King Hu‘s swan-song sees him finally shoot in mainland China (Hu was born and educated in Beijing) after years of working in exile, for a film based on Pu Songling’s hugely popular 18th century ghost story, The Painted Skin. It’s a story he had originally wanted to adapt in the 1960s, before making the superb Dragon Inn. This isn’t a scratch on his other work. Stylistically, its closest companion is probably 1979’s zany supernatural caper, Legend of the Mountain. A Chinese Ghost Story star Joey Wang is somewhat inevitably cast as a possessed concubine who wears a mask of human skin to disguise her true demonic identity. Adam Cheng plays a scholar who is charmed by her beauty, only to be possessed himself by the supernatural Yin and Yang sect, becoming the real baddy of the piece, which is when the story deviates from the source material. In a bid to set herself free from her purgatory, she travels with two Taoist priests (Wu Ma and Lau Shun) to find Taiyi (Sammo Hung), ‘Grand Master of the Way’, who must protect her and many other lost souls in a fight between good and evil. Produced by Ng Ming-tsui – fight choreographer and actor in King Hu’s Mountain films from 1979 – for his New Treasurer Film Company, this falls into the somewhat generic bucket of Hong Kong supernatural films of the era, burdened only by a somewhat humourless tone which means it never quite cuts loose in the same zany way that a Sammo Hung horror film might. And don’t expect a kung fu film, either, despite a few brief moments of action – Mr. Vampire himself, Lam Ching-ying, drops in to kick-ass by way of a knowing if ultimately pointless cameo. This is played more as a knockabout spectacle complete with practical, in-camera effects: wind machines, dry ice, wire stunts, backwards tape, and all manner of things that go bang. There are moments that seem reminiscent of Hu’s more influential work, but this never really feels anything more than perfunctory.