Erotic Ghost Story

As a fan of director Ngai Choi Lam’s bonkers, genre-defying The Seventh Curse and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, I was eager to explore more of his filmography. So, with some trepidation given the title, I watched Erotic Ghost Story.

It proves a disappointing mix of horror and sex-comedy, spending much of its time proffering shots of full-frontal female nudity and scenes of sweaty, simulated sex. But when it pivots to horror, it goes hard, with characters vomiting blood and monsters ripping off faces, making for a shocking surprise. To delve further, I must reveal a plot twist, so beware, spoilers follow.

To start, the film’s title proves misleading, at least in a Western sense, as there are no ghosts. It’s also not erotic, but we’ll get to that later. The plot concerns three sibling fox spirits (supernatural entities capable of shape-shifting) posing as human women. Their goal is to become human, but they’re led astray by their lust for a timid scholar. Said scholar turns out to be a demon, and the sisters must combine their power to overcome him. It’s a plot lifted from The Witches of Eastwick right down to the voodoo-and-monster, lightning-filled finale.

A highlight comes early, when the sisters befuddle a group of thugs by conjuring a plethora of alluring beauties who come running out of the woods. The bandits pair off with the willing women. Gratuitous topless shots as the bandits paw at their partners, until the women transform into maggot-infused, bile-spewing corpses. The men panic. Some vomit while others flee, trousers around their ankles, one still in mid-coitus with a corpse. Yes, these effects—and the later monster ones—look cheap, but that, combined with their over-the-top nature, makes for some so-bad-it’s-good fun. Had the film maintained this outrageous mix of sex and horror, it might have worked.

Instead, the horror goes on hiatus, and the film devolves into a soft-core sex comedy as the trio of sisters copulate with the scholar, first one at a time, then later all together. There’s little to recommend these scenes. The cinematography offers scant inspiration, save its machinations to obscure male genitalia. The execution proves just as uninspired as the characters lay there thrusting while the film intercuts to close-ups of a breast or leg. This was perhaps the most disappointing. I came for Ngai Choi Lam, but got Zalman King.

The explicitness of these bits proves comparable to late-night pay-cable. It’s not hardcore porn and contains no full-frontal male nudity, but the full-frontal female close-ups push it out of any “erotic” zone and nudge it past even the raciest R-rated Hollywood fare.

This tracks, as Erotic Ghost Story was a Category III picture, restricted to viewers eighteen or older. Unlike the United States, where the X and NC-17 certificates came to mean commercial doom, Category III held no such commercial taboos in Hong Kong, leading to a plethora of adults-only titles from a variety of genres, including Ngai Choi Lam’s The Seventh Curse and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

But compared to those films, Erotic Ghost Story disappoints. The Witches of Eastwick does a better job with the same plot, and the aforementioned films do a better job exploiting Category III’s freedom to push genre boundaries. That said, the film spawned two sequels and launched a wave of fantasy-erotica including cult-favorite Sex and Zen, so it found a market.

Maybe Ngai Choi Lam’s entire aspiration was to bring late-night-cable fare to Hong Kong audiences. To that end, he has succeeded, as the best I can say about Erotic Ghost Story is, given the choice between it and some random late-night-cable entry, at least the horror scenes in Erotic Ghost Story offer some variety.