made with

google translate

sorry for the mistakes

 


Corpse Manie

A story that can be summed up in two lines. Simple and very economical impact scenes. Not a great incipit I know, yet we are facing a cult. Or something like that. Because anything is possible if the Shaw Brothers are behind it and if Chih-Hung Kuei, the versatile Hong Kong director who ventured into various genres and made a big impact on his country's genre cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s, is at the helm.

Corpse Mania of 1981 is a slasher with a murderer wearing gloves and goggles, a clear homage, which makes necrophilia its raison d'être. A film that in the first half-hour captures the viewer's full attention thanks to Chih-Hung Kuei, who directs with great skill and elegance, on the strength of beautiful dark, nocturnal photography and above all thanks to strong scenes. The emblem of this film. Strong but simple images, as mentioned, because we see corpses of naked women, totally covered with worms on which Chih-Hung Kuei lingers with his camera often and willingly. As a side dish, a story lost between the morbid and the horror. Not bad at all.

However, once the first half-hour (and the disgust effect) has passed, Corpse Mania settles on a less impactful story, more detective story let's say, with a slow, very slow pace, which makes the film boring at times. This risks spoiling the whole thing, but in the end Corpse Mania remains an impactful and interesting work, not the hard-working director's best film, but definitely worth seeing.

We are in Guangzhou, in the 19th century. The inhabitants of a street hear a horrible smell coming from a house: of putrefaction. They call the police, who discover that in the abandoned house is the corpse of a woman covered in maggots. Not only that, the autopsy reveals that she was sexually abused after her death.
It is up to Inspector Chang (Jung Wang) to investigate the case, which leads him into murky circles of depravity and face a ruthless and vindictive killer.