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The Undertaker in Sohwa Province
For starters, it should be noted that this review is not based on the original Korean movie. It is instead based on the version called Gravedigger put out by producer Joseph Lai and director Godfrey Ho (here going under the name of Charles Lee), who were well-known in the 1980's for buying movies and then cutting and pasting their own footage into the mix in order to dupe video distributors and customers into thinking they were all new films. The results, as you might expect, are less than stellar. All versions of the movie keep the same basic elements. A young man named Ethan (Elton Chong) has his father slaughtered by bandits after the family's fortune. Left for dead, Ethan is rescued by the local undertaker, who teaches him the "gravedigger" style of kung fu so bloody revenge can be enacted. Taken in and of itself, the footage from the original film is okay. The training sequences where Ethan spars with zombies are fun at times, and the use of a coffin as a weapon is unique. But, when when everything is boiled down, this is the same exact revenge plot we've all seen many many times before. Sure, the original film-makers looked like they were trying to liven things up a bit with its' gimmick -- owed probably, in no small fashion, to the success of Sammo Hung's Encounter of the Spooky Kind, a 1980 release that combined martial arts and the undead.
But leave it to Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho to make a story that is barely hanging on by a thread and making it totally nonsensical with the inclusion of ninjas. Unfortunately, the Gravedigger version, running at a scant seventy-five minutes, is missing the trademark Godfrey Ho white (as in foreigner) ninjas wearing headbands with "ninja" emblazoned upon them. That footage (starring longtime Ho collaborator Pierre Kirby) is in the Zombie Versus Ninja version, which has been long out of print. And dear readers, no matter how much I care about you and like to think that this site does a fairly complete job in fleshing out information when possible, in no way am I paying $100 for a used VHS copy for the purposes of an internet review of an obscure 80's martial arts movie. At any rate, though Gravedigger couldn't really be considered "good" in any true sense of the word, it is at least amusing, mostly because of the atrociously bad soundtrack than anything else. With a score that was probably ripped off from outtakes of an Alan Parsons Project recording session backed by dubbing that sounds like it was done by a couple of guys who are hiding out in a broom closet while being hopped up on sugar free Red Bull, there are a lot of unintentionally funny moments present here, which goes a long way to saving this movie from totally descending to the bottom of the Z-movie barrel. If you're a fan of junky movies and have a few frosty adult beverages and some wise-cracking friends handy, this just might do the trick for a bit of brainless entertainment. RATING: 4 |
