Kung Fu Zombie

Did You Know?

• The film was released in Hong Kong in 1981 and in the US in 1982.
• Ground Zero released it on DVD in the US in 2002.
• The cast includes Chan Lau as Wu Lung, Cheng Ka Ying as Lu Dai, and Kwon Young Moon as Kwan Wei Long.

Plot

Pang, a martial artist, stops a robbery and gets the thug Lu Dai locked up. Seeking payback, Lu returns and pays a Taoist priest named Wu Lung to raise zombies against Pang. The scheme fails when Lu is killed by his own trap, and his ghost starts haunting the priest, demanding to be brought back to life. A serial killer named Kwan Wei Long arrives looking to fight Pang and appears to die at his hands. Seeing a useful body, Wu Lung tries to put Lu's spirit into Long's corpse. But Long is so wicked that he comes back as a vampire with his own will. When Pang's father dies, the priest uses that body for Lu's spirit, but the ritual gets disrupted. This leaves the thug and Pang's father sharing control of the same corpse. Now Pang has to take on both the vampire and his father's possessed body.

Reception

J. Doyle Wallis of DVD Talk rated it 3.5/5 stars and called it 'pure, cheap, unadulterated, stupid fun'. Todd Rigney of Beyond Hollywood called it 'an obvious rip-off' of Encounters of the Spooky Kind that approaches the fun of The Evil Dead and Braindead. In Horror and Science Fiction Films III, Donald C. Willis called it '95 minutes of pure silliness'. The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies called it 'a very unusual, funny film'. In The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, Peter Dendle wrote, 'The speeded-up cinematography of martial arts action sequences always gives zombies in East Asian cinema a novel, charismatic twist.' Brian Thomas, who wrote VideoHound's Dragon, said, '[F]or the most part, this has all the dumb spirit of a ninja movie with the added bonus of horror and gore!'