General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Mr. Vampire IV (僵尸叔叔)

Mr. Vampire IV (殭屍叔叔, also released as Mr. Vampire Saga IV and Uncle Vampire) is a 1988 Hong Kong comedy horror film directed by Ricky Lau and the fourth entry in the Mr. Vampire series of jiangshi (hopping vampire) films.¹ It is the only film in the series without its regular star Lam Ching-ying; instead, Anthony Chan plays a Taoist priest and Wu Ma his feuding Buddhist monk neighbor, who must set aside their rivalry when a vampire escapes from a coffin being escorted to the imperial court.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Chinese title	殭屍叔叔 (Jiang shi shu shu, "Uncle Vampire")³
Director / writer	Ricky Lau (劉觀偉); screenplay by Lo Wing-Keung (盧永強)¹
Release	Hong Kong, December 1988 (sources give 21 or 22 December); Taiwan 1 January 1989; Japan 26 August 1989¹^•⁴^•⁵
Hong Kong box office	HK$14,038,901⁴
Runtime	96 minutes (some databases list 91 or 93 minutes)¹^•⁴^•⁵
Distinction	The only Mr. Vampire film without Lam Ching-ying in the cast¹
Production	Bo Ho Films; producers Sammo Hung and Jessica Chan⁶

Spoilers

Plot

A Buddhist monk, Master Yat-yau (Wu Ma), and a Four-eyed Taoist priest (Anthony Chan) live next door to each other in the countryside and are constant rivals, trading pranks and duels even though their two young apprentices, Ching-Ching (Loletta Lee) and Kar-lok (Chin Ka-Lok), grow friendly and a tentative romance develops between them.⁷^•⁸

A royal convoy arrives carrying a coffin: a member of the imperial family has died of corpse poison, and the body is being taken to the capital so the Emperor can inspect it personally. The party includes the young 71st Prince (Ho Kin-Wai) and the eunuch Wu-yuan (Yuen Wah). During a night thunderstorm, rain washes away the magical talismans sealing the coffin, the corpse becomes a corpse spirit and kills or bites several people, including the Prince, who is himself poisoned.³^•⁸ The two priests and their apprentices are forced to cooperate, destroying the risen corpses and then battling the corpse spirit itself.³

The jiangshi only come into play in roughly the second half of the film; the first half is devoted to the priests' rivalry and the apprentices' courtship, with comic set pieces including a Taoist ritual in which an effigy of the Buddhist monk is manipulated to throw him around, and a sequence in which a floor is covered with malted sugar from a jar so that the hopping corpse's progress becomes difficult.⁷^•⁶

Cast

Anthony Chan (陳友) as the Four-eyed Taoist⁹
Wu Ma (午馬) as the Buddhist monk Yat-yau⁹
Chin Ka-Lok (錢嘉樂) as Kar-lok, the Taoist's apprentice⁹
Loletta Lee (李麗珍) as Ching-Ching, the monk's apprentice⁹
Yuen Wah (元華) as the eunuch Wu-yuan⁹
Fat Chung (鍾發) as Taoist Crane, the Taoist's junior escorting the coffin⁹
Ho Kin-Wai (何健威) as the 71st Prince⁹
Pauline Wong (王玉環) as a fox demon (huyao) who appears as a seductive ghost⁹^•⁷

Action direction was credited to the Sammo Hung Stunt Team and Yuen Wah.⁶ The composer was Chin-Yung Shing.⁹

Production and the missing star

The film was the fourth made in the wake of Mr. Vampire (1985), the box-office hit directed by Ricky Lau for Bo Ho Films, the company of producer Sammo Hung, that had started a wave of jiangshi films in Hong Kong.¹⁰ Lau directed the series' sequels in succession: Mr. Vampire II (1986), Mr. Vampire III (1987), and this film.¹¹

Lam Ching-ying's absence. Lam, whose Taoist priest Master Kau had anchored the first three films, does not appear. According to James Oliver's essay in the 2023 Blu-ray booklet, this appears to have been because Lam was simply unavailable, a reading supported by the fact that he afterwards worked again with most of the people involved in the franchise.⁷ In his place, Anthony Chan reprised the grumpy Taoist priest he had played in a cameo in the original film, with Wu Ma as the Buddhist monk.⁶ Reviewers have noted that neither of the two lead roles resembles the straight-laced priest Lam played, and that the script appears to have been shaped around the two actors who were cast.⁷

The production also had a competitive motive: contemporary Hong Kong films such as The Haunted Cop Shop were borrowing gags from Western genre pictures, and Mr. Vampire IV answered them by deploying本土 folk-horror material in full, including the bell-ringing procession of corpses, duels of Maoshan magic, and a Qing-dynasty-style hopping corpse.¹²

Release and reception

The film opened in Hong Kong in December 1988; databases disagree on the exact day, with IMDb, the 18dao film database, and Tube Culture giving 21 December and HKFACT and Baidu Baike giving 22 December.¹^•³^•⁴^•¹³ It earned HK$14,038,901 in Hong Kong, ranking 23rd in the 1988 Hong Kong box office year.⁴^•⁵ It opened in Taiwan on 1 January 1989 and in Japan on 26 August 1989, handled by Toho-Towa.⁵

Contemporary retrospective reviews are mixed on where the film stands in the series. The Far East Films review called it possibly the second best of the true Mr. Vampire films, praising Chin Ka-Lok's acrobatics, while noting it lacks the polish of the original and Lam Ching-ying's presence.⁶ The Sci-Fi Bulletin review found the long first half of priest-versus-monk pranking a weakness, but judged the final third, with the escaped jiangshi and the cellar-dwelling supervampire, to be good franchise work.¹⁴ The Criterion Channel describes it as possibly the most gloriously goofy of the series.² On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.3/10 from 739 users.¹

Place in the series

Bo Ho Films made no further Mr. Vampire films after this fourth entry; the reviewer Jeremy Clarke reads this as the producers judging that the cycle had run its course.⁷ The franchise continued elsewhere, including Lam Ching-ying's own Vampire vs. Vampire (1989) and Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire 1992, films that share the series' title and monsters but not its continuity.¹⁴

In 2023 Eureka Video released the film on Blu-ray in the United Kingdom as part of the Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels set, in a new 1080p HD restoration with Cantonese mono audio, newly translated English subtitles, and a feature-length commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema.¹⁵^•¹⁶

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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