Painted Skin
1993; directed by King Hu

Legendary director King Hu's (A Touch of Zen) last film is a retelling of a popular Chinese short story. Even though the subject matter of sexy demons who use human skin to disguise themselves sounds promising enough, Painted Skin's anachronistic and dated style keeps this release from realizing its' full potential.

Based on Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Painted Skin stars Adam Cheng as Wong, a scholar who spends most of his time at the local tavern. After one night of drinking, he meets the lovely Yau (Joey Wong), who he takes into his home as a concubine. But Wong soon finds out that Yau is actually a ghost on the run from the king of the underworld. Enlisting the aid of some Taoist priests (Wu Ma and Sammo Hung), Wong begins a quest to try and restore order to his village.

Painted Skin feels like a movie made in 1973, not 1993. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, since the 1970's are widely recognized as one of the best decades of film from anywhere in the world. However, the slow-moving camerawork and editing combined with a musical score that doesn't quite fit the onscreen action and special effects that are really anything but special make the movie somewhat plodding and hard to sit through at points. It doesn't help matters any that the Tai Seng DVD is basically VCD quality, right down to plenty of pixellation in the picture and white-on-white badly translated subtitles that make the story hard to follow.

Despite these problems, I would still say that Painted Skin is in no way a bad film -- but it doesn't really offer anything unique or interesting, either. Die-hard Hong Kong film buffs may still want to check this out as it was the last release from one of the region's most acclaimed directors. But the average viewer in the mood for a ghost story would probably be better off checking out one of the myriad movies in a similar vein, such as Gordon Chan's own take on the same story, which was put out in 2008.

RATING: 5