General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Mr. Vampire II (僵尸家族)

Mr. Vampire II (殭屍家族, Vampire Family) is a 1986 Hong Kong horror comedy directed by Ricky Lau and produced by Sammo Hung, the first sequel to the hit jiangshi (hopping vampire) film Mr. Vampire (1985). It moves the series from a Republican-era setting to modern-day Hong Kong, where grave-robbing antique dealers accidentally revive a family of three vampires kept inert by paper talismans pasted on their foreheads.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	殭屍家族 (Cantonese: Geung see ga zuk), also released as Mr. Vampire 2 and Vampire Family⁴
Release	August 15, 1986 (Hong Kong); December 20, 1986 (Japan)⁵^•⁶
Director / producer / writer	Ricky Lau; Sammo Hung; Barry Wong¹^•⁴
Cast	Yuen Biao, Moon Lee, Lam Ching-Ying, Billy Lau, Chung Fat⁷
Hong Kong box office	HK$17,072,137, 8th highest-grossing Hong Kong film of 1986⁶
Setting	Modern-day Hong Kong, unlike the period settings of the other series entries²
Audience rating	5.7/10 on IMDb⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The antique dealer Kwok Tun-wong (Chung Fat) and his two apprentices break into an ancient tomb and steal three corpses, a father, a mother, and a child, each immobilized by a paper spell on the forehead. Kwok intends to sell them as antiques, but the talismans come off: the child vampire escapes, and the father and mother awaken as well.⁹^•¹⁰

One apprentice is bitten and develops corpse poison (尸毒), which brings in the Chinese medicine practitioner played by Lam Ching-Ying. He teams up with his daughter (Moon Lee) and her reporter boyfriend (Yuen Biao) to hunt the vampires down.⁹ Meanwhile a young girl, Chia-chia, mistakes the child vampire for an illegal immigrant from the mainland, takes him home, and befriends him; when her father discovers the visitor and calls the police, the parent vampires break into the family's home.⁹

Production and place in the series

A modern-day sequel. Mr. Vampire (1985), directed by Ricky Lau from a Sammo Hung production, had been a box-office success that started a wave of Hong Kong jiangshi films mixing horror, comedy, and kung fu.¹¹ Mr. Vampire II kept Lau as director and Hung as producer, with action choreography by Hung's stunt team and cinematography credited to Andrew Lau, Cho Wai-Kei, Peter Ngor, and Arthur Wong.⁴ Lam Ching-Ying returned, playing a Taoist priest and vampire hunter of the same type as his Uncle Kau from the first film, this time in contemporary Hong Kong; the other films in the series are set in the early twentieth century.²

The film's most distinctive choice is the child-vampire subplot. Reviewers have compared the scenes of the child vampire and his schoolkid friends to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with gags and set pieces that pay homage to Spielberg's film; the children smuggle him into hospitals to find blood while pretending he is an illegal immigrant.¹²^•¹³ Another signature sequence has the vampires and their pursuers moving in slow motion under the influence of a "retarder" liquid, a sedative-style gag that drives the film's centerpiece fight.¹²^•⁸ Part of the action was filmed at Tai Wo Tang, a ground-floor shop at 24 Nga Tsin Long Road in Kowloon City, where Lam's character discusses the succession of the Chinese medicine clinic with his daughter's boyfriend.⁹

Reception

The film earned HK$17,072,137 in Hong Kong, placing 8th in the 1986 yearly box-office ranking, and its Japanese release in December 1986 produced a brief vampire boom there.⁶^•¹⁴ Critical and audience response has been cooler than for the original: IMDb lists 5.7/10,⁸ and the Eureka Blu-ray reviewer notes that Mr. Vampire II "got the weakest reviews of the four films everywhere I looked," while still praising the physical comedy.¹² Common criticisms target the corny children's scenes and the sense that the film plays as two or three loosely joined movies rather than one sequel; defenders point to the slow-motion set piece and the novelty of the modern setting.¹²^•¹⁵

Home media and streaming

In the United States the film is currently available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription; it is not on Netflix.¹⁶^•¹⁷ In 2023 Eureka Entertainment released the Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels Blu-ray set, which includes Mr. Vampire II (subtitled Vampire Family) with an alternate English dub and commentary tracks by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema and by Asian film expert Frank Djeng.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Franchise and series entries as standalone works › Horror and slasher series film entries › 1970s and 1980s releases

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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