a year, the dead return to roam the Earth. And how does this manifest itself? A bunch of silly whooping and fruit invisibly pilfered from dinner tables. Put away your heart pills; this is not serious stuff.
The absence of gravity is mostly an advantage for a film like Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave, which only wants to have some fun, like a haunted house that also has a judo match set up on the front lawn. When Chung’s father’s ghost (who sounds in the English dub almost exactly like Krusty the Clown) shows up to demand that his son avenge him, you might pick up some Hamlet vibes, but the allusion is undercut slightly when Chung is so surprised that he kicks his ghostly father’s apparition in the face. Screenwriter Fung Lu seems allergic to anything that would approach genuine horror. Warriors returning from the dead bicker about whether to accept their summons, and then float through fight scenes like shirts on the carousel at a dry cleaner. Bodies that rise from their graves and are more annoyed than vengeful. If it weren’t for Lo’s resourceful evil sorcerer, you might start to wonder if anyone in this film knew they were in a movie about the supernatural.
This unsteady mix of martial arts tropes and disdain for scares leads to some of director Lee’s most off-balance impulses. The evil Kam Tai Fu is desperate to achieve invincibility, but his Achilles heel turns out to be his breasts, which resist the shield treatment. The formula for said impenetrability is some obscure dark magic, specifically requiring a pair of hearts stolen from victims at the moment of orgasm, a requirement of such specificity that it feels reverse-engineered to justify the associated sex scene. In the most 
unexpected and delightfully strange moment, the beleaguered sorcerer escapes Chung and his battalion of ghosts by throwing a wad of cash into their air and yelling, “Count Dracula! Come to my aid!” Sure enough, a pasty European with fangs suddenly appears and flits about, flummoxing his opponents but also not really coming to anyone’s aid. It’s a genuinely bonkers moment, and knowing they had this one up their sleeve, the filmmakers could have used more of them.
Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave is serviceable martial arts action, slightly ridiculous horror, and surface-level weirdness. It lacks the will to be no-holds-barred nutty, but it does make for a nice twist on familiar genre fare. If nothing else, this will always be remembered as the film that taught us how to summon Dracula to our aid. Use that knowledge wisely.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by daustin. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
Kung Fu from Beyond the Grave is streaming on Prime Video.