Corpse Mania is a movie for the whole family -- if your last name is Manson. Featuring choice bits like necrophilia and serial killing, there is more than a little sliver of a nasty edge present to the proceedings here. Unfortunately, that grimness and griminess is ultimately let down by the Shaw Brothers' patented low budget methods. Maggots and ketchup blood aren't exactly the sorts of things that'll instill feelings of fear in most viewers.

The maniac producing corpses by the boatload here is Li Zhengyuan (Eric Chan), who goes off the deep end after his wife contracts tuberculosis while working for mama-san Madam Lan (Tanny Tien Ni). After being caught in flagrante delicto with his wife's still-lukewarm body, Li is sent to an asylum, and, as you might imagine, he's not that much better after being released, becoming the prime suspect in police detective Zhang's (Wong Yung) investigation of the murders of several of Lan's ladies.

At times, director Gwai Chi-Heung shows a mastery of the suspense genre. Corpse Mania's best scenes are bathed in darkness, both literally in their film-making methods and also from their nefarious content. At these points, Corpse Mania genuinely creates an unsettling feeling that places it close to the Category III "true crime" movies like The Untold Story. However, as the movie reaches its' finale, what was at times a smart and scary cat-and-mouse thriller turns into a fairly dopey slasher picture that starts to mistake the pouring out of fake blood as a replacement for competent film-making.

Whether it was due to the Shaw Brothers penny-pinching and insistence of placing "big events" at the end of every reel of film, or a breakdown at the production level, the last twenty minutes or so of Corpse Mania almost feels like a different movie. I'm not one to turn my nose at slasher films -- after all, I am a Gen-Xer that grew up watching classics in the genre like Friday the 13th and Halloween as well as whatever else the stoner at the local video store would allow a impressionable twelve-year-old to rent -- the change in tone and style combined with the aforementioned cheeseball gore effects ultimately ends up marring a production that initially holds a lot of hope for being something truly special from the Shaw Brothers studio.

RATING: 6