Weird Bunnyhopping Chinese Zombies!!!!!

[Gorn Captain]

I've always liked getting variations on figures, DVDs and such, coming from other countries (non-US). I have vintage SW on Italian, French, Spanish cards. I just love the weird titles and lettering.

So whenever a friend goes traveling, I ask for "weird foreign sh*t", based on franchises we all know and love. My globetrotting pal Marcel has brought me LOTR on DVD, in Malaysian (I think). He got the whole saga for me for like...a buck...
You sure get a lot for your money over there.
It doesn't have to be rare to intrigue me, just different. Get me a SW figure on a japanese card or strange-looking DVD, and I'm super happy.

Last month, Marcel went on a biking trip through China. He didn't bike all the way to China, of course. That would be tiring. But he did see the country on his bicycle, in typically Chinese style.
I had a birthday coming up, so he browsed through a local store (usually a couple of square feet, stuffed to the gills with a couple of thousand DVDs), and went for "weird sh*t". Some store owners warn that "you won't understand a word", but Marcel just counters with "that's the whole point".
He got me a pile of Chinese zombie movies, with really odd covers. You just get the DVD with a flat printed sleeve, and you have to get a plastic case yourself, saving the store a lot of space.
I just watched the first one, and what can I say, Chinese zombies are weird.
These ones all wear blue robes, have a phone book page glued to their foreheads, keep their hand stretched out like sleepwalkers, and...bunnyhop.
Really. All the way through the movie, and in single file.
The chase sequences are...psychedelic.
The good guys are a big fat one called Fanta, and a short one, which I presume might be Fanta Light.
After 90 minutes, I rubbed my eyes, but directly after the end, the next movie started. With more bunnyhopping zombies!
Yep, the disc has twelve more movies on it.
They probably thought one movie for one dollar was ripping people off.
There are many sleepless nights ahead of me...
I wonder what I'll dream of?

[jp1969]

Sounds scary.

[ctc]

>These ones all wear blue robes, have a phone book page glued to their foreheads, keep their hand stretched out like sleepwalkers, and...bunnyhop.

Those are ghosts, according to Chinese legend. But yeah; they're more like western zombies than what we think of as ghosts. I don't get the hopping, but they all do it. The hands thing is akin to us showing zombies with blank eyes, and it's similar to how western movies protray sleepwalkers.... which ties in with the scrolls on their heads. The scrolls are how evil wizards reanimate and control them.

Don C.

[CrimsonGhost]

I love the movie Mr. Vampire about the Chinese hopping vampires. They rule!!

[Gorn Captain]

Obviously, we have some bunnyhopping Chinese ghosts experts among us....
Cool!!!!
We should start our own forum. It would be hopping mad....

[cjefferys]

Not sure why they hop either, but the hopping ghosts/vampires are very common in Chinese folklore, and appear in many films, I even saw one that has hardcore sex scenes mixed in with the horror and martial arts. That was one mind bending film.

[Gorn Captain]

I even saw one that has hardcore sex scenes mixed in with the horror and martial arts. That was one mind bending film.

Title, please.....

[Meule]

I wanna see this

[GUYx1]

Back in the day I always loved the poster for this hopping vampire film.
Where They were battled by Robocop.

[clemso]

Found this explanation to why they hop. Nice bit of Sunday Chinese Zombie trivia research to start my day, really need to get a life
chinese hopping vampireS
are called "jiang shi", pronounced"goyonshi" in Cantonese.
Actually they are not vampires at all because "jiang shi" translates into "stiff corpse"! So they hop because their joints have hardend up. They are more like a cross between a mummy and a zombie...the stiff movements of a mummy with the comic stupidity of a western zombie. They have these big ol' dracula fangs but I don't know what they use them for because they do not such the blood of humans . The 2 holes in the side of their victims neck come from being stabbed with their extremely long fingernails. Jiang shi are blind and locate their victims by their breath.The jiang shi wear the dark robes of the imperial Qing Dynasty, and the origin of the jiang shi folk tail comes from the practace of carrying a corpse over a thousand "li."(li, a Chinese unit of length = 1; 2 kilometers.)

[Tothiro]

The hopping comes from a combination of rigor mortis, and cultural tradition. Chinese vampire ghost stories are more typically the "hungry ghost" type, which is more like a zombie in practice. The outstretched arm and hopping thing is from rigor mortis, IE the arms are stuck that way and the hopping is because they can't bend their legs to walk. Goofy, I know. There's a popular story that Buddhist monks were hired by poor families to train the recently deceased to hop back home if the family was too poor to pay to have the body transported. Sounds like internet trollyery to me, but hey - I've heard weirder Chinese culture exchange.
Another origin that's suggested is that workers who died far from home would traditionally have their bodies transported back so the spirits would not be restless in unfamiliar surroundings (*true) and that corpses would be tied to bamboo poles and taken by wagon at night... the bumping of the wheels and flexing of the poles would make the "zombie" appear as if it were hopping down a road if viewed from a distance.
There's some other reoccurring stuff in the genre about turning into wolves, learning to fly, being white and furry (a popular image) etc, etc. Most of that is based on the idea of people having two souls, one animalistic and one conscious. When a violent death occurs, basically your souls aren't ready for it and the animalistic one can reanimate you and drive you around town by your id. Chinese vampires are almost always suckers of chi, not flesh, but they do get it by violent chow-time in a lot of the horror movies. Oh, generally they also don't rise from the grave... it happens before they're buried.

I have one released as Kung Fu Zombie! which is particularly awful that I enjoy.
The forehead book thing has to do with Taoist spells, as I recall... In which a physical object is written out by a priest (usually gibberish) and then applied to the forehead to either calm or control the spirit within. This is actually pretty common with how Chinese mysticism works in general (Taoist or Buddhist) because a lot of the time there's offerings to the spirit world, and they are often in paper form... You can buy special stand-in Chinese paper money, deeds to houses, even paper credit cards, and you take those to a temple honoring your ancestors and burn it, transferring the value of the item symbolically into the afterlife, so your ancestors literally have a place to stay and spending money for the month in the spirit world so they won't come and be angry with you, rattle your pans while you're sleeping, etc.

[clemso]

The hopping comes from a combination of rigor mortis.

I googled for the film you all were talking about. There is one called the Ghoul S*x Squad. I hear the acting is quite wooden terrible joke, i know

[cjefferys]

Yep, Ghoul Sex Squad is the one I'm taking about. I rented it from my local underground video store years ago (the now sadly closed Mondo Video in Buffalo). It was a 10th generation VHS dupe that was pretty bad quality but it was still a trip to watch. I was debating whether it was worth transferring my copy of it to DVD, but I just did a quick search and noticed that torrents of that film are available for downloading (do a search for the title on Pirate Bay). It looks like the quality isn't much better than my old VHS though, it's a pretty rare, obscure film so a nice copy is probably impossible to find.

pronounced"goyonshi" in Cantonese

Thanks, I was racking my brain trying to remember what they were called in Cantonese. That's it.

[ctc]

>The 2 holes in the side of their victims neck

....or bottom of the feet....

>locate their victims by their breath

Whereas their breath is extremely poisonous.

Don C.

[samurainoir]

Mr Vampire is great fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TOOAlZ8nlc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x062XmBvbc